Friday, May 27, 2011

Cavewoman!

White to play.
I have annotated the game Lahno - Khotenashvili, European Women's Individual Championship, Tbilisi 2011.  It received passing reference from Malcolm Pein and was brought to my attention by Caveman aficionado Michelangelooo.  It is a pleasure to see GM Kateryna Lahno playing the Caveman Caro-Kann, which I have written about here a number of times.  GM Lahno may be the highest rated player to have used this tricky line, which invites her opponent to chase after a Rook with her Queen at the risk of falling into a wooly mammoth trap in the process.  Though Khotenashvili did not test her preparation fully, Lahno played a very nice game and concluded things in stunning fashion (see diagram above).  Previous pieces on the Caveman Caro-Kann include:

2 comments:

Michelangelooo said...

Nice article again!

I checked 365chess.com and the database gives the games listed below form the position after ...Qb6
This means that Lahno is not the strongest player trying the Caveman with white.

Are we going to see it in real worldclass games?

Smirnov,P (2636)-Kornev,A (2532)2007 EU-Cup 23rd
Korneev,O (2623)-Mirzoev,A (2567)2008 XVIII Magistral
Popov,I (2589)-Zontakh,A (2541) 2010 17th TCh-RUS Higher League
Perunovic,M (2580)-Lalith,B (2480)2009 11th Dubai Open
Perunovic,M (2574)-Drazic,S (2545)2010 ch-SRB
Korneev,O (2554)-Galkin,A (2608)2009 LIII TCh-ESP ECLUB Gp1

Intermezzo said...

Thanks for this post and the related ones which I found most interesting. On Saturday I was inspires to give this line a go against a very strong player at the Brighouse Rapidplay. I got squashed but I didn't really know what I was doing and was inspired enough by the line to do some more research as I'd like to give this a go in future.

Meantime to respond to michaelangelooo's comment above... we now have a worldclass game to study in this line as Shirov gave it a go again the world champ in their rapidplay match last weekend also. Sadly he went down like a whore in a brothel! Looks like us budding cavemen have a new line to study as Anand went for 7...Qa6!?