Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Only One Mistake!
The city of Biel (Switzerland) hosts every year the prestigious “Biel Chess Festival” featuring many parallel events.
That festival has a long tradition of over half a century. Among the winners in the main event are World Champions Anatoly Karpov (three times), Magnus Carlsen (three times), Viswanathan Anand and Hou Yifan.
In 2024, the “Biel Chess Festival” featured over 20 individual events. The innovative organizers made a main tournament mixing variants and time controls in the form of a “triathlon”. Six GMs competed in five rounds of Rapid chess (2 points for a win/1 for a draw), five rounds of Classical (4/1.5), and ten rounds of Blitz (1/0.5). The top four then played three more rounds of Classical against each other, with colors reversed. Ties were settled by the standings of the Chess960 tournament held on the opening day. There were two “triathlons”, one for ‘Masters’ and another for ‘Challengers’
In 2024, the six GMs playing in the ‘Masters’ group were: Indian GM Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu, German GM Vincent Keymer, Vietnamese GM Le Quang Liem, American GMs Sam Shankland and Abhimanyu Mishra, and Armenian GM Haik Martirosyan.
In a previous post we saw the extraordinary case of GM Anish Giri in his game against GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov during the FIDE World Cup 2021. Up to five times Giri missed his chance to win the game. The opposite question is whether GMs can play a perfect game without any mistakes. And today’s game could be one of those special cases. In the ‘Masters’ classic competition of the “2024 Biel Chess Festival”, Martirosyan faced Keymer in round 2 and it was almost Martirosyan’s masterpiece. The Armenian GM did everything perfectly. He dominated the battle and at move 51 he unleashed a powerful sacrifice on g6. And the most exciting is that he sacrificed a second piece on the same square two moves later.
The diagram below shows the critical position when Martirosyan started his breakthrough.
After his two brilliant moves, Martirosyan obtained a winning rook endgame. However, his advantage vanished 17 moves later with an inaccuracy that led to a theoretical draw.
The apparently natural Martirosyan’s 69th pawn move turned the seven hours of play into a futile effort. Only one mistake and all the work previously done becomes useless. It’s worth remembering here Fischer’s famous statement: “Chess demands total concentration!”
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 1210 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.
