Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Devilish Combo
Catalonia is an autonomous community in northeastern Spain, bordering with France at the Mediterranean Sea. It has a total area of aproximately 32,000 km2 (similar to county Tana River in Kenya) and a population of 8 million inhabitants.
Chess is a popular game in the region and the Catalan Chess League is the first team event in the season.
570 teams participate every year spread over 64 groups covering 7 divisions and involving a total of 3788 players.
One of those teams is “C.E.Granollers-Canovelles”, which members of Nairobi Chess Club know very well because they played an online match back in 2021.
“C.E.Granollers-Canovelles” brings every year five teams to the League, one of them in Division-2. From that division is today’s game, played on board 1 in the match “Granollers” vs “Gran Penya”. IM Luis Rojas from Granollers had the white pieces, while CM Joan Garcia was his opponent. The game started as a Caro-Kann Defense and after move 30…Ba3 arose the following position. IM Rojas struggled to find the best move but failed. Nevertheless he eventually won the game.
Can you find the combination that gives White the victory almost immediately?
It’s a devilish combination that requires an accurate assessment and fine calculation of sharp moves.
White has the advantage but Black has defensive resources. And that makes difficult White’s task of assessing and finding the most forceful line. However, thanks to that advantage, and despite Black applying the best defense, all lines lead to favorable endings for White.
It’s worth stressing that the time control was 90 minutes for the whole game, plus 30 seconds from move 1. It’s always necessary a good time management in order to avoid time out and frequently is very difficult to find the most forceful line with few minutes available.
Maybe you play chess but are unable to attend a local club. If that is your case, then join our virtual Chess.com club. On our site, we regularly play online tournaments and team matches. More than 1230 members enjoy that chance and new players join every week. We have new tournaments scheduled for the coming months waiting for players! Join now! Additionally, we have a puzzle section and we have recently started to practice the variant of ‘Vote Chess’. Although not very popular, ‘Vote Chess’ is an effective educational tool for learning together.
