Monday, May 21, 2007

Consultation Game - Part One


John Moldovan has posted the unannotated score of the KCC's Consultation Game at The Chess Coroner blog. I have posted some deeper notes on the opening, complete with sample games in alternate lines, at our site. The game is set to conclude at our next meeting, Thursday, May 24, beginning shortly after 8:00 p.m.
It was interesting to discover how popular this line is (even Kramnick plays it often as White, and Shirov the Black side), and what a long pedigree it has. A good introduction to the history can be found in Adam Harvey's excellent book, Colle Plays the Colle System, which deeply annotates (using historical sources) several of Edgard Colle's games that reached our key position (see above), via Colle's famously favored move order 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.e3 Bf5 4.c4 c6. Our game nearly duplicates a World Championship game: Lasker - Capablanca, World Championship 1921 (included in my notes)--only the Black team played Capablanca's interesting Queen move (...Qf6) a move earlier, which seems an important improvement. Perhaps we should have tried 12.d5 in response?
I suggest we take the position above as the starting point in our Thematic Tournament on May 31.

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