Monday, September 17, 2007

Hall of Shame, Episode 2

In my defense, I was on a late-night blurry-visioned blitz binge when I missed this mate. Still, there is no reason for me to miss this as long as I still test positive for brain stem activity.

Make sure you're familiar with this mating mechanism...it pops up quite often, and you see it in a lot of tactics books.



1. Bxh7+ Kh8 2. Bg6+ Bh6 3. Qxh6+ Kg8 4. Qh7#

This was an example of chess blindness. During my few seconds of analysis I thought that the king would escape via f7, missing that my queen prevents that.

3 comments:

rockyrook said...

You're absolutly correct ... I've seen this dozens of times and have fallen for the "trap" to capture with the queen and not the bishop.

Thanks for posting!

Anonymous said...

I've got to mention my two latest "hall of shame" worthy incidents, both as black in the Scotch Game after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 exd4 4.Nxd4 Bc5:

First off came 5.Be3 d6??? which after exchanges leaves me with tripled pawns, and after the queenswap I can't castle.

Next game, I got 5.Nb3 Nf6??? and resigned before 6.Nxc5 -- somehow I didn't see it coming until I had moved...

Grandpatzer said...

Psymar: I like the tripled pawn example!