Excellently done Mr Bedford. D4 is regularly played against me in OTB games when I am black. I know I must break through with invariably e5, or sometimes c5, so Peter's game plan was too delayed.....
British Chess Championship 2011
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This is a really pissed of me posting this for the second time having just spent nearly 2 hours posting the first time for it to vanish.
Anyway as most of you will know Pete Shaw has been playing in the British championships this past 2 week in sheffield. I wanted to take the opportunity to post some analysis of his round 9 game which he played a slav defense as black. Both players are around the Candidate master level and as such the ideas and concepts they employ are not over complicated to the layman.
I felt this game was instructive for me as it highlights some of the key themes that black must play in the slav set up. This analysis is by no means comprehensive and there are stronger players than me on this site so please add your own analysis, comments or challenge mine.
Key points for me from this game are
1. Black must play the e5 or c5 break as early as possible in order to change the pawn structure. Here black missed an opprtunity to do this and this resulted in a weakness in his position which cost him the game. Blacks failure to play the thematic dxc4 in the end allowed white to play cxd5 and create the backward d pawn
2. Whites pressure on the d5 pawn reaulted in blacks position becoming lost, although he didnt take the pawn the pressure allowed white to get in moves like a5, and when the last minor peices were traded white had also created a passed pawn.
3 whites peices controlling key squares preventing black from being able to defend his weakness.
Like I said i already spent a few hours this morning analysing this game for it not to load correctly so my second analysis is not quite as in depth as my first but hopefully i have made my points.
This is in no way a critiscism of pete as he is a stronger player than i will ever be, i just though this game could teach me valuable lessons about the key idea of the c5 or e5 breakthrough.