Material: Black is up a pawn.

White has clogged up the luft Black created for his King.

"Ha! What a waste of time!" he said. "I certainly won't need something useless like that."

25. ...Qxe4 26. Rxe4

"And now you've gone and sacked your queen! What's with you today?"

26. ...Rd1+

recognized late that it is BLACK to play and wasted minutes to "solve" it with WHITE to play.....

25...Qxe4 wins a rook as

26. Rxe4 Rd1+ is going to get a back rank mate

This is Chess-101 stuff, very basic. After

25...Qxe4

black ends up a rook up, as the black queen cannot be captured, eg:

26 Rxe4 Rd1+ 27 Re1 Rxe1#

That was the question I was asking myself. Also, on move 24:

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Why did White play 24.Bb2 and set up the back rank mate? Black's bishop had optical appeal, but little else.

At first I thought White was just embarrassed to lose to a woman, until I saw that Vepkhvishvili was only 15 at the time of the game and actually four years younger than Alexandria. She was already a WIM, and probably stronger than he would be at his peak.

25........Qxe4
White can not take Queen cause it will be check mated and Black falls ahead by a Rook.

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At first glance, white seems to have a pleasant position. He has a better pawn structure than black - 2 pawn islands against three. He has doubled rooks on a half open file. Okay, so he would rather have doubled his rooks on the d file, but that's a minor detail. Isn't it? White can now look forward to playing against the black isolated pawns on a5 and c6. He has a simple plan - swap off all the pieces, then pick up one or both of the isolated queenside pawns before black can push her kingside pawn majority.

But white's seemingly harmonious position has two hidden flaws. The first we have seen in the finish to the puzzle - a weak back rank. That means that the white queen has to stay in touch with the Re4. He has to prevent black's idea of Qxe4 followed by Rd1+.

So who do we blame? The white kingside pawns for not creating luft? The white king for not making a safer home for himself? The Re4 for allowing itself to be stranded and pinned in the middle of the board without sufficient support? The Re1 for being overworked - needing to defend both Re4 and the d1 square? The white queen for leaving her defensive post on c2? The Ba3 for slipping to b2 to offer the exchange, but unwittingly to set off a chain reaction on one wing which will mate the white king on the other?

At this point, the three queenside pawns look at each other with a slightly nervous but slightly smug expression. "At least we didn't do anything wrong" they seem to say as they get packed back into the box.

But let's try to be kind for white for a moment. We are laughing at him for missing the back rank mate, but when we look at the starting position above, black actually has two threats. The first is the back rank mate. The other threat is 24...Rd4, doubling up on the pinned Re4.

And now we see that white's position is not as good as we first thought. He would like to unpin his queen, but there is no easy way of doing it. The a1-h8 diagonal is off limits and 24. Qc1 runs into Bh6 when the bishop is safe because of the same Qxe4 trick that we see in the game. We could try 24. R4e2, but after 24...Qxc2 25. Rxc2 a4, white's queenside is falling apart.

<25....?>

Mterial: =

Candidates: after some White moves <[Qxe4†]>

-ML-
Clearer than this you won't get an overworked theme.

<25....Qxe4> would provoke resigning on account of:

24. h3 Rd4 25. g4

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