Yesterday at the Club Todd Durham and I were looking at some of his games, and one game had him with a bishop and knight vs two knights. The ending was very interesting and ended in a draw, but in the course of analyzing it we talked about the concept of king activity.
I have read multiple times (but now can't find the exact references) that the normal sequence of activating pieces in an endgame should be:
1. Queen
2. Rooks
3. King
4. Knights
5. Bishops
I am in the midst of re-reading GM Lars Bo Hansen's Foundations of Chess Strategy (absorbing ideas on the second pass that I missed in the first), and unfortunately it was not until I was in the car on the way home that I remembered the MOAKE (mother of all king endings) known around the world as Browne-Smyslov, Las Palmas Interzonal, 1982.
It prompted a little research when I got home, and I found three books with annotations to the game. They are:
Foundations of Chess Strategy by GM Lars Bo Hansen
Vasily Smyslov: Endgame Virtuoso by GM and Former World Champions Vasily Smyslov
The New Bogo-Indian by IM Shaun Taulbut
I suspect that I could also find it in other books, but three will suffice for us here.
The link to the game is below. I extracted commentary from the above games, citing the author in each case, and I added some "merely mortal" comments where I thought there was an additional idea worth noting.
Before we go to the game, I would like to intentionally bias your viewpoint by recommending that the following ideas be kept in mind:
1) Economy of force is an under-appreciated commodity in chess. We understand economy of force when applied to defense, but it is rare to see it involved in an attack. Enjoy it when you can!
2) Prophylaxis can also be an offensive weapon, if it prevents potential defensive forces from participating in the action.
3) Smyslov is what we "Hansenites" refer to as a Reflector, but even though he is very positional in the game, his moves have very concrete purposes. His king moves with energy and purpose throughout the game, completely devoid of stereotyped thinking.
4) Smyslov was 63 when the game was played. Throw your senior stereotypes out the window!
Enough blabber- here is the game!:
Click here to see Smyslov's King kick #$^5434!!
You had it in at least one more book, as it is in Informator 34, too. It was a very popular variation at that time, appearing multiple times in Interzonals (there were three that year), the Olympiad, and Tilburg (which was pretty much the biggest tournament of the year back then). Browne himself had a horrible interzonal, finishing last on three points, two-and-half points behind the next finishers! He managed to draw Smyslov in this variation about two months later at Tilburg, using 9 Qd3 instead.
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