....g5 can be a great move, but can also be a blunder!
Where to start? A few weeks ago the basic idea for this post came....perusing through one of the best chess books ever published,
I came across the following game, in which Maroczy (a world-class player in his time), played ....g5 at the wrong moment, and got crushed.....the game starts out as a Sicilian, but by move 9 it looks like a French Defense! Judge for yourself, as Maroczy loses in 13 moves!
Fast-forward 69 years, to the game Kostro Uhlmann....which I found in the following book (probably one of the best books about the French Defense, since Uhlmann played it against everyone, and even beat Fischer and Bronstein with it!)
So, trying to find out how far this ...g5 idea could go, I went to another favorite book, the one that contains all 85 games of the six matches played in 1834 (yes, you read right, 1834, almost 200 years ago!) between De la Bourdonnais and McDonnell, the first great competition for which scores were kept.....these are games that the great Paul Morphy studied, and Capablanca in turn studied Morphy, and so on.....
So, what gives? What did I find?
As you can see from the Maroczy game, a Siciian can end up looking as a French!
In these 1834 games, quite often this happened, as in this sequence of moves:
...which looks more like an Advance Variation from the French Defense!
OK, so I found a few games featuring the move .....g5. Let's take a quick Look. My apologies for lack of comments in general.....I don't have as much time and energy for this as I used to. Hopefully this blog post will inspire someone to explore this pattern a bit more; it is a worthwhile one, it seems to me.
This next game is no. 76 in the series of 85 games.....
In this game, the move...g5! had a great impact in demolishing White's pawn centre.
We look now briefly at Judit Polgar.....from both White and Black. Let me explain.....with White, against the Sicilian, she loved to play a timely g4!
In the following game against Hans Ree, it is worth mentioning that Judit Polgar was 13 years old!
----Just a small note to point out that she might have been inspired by the following game from 1961.....in this game, Nexhmetdinov beats Tal with a similar g4 advance...years later, they asked Tal what the happiest day of his life was, and he replied.....the day he lost the following game against Nezhmetdinov, who was one of Tal's trainers when he won the World Championship against Botvinnik in 1960. Nezh had a lifetime plus score against Tal!
Going back to ...g5 with Black, here are two games by Planinc, who could, like very few, infuse energy into the chess pieces. Watch and marvel!
The next game is absolutely spectacular...enjoy!
A great game by Polgar.....
P.S.- I forgot to mention, I have a small blog post about ....g5 in the Italian Game....
This is all I have time for now......Peace.
