The Greater Toronto Chess League

1. play with slower time controls. You won’t learn much from 1 minute games, and on ICC it does not take too long to find an opponent for a decent 15 minute game
2. focus, focus, focus, don’t get distracted on other windows open on your computer while opponent is thinking (or even worse – during your move!). I already wrote a whole other post about that.
3. don’t play online chess when you are tired. That kind of makes sense, since it’s hard to focus when you’re tired.
4. make sure all your games are automatically stored into a pgn file
5. review each game soon after it’s played
6. don’t feed it immediately to an engine, analyse by yourself for a bit
7. check the opening against a Reference DB to see where you and your opponent deviated from previously played games
8. if your opponent played something you completely did not expect - update your opening repertoire afterwards
9. don’t play too many games in a row
10. don’t take online chess too seriously, remember that over the board tournaments is a completely different game from online blitz

To the last point, when I played in my first British Columbia Junior championship a few years ago, the highest rated player had been a bit rusty. He had not played tournament chess for about a year, and he did not do so well (finishing outside of the top 3 from what I could recall) in our little competition. After the tournament he told me with a smile that he had played a lot of 1 minute games right before the tournament. He was doing really well in those, and assumed he was in excellent shape for the event. Switching time controls is never easy, I am sure we have all discovered that!

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. I recommend keeping track of the time you spent during the game. Once you get into the habit of adding clock information to every move, it won’t be any more of a distraction than recording the move itself. Once you get home – you can enter it later into your personal collection/database of games and later use it while analysing the game. I went over a quick example in my previous post on the same subject. To improve your time management, here are 10 questions to think about:

1. did you spent enough time during the critical moments?
2. were there simple moves on which you spent more time than necessary?
3. was your opening preparation sufficient to quickly play the opening moves?
4. did you take advantage of your opponent’s long thinking sessions by preparing a quick response against his most likely moves?
5. was your overall playing speed appropriate for the time controls in the tournament?
6. were you spending enough time on your moves even if your opponent was in time trouble?
7. is your thinking generally efficient? Are you careful about first identifying all candidate moves, or do you ever spend time calculating crazy complications to later discover that they are not necessary?
8. do you handle time trouble reasonably trouble well – stress wise? There are good blitz players, who collapse at the end of a long slow game due to time trouble…
9. can you play basic and/or simple endgames with little increment only? games are often decided in those long endgames when speed matters.
10. do you play in enough slow tournaments for any of this to even matter?

I suspect by answering these questions you will learn a lot more about your chess strengths and weaknesses in general. I personally suspect that my opening preparation is often falling behind so I sometimes have spend too much time early in the game. I also generally don’t get too stressed out by time trouble (not more than I usually am, that is), but even though I like the endgame, I know there plenty of endgames I misplayed that I might have saved if I had an extra half an hour on the clock! I am also really bad about thinking during my opponent’s time, I am usually so stressed out during my games that I can’t stay in front of the board while my opponent is thinking.

All in all, if your time management is poor, or if there is something you want to improve about it (I know I do) – the popular advice is to play training games or an entire tournament with focus on better time management. Even if it has a detrimental impact on your result just in that tournament – that would make you a better player in the long term.

Karpov – Georgadze, 1983

  Black to move. Where should the rook retreat?
In this position Black played 24… Rcc8 and experienced difficulties after White transferred the knight to c6. He later lost the game.
In his book “My 100 wins” (1984) Anatoly Karpov instead recommended 24… Rc7 (presumably to make sure that Be7 is guarded when White knight arrives to c6) 25. Nb4 Qf5 – “starting the counter attack as soon as possible”. There is a little tactical problem with that suggestion, that Karpov probably overlooked. It is ironic that Kasparov later copied the entire annotation in his Volume 5 of “My Great Predecessors”, without spotting the mistake (and I am pretty sure it is a mistake, since White gets to win a pawn or exchange on a spot without obvious compensation). That just goes to show that even world champions should blunder check their recommendations with engines (although of course there were no engines when Karpov’s book was first published).

Here is the position after Karpov’s suggested improvement of “Rc5-c7”.

White to move. How to win material immediately?

One important skill for a chess player is to feel the moment in a game when you really have to think hard and an make an important decision or two. How well do you sense such critical situations? In analysis, you or your engine can always identify the blunders, when advantage switches from one side to the other. But what about during the game? To measure your skill – I suggest recording time spent on each move on a score sheet during the game. While going through the game afterwards – it will be not hard to tell whether you spent enough time during the critical moments. You can also improve your time management by identifying moves on which you spent more time than necessary!

Looking at time spent will also reveal what of opponent’s moves came to you as a surprise…

Here is an example played with 1 hr 30 minutes per game, and 1 minute increments:
Yoos - Jiganchine, Keres Memorial 2009.
1. e4 c6
2. d4 d5
3. e5 c5
4. dxc5 e6
5. Be3 Nd7
6. Nf3 (1-24) Qc7 (1-29)
7. c4 (1-19) dxc4 (1-12)
8. Qa4 Bxc5 (1-11)
9. Bxc5 Qxc5
10. Nc3 Nh6 (59)
11. Ne4 (1-12) Qc6 (49)

Without even looking at the board or replaying the moves, this time spent after moves tells a story! Looking at the moves again, what can we see?
1. e4 c6
2. d4 d5
3. e5 c5
4. dxc5 e6
5. Be3 Nd7

The main line now is 6. Bb5
6. Nf3 (1-24)

Jack was spending several minutes here, so I was already feeling that my opening choice was not completely bad. But was he trying to remember theory, or just choosing which line to play to surprise me the most? He in fact had already played Nf3 in one of his games before!
6 ….Qc7 (1-29)
Now, the usual move is 6… Bc5, but because Black plays 6… Qc7 against 6.Bb5, I played the same move without much thinking. Clearly I did not sense an important difference between 6. Nf3 and 6. Bb5
7. c4 (1-19)
White must have either had this prepared at home and he was double checking, or it was part of his plan with Nf3. Either way, he was not spending too much time here yet.

7… dxc4 (1-12)
The almost 20 move think on move 7 shows that clearly I had not expected 7.c4, even though this is a somewhat common idea, and makes more sense with the queen on c7, rather than on d8.
8. Qa4 Bxc5 (1-11)
Only reasonable move, so makes sense to play it fast.
9. Bxc5 Qxc5
10. Nc3
 
Now Black has to choose between Nh6 and Ne7, so here comes a 10 minute think.
10… Nh6 (59)
11. Ne4 (1-12)

Again, White is playing reasonably fast, and at this point Black has to choose between 11… Qc6 and 11… b5 !?
11… Qc6 (49)
11 moves into it, I I already spent almost half of my time. I carried on in a similar fashion, got into time trouble and made a decisive blunder on move 16 already. All that could have arguably been prevented had a put a bit more thought on my critical decision on move 6, which I clearly did not!

David Bronstein had also been advocating including time spent as part of the game scores – since it is just as much part of the game as the actual moves! You can learn more about the trends in you play - going through the records of my games I noticed that in most games that I have lost – I had been spending more time than my opponent starting from the opening – this game against Yoos is a typical example.

It is a good tool for evaluating your overall understanding of the game as well. Mark Dvoretsky has an example in one of his books where he played an anti-positional move and immediately realized its flaws. He then goes on to explain that the fact that he played it very fast means to the coach that he is impulsive, whereas if he had spent a long time on it – that would have revealed poor positional understanding.

The logic of any given chess game usually does not become apparent until you dig deeper into it move by move. It takes time to understand the features of the position, identify the characteristic ideas, key positions and their evaluations. The computer is helpful, but in the endgame you want to tell if the +1.69 evaluation shown by the computer engine can actually be turned into a win, or it is, in fact a theoretical draw.

This position is from one of my games from Canadian Championship in 2004, Jiganchine - Bailey

White to move. Evaluate the position. Click here to replay the entire game.

The position seems messy; White is slightly ahead on material, but Black’s pawns look quite dangerous. Who is better? White won the game, but primarily because my opponent tried to play against my time trouble. While analysing the endgame, I had 3 goals:

1. Establish some understanding and rough evaluation of the starting position
2. Determine key ideas for both sides
3. Go through the game move by move searching for improvements, keeping track of critical moments – when evaluation of the position changes – e.g. from being equal to winning for White.

After a couple of hours in front of the computer I came up with this:

1. The starting position is roughly equal – both sides can build a fortress of their own, so with correct play, I don’t see how any side can play for a win
2. White and Black have several ideas
   1. White has two key ideas – to not lose, he needs to block Black ‘f’ and and ‘g’ pawns along dark squares, keeping the king on g3. If White wants to win – his goal is to obtain a passed pawn. That appears hard in the initial position, but may become a possibility if Black becomes too ambitious.
      Black to move. He can’t counter the advance of the ‘a’ pawn, while Black’s pawns are blocked.
      
   2. Black’s idea is to support the advance of kingside pawns with the king, and if possible – to counterattack the pawn on h6. A position like this illustrates that Black’s pawns can get dangerous:
      White to move (analysis) – he is in zugzwang and is losing!
      If the rook moves from g7 along 7th rank – Black will play g4-g3 with deadly effect
3. Black was doing ok, but at some point erred by moving his king to e5 – too far from the ‘h’ pawns. Watch this video to follow my analysis of all the things that my opponent and myself had missed:

Johnson – Jiganchine, Keres Memorial 2007, Vancouver

White to move

Watch this YouTube video to see the solution.

Salov – Gelfand, 1998

White to move

The d4 knight is attacked, but it is an essential piece for White’s initiative. How to keep the attack going and justify White’s pile of heavy pieces on the ‘h’ file?
Watch the video for the answer and to see the entire game – White actually got a bit carried away with his sacrifices and was lost right before the time control, but a fortunate swindle brought him a full point.

I continue to study the typical middlegame positions by making YouTube videos with grandmaster games.
Today it is Ivanchuk – Topalov, 1996.

Here are few key moments:
White to move. How to prevent Black’s counterplay on the queenside?

White to move. The key point of the game, Ivanchuk’s chance to shine. Black just played Ne5-c6; does the White rook have to retreat or is there a way to increase the pressure against  ‘f7’ while the rook is on the 7th rank?

White to move. Bg2 is his least active piece, how to bring it into the game?

The game makes a great impression, given how White sacrifices the pawns to open up the diagonals for his bishops. Here are more observations about this middlegame structure:

1. White can control the ‘a’ file effectively after black plays b7-b5
2. b2-b4 normally weakens a lot of squares along the ‘c’ file in the Open Sicilian, but when White has control over the center – can be effective at preventing b5-b4, Nd7-c5, and leaves Black’s ‘b’ pawn a good target.
3. f7 pawn is also a good target if the Black rook is on e8 and the Black knight leaves e5 square
4. If you play against Vassily Ivanchuk, and you attack his rook on the queenside, he is probably going to move a pawn on the kingside…

You can also replay through the game in the pgn viewer at chessgames.com.

White to move.

I would describe the spirit of White’s attack as “he can only take them one at a time”; several of White’s pieces are being attacked, and he keeps sacrificing … In this game Korchnoi shows that he is not only a great defender, but is also able to attack with vigour when necessary. The video has the solution and goes over the whole game (you may notice that this line of the French defence had also occurred in one of my recent games). The game is also discussed on the chessgames forum.

An indicator of a strong chess player is his or her ability to see the whole board and combine play on both flanks. The game Nunn – Short, 1986 impressed me in particular – the future world championship contender Nigel Short was caught off guard and had to resign already on move 30. As a side note, if you would like to see more of sharp tactical play by John Nunn, I strongly recommend the collection of his games “Secrets of Grandmaster Chess” or its earlier edition, “Secrets of Grandmaster Play”. Every move in the book is made with a particular goal in mind, tactics and strategy always tied together! As an appetizer, try to solve this position:

Nunn – Short, 1986

White to move, how to respond to 27… h5 ?

For the solution, watch this video that goes over the entire game:

DDT3000 – pirulo, 2010, ICC, 3 minutes per game

 White to move 

This is a typical IQP position, with one pair of minor pieces gone off the board, but White (myself) still having enough resources for the attack. Books have been written about this structure, Winning Pawn Structures by Baburin being my favourite one. Black has pressure on b2, and White does not want to play b2-b4 as that would weaken the c3 square. Running down to the last minute on the clock, I realized that my main idea is to exploit the pressure on the a2-g8 diagonal, and that this was as good moment as it would ever be. So …

23. Bxf6 Bxf6 24. Nxe6! A typical idea, all of White’s pieces have lined up for this sacrifice, so if it does not work now, it is not likely to work later either. I already once blogged about a similar sacrifice on e6, where the placement of the White pieces was quite alike.

Black to move. Black’s rook on f8 and knight on d5 are hanging, so he has to accept the ‘gift’.

24 ... fxe6 25. Rxe6 Qd8?!

White to move.

Here I messed up my little ‘creation’, and according to my previous idea (from 5 seconds ago), I continued to build up the pressure on the a2-g8 diagonal with 26. Qf3? That allowed Black to escape and the game later ended in a draw. However, there was a much better and simpler idea, that would have left White up two pawns, with a winning position. What was it? Hint – White uses the fact that Qh3 may later attack Rc8.

PS. I find that these IQP structures are really hard to hold for Black without allowing White his moment glory with a d4-d5 breakthrough or piece sacrifice around the weakened kingside structure like in this example. It is quite rare to see a game (at least in my experience) where a favourable opportunity would never present itself and Black would just exploit the weakness of the d4 pawn.

If you are a professional tournament player, or very active in chess competitions, you are probably jumping from tournament to tournament so frequently that preparing for a given event involves making sure that you register and show up for it in timely fashion, and then just prepare for each game (pure guessing on my part, I actually don’t know for a fact what the pros do). But if you are like me and only play in 2-3 tournaments a year, being rusty and not adjusted to the tournament setting can seriously affect your play. Here are some suggestions for how average adult players (1500-2400 ELO) can get better prepared for those rare but important chess tournaments:

1. Play some practice games online, with slower time controls. With patience, one can nearly always find an opponent for a 15 minute game on ICC. Even better – a couple of training games in an environment similar to the tournament setting (I would guess though that if you don’t play much in tournaments, training games over the board would be hard to arrange too). In any case – focus on the quality of your play, not the online rating.
2. Practice tactics
3. Find out who your opponents are going to be, if that’s possible. Even in a Swiss tournament, it is possible to have a cursory idea of who your 10 most dangerous competitors are and whether there is any opening in your repertoire you need to review.
4. Decide on your opening repertoire for this tournament. Focus on preparing just those openings. Your long term opening repertoire plan may involve adding a new defence against e4, or switching to 1.d4 from 1.e4, and that’s fine, but make a decision well in advance whether they are going to be ready for any given tournament.
5. Do a bit of study for pure pleasure – look at your favourite games/books, etc, to reignite your interest in the game
6. Rest from chess for several days before the tournament. Most tournaments now are played with two games per day, and with some possible “before the round” opening preparation, during the competition you will have more than chess to satisfy your daily dose. So don’t overdose it!
7. Plan the non-chess part of the event well, try to clear up your schedule to reduce possible distractions. As a side note, I used to take a day or two off work right before the tournament to “rest”, but that just made me hope to get review my openings, and do all the tactics and opening and other training in those two days, which was obviously contradicting point 6!
8. Set up a goal for the tournament. I am not talking about a pure result, expected performance rating, but rather a specific training objective that you can aim for during the games. Examples would be “not getting into time trouble”, “spend more time at the board during opponent’s urn instead of walking” and so on.
9. Get enough sleep!
10. Preparing for each tournament should start at the … end of the previous tournament, so when the event is over – make sure to go over your games sooner rather than later. What was the problem in your play, and how are you going to address it?

I now realized that I already had made a similar list a couple of years ago, the list has now grown from 3 to 10 items. Does that mean that I now prepare for tournaments more thoroughly? Or just that I got to better appreciate the side effects of sleep deprivation?

Keres Memorial 2010 was held last weekend in Richmond, British Columbia. While last year I wrote up a summary with diagrams, this time I instead captured fresh impressions of my games into several Youtube videos:

Round 2 game - A complex middlegame in the Sicilian Dragon, with Black throwing multiple sacrifices at my position to keep his initiative going. This turns out to be an effective strategy in time trouble! Part 2 shows how the game concluded.
 

Round 3 game - White sacrificed the d4 pawn in the well known variation of the French Defence. In return he gets faster development, and soon - the material advantage. A fairly simple and somewhat instructive game (I say “simple”, but of course just like any game - took a lot of effort over the board).
 

The last round game where both players needed to win. Black's king was a bit more exposed and that allowed me to create an unexpected attack. Black overlooked a very unexpected defensive resource and soon had to resign because his queenside collapsed, and dark squares around his king were catastrophically weak.

PS. My Youtube channel now has 40 chess-related videos, feel free to watch more clips and subscribe :-)

Letzelter – Faivre, 1971

Black to move.

White’s last move must have been Bg5, with a discovered attack against the unprotected rook on d4.

Just like the annotator and players, I fell for 1… Qxg5 2. Rxd4 Ne3!, which does give black some advantage after 3. Qc6 Nxf1 4. Kxf1 Qe3! 5. Qf3! However a computer engine pointed out a much simpler and more effective solution. What was it?

The World Championship match is very intense and there are a lot of sources covering it. I am enjoying video reviews from Sergei Shipov (in Russian) at http://www.crestbook.com/; he has been joined by Garry Kasparov during analysis for the last couple of games.

Not all websites, however, provide equally deep coverage; the main page of The Week in Chess as of this morning sounded somewhat superficial when describing game 8:

Anand got a completely drawn position and then played 54...Bc6??? which lost almost instantly and he resigned a couple of moves later. In contrast to game 7 both players played poorly. Anand's opening was bad, Topalov didn't press very well and certainly didn't cause Anand's shocking blunder at the end. All very odd.

Is it possible to get cause and effect in chess any more wrong than that? Has any world championship match been more intense than this one? There are no short draws, Topalov is playing in every game till there are kings on the board, and is pressing against Anand with his opening preparation as well. It is pretty clear that exhaustion is mounting and this why Anand made the blunder that he made in game 8. There are still 4 exciting games left in this match, so we’ll have to see what happens next, while today is rest day.

It often happens that a chess player studies a lot, but the rating does not go up. On the other hand, sometimes one just plays in tournaments, and the rating keeps growing and growing, without the player putting much effort into learning chess theory. Today, I thought I’d break this down into pieces.

There are various sources of chess knowledge:

• Grandmaster games in books and databases
• Games you play and analyse yourself
• Opening theory
• Endgame books and theory
• Tactical fragments and combinations

These contribute to your “chess culture”, but if you stare at an opening encyclopaedia all day, and cannot remember a thing a day later, that does not help you much in the next tournament. Success during any given game depends on how well you processed that information, and whether you turned it into so called chess skills:

• correct play in fully memorized opening variations
  • Part of this is specific opening preparation against a given opponent
  • You’d rarely win a game by pure opening knowledge alone, but exact knowledge helps building a foundation for every game
• correct play in fully memorized endgame positions
• clock control/time management, staying calm in Zeitnot, if it does occur
• ability to focus well and the same time not get too tired during the game
• recognizing patterns in the opening, middlegame, endgame positions
  • this is really where the bulk of chess strength lies; using those patterns a stronger player can outplay a weaker opponent, spot a tactical chance, etc

Today I made an ‘observation’ - I spend time acquiring bits of chess knowledge year after year, but my skills stay about the same, at least my rating says so. For almost 10 years. While preserving one’s playing strength does not come for free, some progress would be nice too. So I wrote this up so that I can ask myself a few questions:

• Could I be more efficient at acquiring skills while ploughing throw various sources of chess information?
• Am I not acquiring enough “knowledge”?
  • do I not learn enough “new stuff”, fast enough for progress to be noticeable?
  • for every new bit that I learn – do I forget some other older bit of chess information, because that’s how memory works once you get older?
• Does my newly acquired knowledge fail to consistently translate into immediate skills/strength?
  • Memorizing opening variations that no one plays against you would be one way of achieving that ‘goal’
  • Another example would be switching from one opening to another. That’s rarely going to make you a stronger player on a spot; at least in this case there is method behind the madness
• In the end of the day – should I make sure that I am spending my time where it’s going to benefit my playing strength the most?
• This is not a redundant question: one could be studying chess for pure enjoyment, with no particular purpose in mind

For myself, the answer is probably “yes” to all those questions! What about you?

I already made a few posts about the benefits of analysing your own games; one of the suggestions is that you’d analyse the game pretty soon after you played it. That way you can reflect on the thoughts you had during the game, and incorporate them into analysis. But there is also plenty of reasons to analyse your old games too! Here are a few:

1. Even if you looked at that game in great detail 10 years ago, computer engines would have made significant progress, so you’ll spot a few new tactical details that you never realized you missed. Expect a few surprises!
2. Similarly, you may have not had a proper database at the time at all, so you may have not analysed the opening part of it properly.
3. Even if you did check the game against a database back then, that was a long time ago! You will see if any new games have been played in the opening since you played that game in 2002.
4. Old games may be still very relevant to your opening repertoire. Moreover, you may have given up on a certain opening because of a tough loss. Was that loss really the result of an opening problem? Or is it worth resurrecting those old variations that you had spent weeks studying?
5. You may notice some strategic plans that never occurred to you at the time when you played a game. You may have learned about them already after playing that game. Seeing how they could apply to familiar positions should re-enforce that learning experience.
6. Looking at several of your older games at once – gives you a better perspective of the trends in your games. Are endgames really your strength? Or does every endgame you play contain 2-3 big mistakes?
7. If you want to study bishop endgames, you may have not played any of them recently. Old games are then a great study/analysis material! You’ll notice that Mark Dvoretsky often uses his old games even in newer books, and likes to add details to his old findings.
8. Some games you may have not analysed at all (e.g. you did not have time immediately after the tournament, and only looked at 2-3 games that seemed most interesting). But even simple games can have a lot of instructive details in them!
9. Several years later, you’d be more objective in analysis, and look for improvements in parts of the game that you would have avoided looking at otherwise (e.g. it is not fun to look at an emotional loss)
10. In addition to reviewing your moves in the actual game, you’ll have a chance to review your old analysis, which reveals your understanding of the chess!

Given how few tournament games I play right now, I used positions from my old games for a lot of my blog entries, here are a few examples:
Game from Canadian Chess Junior Championship 2002 – video
Three rook endgames, three choices, three blunders, three videos
Analytical mistakes – bishop against knight
Most Complicated Pawn Endgame I Ever Played
Bishop endgame (Wright-Jiganchine, 1999)

I’ve been alluding to the importance of building an opening repertoire by talking about various methods of doing it, but I have not actually explicitly discussed why it is important to build up an opening repertoire, and put it into a database. Of course, you’d expect to get better positions out of the opening! But as a bonus, here are 10 other direct reasons why having a well defined repertoire is going to benefit your play and study:

1. You will save time on the clock during games, since you won’t have to think about which line to choose today
2. Every game played with a repertoire (online blitz, over the board, etc) – takes you closer to understanding your type of middlegame. Also, instead of playing random positions, you are now working towards a glorious goal of polishing your openings
3. You can ensure you study games of grandmasters that match your repertoire, rather than random ones
4. If you repertoire is in a database, you can give it to computer engine to blunder check
5. If you want to analyse a fun position – pick one from your repertoire, and you are working on an opening novelty!
6. You can test how well you remember your openings with a tool like Chess Position Trainer
7. If you have a chess study buddy, you can play practice games from certain starting positions, just like Botvinnik did with Ragozin!
8. If you have a coach, he can help to review your repertoire, rather than labour on building it for you from scratch
9. You have a better starting point when preparing for a game against a particular opponent
10. You can now focus on improving other parts of the game, such as middlegame, tactics, endgame, etc. Improving your repertoire will take care of itself, it is an ongoing process, but you have a baseline to work against!

You may have your own reasons, but the last one is a clear winner for me. Ultimately chess is a game for us to enjoy, and sometimes having little bit of discipline up front makes it more pleasant and fun in the long run, going back to my older post on how to enjoy studying openings.

If you have read the book “Mastering the Endgame” by Mikhail Shereshevsky, there is little new for you in this post. Otherwise, I’d like to emphasize again – studying the opening should involve not only memorizing the moves until the end of the line in your opening encyclopaedia, such as NCO, but also learning the typical patterns, middlegame ideas, and even the impact of pawn structures (that do originate in your opening) on the resulting endgames. Here is a little example (click on the game link to replay the moves)

Hamdouchi – Mifsud, 1994

 Black to move. Can he free himself up with e7-e6?
The pawn structure obviously arouse from the Dragon variation of the Sicilian defence. Grandmaster Hamdouchi outplayed his opponent and has several advantages:
1) the pawn on h6 is a thorn in Black’s position.
2) b5 pawn is a weakness
3) Black’s g7 bishop is traded off, and White has enjoying the advantage of having a better bishop

All that being said, those are small advantages, and it would normally take a lot of work to convert a position like this into a full point for White. But Black decided to free himself up and undermine the d5 pawn with e7-e6. The punishment was swift:

28… e6? 29. Bxg6!!
When you have a far pawn advanced pawn, sacrifices like this are very typical.

29… hxg6 30. h7 Kg7
White to move. e7-e6 weakened the 7th rank, so White can take advantage of it.

31. Rxf7+! Kxf7? (It was better to go into a rook endgame that is probably still lost: 31... Kh8 32. Rxd7 exd5 33. Kb2 Rc6 34. c3 d4 35. cxd4 Rc4 36. Rxd6 Rxb4+ 37. Kc3 Rc4+ 38. Kd3 Kxh7 39. Rb6 +-) 32. h8=Q Rb7 33. g5 exd5 34. Qf6+ Kg8 35. Qxg6+ 1-0

White demonstrated the ideas of this endgame in a perfect form in this example. To improve the level of your play – take note of games that illustrate ideas typical for the pawn structure of your openings!