Chess School Quiz Challenge #20

Challenge

Can you see which square both sides are fighting for? In one of her most famous and instructive games against the later world champion Viswanathan Anand, Judit Polgar devised a plan for White to take command. How does this plan work? And what did Polgar do?

Solution

The chessboard has 64 squares, but only one is at stake here. The battle for the square d5 determines how both sides proceed. White has a dream and will try to make it come true: To install a knight on the d5-square - and to do so in such a way that Black can neither expel nor exchange this knight.

The central square d5 is a potential weakness for Black. He can't defend it with pawns. The square is already accessible to white pieces, but jumping directly to d5 is useless. Black exchanges the knight, problem solved. And if the second knight then found a way to d5 - Black would also exchange it off. As long as Black has two knights that can defend the d5-square, the eternally and inviolably anchored knight on d5 remains a dream for White.

Judit Polgar grasped this at a glance in her game against the later world champion Viswanathan Anand, played in Wijk an Zee in 1998. And she devised a three-part plan that would go down in the textbooks and make the game one of her most famous (which also has to do with the spectacular final combination, but that's a different story).

Polgar went Be3-g5, part one of her plan to clear the d5-square. Next she will exchange the bishop for the knight on f6. This eliminates one potential defender of the d5-square. Three moves later the position was this:

Now White can bring a knight to d5 to exchange the last remaining pair of knights on the board, part two of White's plan. After that, Black will only have one minor piece left, the black-squared bishop. And that poor fellow can do nothing to prevent the white knight from nesting on d5. Of course it's not trivial to get the white knight from e1 to d5, but it is possible. Black, one of the best players in the world, managed to throw a few more spanner in the works, but 13 moves later Polgar’s dream had come true, part three of the plan had been executed:

The white knight is untouchable and dominant on its central base d5. White has a stable advantage, even if the game is far from won. The best female chess player ever needed another 30 moves to do so.