Beating the Sicilian

An interesting moment from the Yearly Classical Arena that took place less than 24 hours ago. My opponent played a somewhat dubious line and dangerously fell behind in development. At move 13 I knew I had to strike but failed to find the right continuation after a five minutes thought.



Can you spot why 13.Nd5 is so strong without consulting an engine?

Yes. After 13...exd5 14.exd5 White has a lot of pressure on Black's centralized king, which cannot castle to safety due to the Ng8. After, for example, 14...Nf6 15.Nf5 Nxd5 16.Rxd5 Bxd5 17.Qxd5, black's position falls apart: 17...Qd8 18.Rxe7+ Qxe7 (18...Kf8?? 19.Qxf7#) 19.Nxe7 and Black can't even take the Ne7 because the Ra8 hangs. If Black tries 13...0-0-0, then White could try 14.b4 with the idea of 15.c4, opening lines against the queenside.
It's a typical attacking idea in Scheveningen structures when White has heavy pieces on the e-file, especially when provoked by b5-b4.

Thanks for replying, and double thanks for letting the engine turned off. What you said makes a lot of sense, and certainly White has good compensation for the piece - but not enough to claim a big advantage. Instead of the moves 14...Nf6 and 14...0-0-0 that you mentioned, a better try is 14...Qd7 which prevents the knight jump to f5, and then a skilled defender can probably hang on, with all three results being possible in a practical game.

I had considered 13.Nd5, but it looked as clear as mud to me, so I finally mentally tossed a coin and took on b5 instead. That worked out great because my opponent took the poisoned c2-pawn instead of the correct 14...Qb6 which would have forced me to take with the knight on d6 first, again with a double-edged position which could go either way.

What I missed is that after 13.Nd5 exd5, instead of the automatic recapture, White has a much stronger move 14.e5! The obvious threat is 15.exd6, 14...dxe5 fails to 15.Bxe5 with a double attack, and the relatively best move 14...0-0-0 has a similar problem because it allows 15.Qg4+ and 16.Qxg7, winning back the piece with interest.

There is very little to calculate after 14.e5, it is obvious that this is the right move once you consider it, yet I failed to do that. Applying a more proper thought process (e.g. listing all the candidate moves before calculating any variations), spending more time at the critical moment or not playing after 11 p.m. would all have helped to find the win.

But another reason for my mistake is that following up the Nd5 sacrifice with e5 rather than exd5 was not part of my active vocabulary, although I had seen such ideas before. A strong player who recognizes this pattern intuitively would most likely be able to apply it to the current situation in a blitz game.

I gave it a good college try. 14.e5 is such a beautifully powerful move, the kind you would find in a GM's book of greatest games or Smirin's *Sicilian Warfare*. I don't think I would have seen that over the board and I wouldn't have been ashamed after seeing it in the analysis.

I would like to save this instructive example, for my own practical play and to show any future students I take on. Do you mind?

@forsoothplays said in #4:

> I would like to save this instructive example, for my own practical play and to show any future students I take on. Do you mind?

Not at all, please let others learn from it. Just give a URL to this thread for credit.

@zwenna said in #1:
> Can you spot why 13.Nd5 is so strong without consulting an engine?

I also assumed it was because after exd5 your Knight could go to c6 and you have the open e-file. So my answer is "no".

Looks like I had this position a couple of times in my games... Nd5 usually works even in not-so-ideal positions.

@zwenna said in #1:
> without consulting an engine?

I didn't even look yet. Good question scheme. It could make a great template for interesting threads. If only we had a common board to verbal way to communicate other than encoding in strings of coordinates. (although nothing wrong with having that as reproducible data, supporting/illustrating the conversation arguments).

Well, we do have some. I think development might come in different shapes in each experience of both the board and how we talk about it. But we might all have the common sense that it is about increasing the activity of all our movable things (pieces and pawns), in a sustainably "increasing" potential of exerting the final restricting pressure. We start mostly equally cramped (all sliding pieces), and seek to reconfigure that one turn at a time, into a cramped opponent king before ours get the same.

But there are pawns obstacles, for most of the movers. Etc... the rest is history... Kidding. I just meant that development, being late per op introduction, is meaningful, and more informative than an opening name for me, and more informative about the issues of the proposed game, than just rephrasing the moves of the board by their SAN encoding. (and I don't just mean that because I am not fluent, but because I would also don't need that conversation, if having the real thing in a board to look at, so the conversation can be about more than recreating what I can check myself, without computing the string to board).

This is a compliment. Now, I am curious about what you meant while browsing that game, "de visu" and "de manu". thanks. This is a meaningful opening post. Enticing about the board. I now have a human talk scaffold to look at someones else's game I did not participate in. I might not get lost or attention skip or bored this time.

Whole thread seems like food for my study. actually. Thanks to the others as well.