Jan-04-20 | | mckmac: Notes by David Bronstein, from the book "Secret Notes" (2007) co-written with Sergey Voronkov, and published after Grandmaster Bronstein's passing. click for larger view<10.O-O-O On seeing this move, I couldn't help smiling: I remembered an amusing story, told to me by Velimirovic. It turns out that his mother also played chess; she was a master and even, if my memory does not betray me, once won the Yugoslavian Championship. And on one occasion they had a heated discussion. In the variation which theory now calls the "Velimirovic Attack", the son usually castled on the kingside, whereas the mother preferred the queenside. In order to demonstrate that he was right, Dragoljub began analysing the consequences of queenside castling, spent a mass of time, and came to the unexpected conclusion: his mother was right!>  click for larger view<15...exf3 At the cost of two pawns White has succeeded in detaining the black king in the centre. Now it only remains to open the centre and develop a winning attack-exactly as Velimirovic did in our game from the distant past. Why then, you may ask, did I go for this variation? didn't I know this? of course I knew: that year all the magazines were full of games where the battle began precisely from the given position.16.Ng3!? A cunning move. White does not allow the knight to go to e4 and threatens to break up Black's defenses by g5-g6. It was my turn to think. What to do? Follow the path selected by my opponent, or try and forestall him? The more I thought, the more obvious it became to me that I would have to give up my knight at f6: here the integrity of the pawns is more important than anything!>  click for larger view<16...Ne5!! In a blitz game I would have played this immediately, whereas here I thought for a whole 50 minutes. But I was sure that Velimirovic would have thoroughly analyzed his novelty and could not have failed to take into account the reply 16....Ne5. True, what then did he think about for half an hour? A mystery.> |