Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Stalemate
Almost every chess player has ever blundered into a stalemate after reaching a winning game. That happens even to GMs. Stalemates often happens after a huge blunder, but sometimes they are the result of a brilliant idea by the defending side.
GM Alexander Beliavsky (1953) was born in Lviv (Ukraine -former Soviet Union-) and later moved to Slovenia after Soviet dissolution. Most of his career he played for the Soviet Union. He was four-time Soviet champion (1974, 1980, 1987, and 1990) and also Slovenian champion in 1996 and 2011.
Larry Christiansen (1955) is an American GM born in California and US Champion in 1980, 1983, and 2002.
Both GMs were among the top-25 players in the 1980s and 1990s, with Beliavsky reaching as high as fourth in the world.
Typically, when in trouble against a title master, it means that the inferior player is going to lose the game. But Christiansen is an aggressive-tactical player and someone who fights every game until the end.
In today’s game with Beliavsky, Christiansen was on the losing side and set up a series of ingenious traps. Beliavsky expertly navigated his way through them until he fell for the last one and allowed Christiansen to escape.
Beliavsky worked his way through the complications, but stumbled one step before the finish line. An understandable error. He saw that there was no perpetual check for Black, but didn’t realize that Christiansen had set up a stalemate.
We are used to see stalemates in situations where the defender has just the lonely king and maybe a couple of blocked pawns, but in this game Christiansen still had about half of his army on the board when he started his combination.
In a previous post we saw how a young Kasparov overlooked a heartbreaking stalemate.
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