lovely!

Pirc Alert! (Book) Not a bad game by you Donnie–last night occasionally in between moves of my game I watched your opponent dismember a 1930 USCF…but he can be had! Occasionally. With excellent play. I am definitely going to try and watch him and Tacticus live.

I forgot that I never commented on this game. I have a few things to say…

9.Bg7 is a mistake, I knew it during the game also. The idea was actually that the knight on d4 might be useful, but then a couple moves later I exchanged it anyways. The correct sequence was 9.Nc6 bc 10.h4, preventing your suggestion of …h5.

Also, as far as what I saw when playing a5. I wanted to defend the knight so that I could move my queen into a more aggressive position, but I had to be careful because you have a lot of checks. So for instance I initially wanted to play Qe6, but luckily for my fans I hesitated and found the strong reply

35.Qe6 Qf2 36.Ka3? (any other king move allows perpetual check along the back 2 ranks until White retreats his queen, should still be winning though) 36…Qc5 and now I don’t have a move, because after 37.Ka4 Qb5 I am losing a piece, and after any other king move I am losing the pawn and my knight will be hanging. So no mate there. Then there’s this move 35.Qd4 which threatens to come in behind the Black king on the long diagonal. And …e5 is out of the question because of d6, so bringing your Queen to e5 is the only way to stop the invasion. Then the queen trade was evaluated as winning for me because like I told you after the game, the knight plays against the f pawn and the king plays against the e pawn (the king is in the square).

But…usually I would find a move like a6 had I not been bias towards the line of thought that got us to that position in the first place.

a6! is a very good recommendation, in the game I was not looking for this type of solution. Basically if your king tries to chase the pawn down it fails because even though it is in the square and it can reach b7 before the pawn reaches a8, because of the knight it cannot capture on a8 and if it goes after the knight than it leaves the square. So that only leaves pushing the f pawn frantically and hoping, but hope is lost after 38.a6 f3 39.a7 f2 40.a8Q Kc7 41.Qc8 Kb6 42.Qf5 stopping the pawn. My way is not bad, obviously it is still winning, but a6 is easy to see and a very strong move.