Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: d5 Aborted the Trick

In previous posts, I showed you tricks for drawing in different openings.

One of them was in the nowadays very popular London System. If you review that post, you will see the motif of ‘poisoned pawn’. Nevertheless, Black takes the b2-pawn without danger because White cannot trap the queen.

But don’t think that in similar positions Black always can take the b2-pawn.

If you compare it with today’s example, you will see a slightly different setup, which is that Black has already played a pawn on d5. That pawn makes the difference allowing White to take an important advantage.

It’s important to pay attention to small details. Trying to play moves mechanically is a bad practice because like in today’s example, the position of other pieces modifies the final result.

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