GM Serper's Chess Video Quiz
This is the time of the year when kids are passing their final exams in school, so I decided to offer a quiz for our readers too.
We did regular chess tests before (for example, here and here), so today I decided to try something new.
You'll be offered some interesting chess videos from YouTube and a question to answer.
Ready? Let's start!
This is our favorite episode from "Searching for Bobby Fischer."
In this article, we discussed the bad chess habits you can learn watching this entertaining movie. And today you'll see why the bad chess habits can really hurt your chess results.
Do you see how the kid playing White blitzed out his moves despite having more than 15 minutes on his clock? Now try to find out the variation White missed that would save the game, and potentially could have given him the national title. Start from the position at 8:10.
Here is how the game ended:
So, what should have White played instead? (Hat tip to GM Sam Shankland who pointed out this opportunity in his comment to my article).
Now, let's compare our findings:
Let's take a look at the games that were played in the real world.
The following game left many spectators puzzled. What happened at the end, who won the game, and why? (You can proceed right to 9:10 to answer this question).
I think that was easy, right? We can see that Magnus tried to play Kd4 only to realize that the move was losing right away due to the skewer Bf2+, which instantly wins the rook and the game!
Then he tried to change his move and play Kc4 instead, but his opponent GM Savchenko reminded him of the touch move rule. At that point, Magnus' facial expression is priceless! Nevertheless, he immediately admits his fault, resigns the game and shakes his opponent's hand.
Here is one more Magnus loss, two years later in another world blitz championship:
You can see that at 8:58 Morozevich plays Kf8 and immediately his hand reaches to make another move. Of course he realizes that it is illegal, so the move Kf8 stays.
Carlsen replies Kg4 and Morozevich shakes his head. What's that all about?
I know this was very easy for you (but not for Carlsen!). By playing Qb8+! instead of Kg4??, White was winning one of Black's rooks, achieving a completely winning position!
Our final video was made during the women's world blitz championship in 2010. The players are two Russian international masters -- two Marias: Fominykh vs. Severina.
By the way, for a reason unknown to me, Maria Severina is a quite popular person in many Russian chess videos on YouTube.
(Disclaimer: I got a lot of flak when in this article, where I called the current women's world champion "beautiful." Therefore, you are not going to find the adjectives "beautiful," "cute," or similarly offensive words in my articles when I talk about women's chess.)
At about 3:16 you can notice a visible sigh of relief in Severina's body language. Why, what happened?
You can check your answer here:
I hope you enjoyed our little video quiz!
