| Gunsberg 2005-04-07, 6:07 pm |
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ian burton wrote:
quote:
> In today's Amber blindfold game between Shirov and Kramnik, won by
Kramnik,
quote:
> Kramnik promoted a pawn to a Bishop. It was mere whimsy on his part,
but is
quote:
> there another game between grandmasters in which such an
underpromotion has
quote:
> taken place. Does Kramnik go down in history as the first to do so?
> --
> Ian Burton
> [Please Reply to Newsgroup]
No, Kramnik is not the first. Moreover, there have been instances of
games between Granmasters that involved **necessary** underpromotions
to a Bishop, for the obvious purpose of avoiding Stalemate threats by
the opponent.
As usual, Tim Krabbe's Chess Curiosities website is an excellent source
for information about such topics.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/chess/chess.html
Kholmov - Ehlvest
Wolgodonsk 1983
After 72.Ra1, there followed h1B! (72...h1Q 73.Ra8+ Qxa8 would have
been stalemate). Now it was easy; after 73.Rf1 Rh8 74.Rf7 Re8 75.Kc5 e5
76.Kd6 Bb7 White resigned.
Of course, if you want to be "technical" Ehlvest did not become a GM
until 1987.
However, Krabbe's web pages cites several games between strong players
where underpromotion occurred in non-trivial circumstances.
============================
http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/chess2/minor.htm
UNDERPROMOTION IN GAMES
In 1912, in The Theory of Pawn Promotion, Alain White wrote that he had
'never heard of a game where victory was won by a promotion to Rook or
Bishop'. In 1936 the great endgame connoisseur Harold Lommer wrote
something to that effect too. In my own Chess Curiosities (1985) I
mentioned the 'extreme rareness of such promotions', and quoted 12
examples from all of chess history, including trivial ones. Ten years
later Harold van der Heijden, in his Pawn Promotion, extended the list
to 27. We had entered the database era - he had used a 400,000 game
one. Over the following two years, in the magazine EBUR, he showed some
15 new cases. My turn again - in the meantime the databases have grown
to almost 2,000,000 games, and if I used the same criteria as in 1985,
I could show over 60 examples now.
It's beginning to spoil the fun. We shouldn't know that much.
Sometimes, letting my computer hunt in the databases, I feel like a
peeping Tom of chess history - as if I were reading a loved one's
secret diary.
But even now, Alain White's question pops up in the newsgroups: has
ever a game been won by a promotion to Rook or Bishop? Why, yes - maybe
it's time to rephrase his remark: has ever a game been drawn by a
promotion to Rook or Bishop? Not that I know of, but it could happen -
it doesn't take more than 5 minutes to set up a crude idea that might
occur in a game
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