Amazing combination by milacik(IM)

[drahacikfm]

We are just back from the final round of the Slovak Extraliga.  My wife (milacik(IM) here on Chess Tempo) played a fantastically deep combination to win her game against the very experienced Grandmaster Lubomir Ftacnik, who has been ranked in the top 100 in the world in the past.

Here is the position at the beginning of the combination.



Black has just played f3 attacking the White rook on e2.  Black has a very nice position up a pawn.  I had already written this off as a loss for us, and went back to my game.  My wife sets a devious trap and had seen all the way to the mate on move 13!

1.Re4

Doesn't this just hang the pawn on b2 to 1..Nxb2, when Black is up two pawns and attacking the White rook on d1?  The Grandmaster calculates a long time, thinks he sees the trap, and thinks he has seen farther and has a way out of the trap:

1...       Nxb2??

Loses the game by force.  He had to play 1...d5, and Black is clearly better then.  But he got a little greedy and took that second pawn.

2.Nh6+  Kh8
3.Rd2

This is the supposed trap... the knight has no where to go.  But the GM thinks he has seen a little farther and plays

3...   Qc6

This attacks the White rook on e4 and at the same time provides an escape for the knight at a4.

4.Rh4  Na4



5.Qc2

A devious move, threatening to take the knight on a4, and threatening Nf7+ Rxf7 Qxh7#.  But GM Ftacnik had seen all of this when he played 1...Nxb2, and plays

5...  Bxc3

Now the GM was looking fairly proud of himself!  He has protected against the mate (Nf7+ Rxf7 will protect h7, and the knight on a4 can't be taken because the White rook on d2 is hanging.  And he is three pawns up!  He had seen all this when he played 1...Nxb2.

But my wife had seen ALL of this and much more before she played 1.Re4!  She now played

6.Rd3

If the bishop moves, the knight will hang.  Of course Black could now play a move such as 6...Ba1, giving away the knight on a4, but analysis later showed that inspite of his 3 pawns he is losing.  Instead, the GM instantly played

6...  Bd4



which protects the bishop and blocks the rook on h4 from attacking the knight on a4.  This was as far as Ftacnik had seen when he first played 1...Nxb2 and now he was happy with his three extra pawns and all the hanging pieces and mates are covered.  At least he thought so!  But now come the final shocking blows:

7.Rdxd4!

This part of the combination is not so difficult to see.  But to plan this 6 moves earlier shows amazing talent.

7...       cxd4
8.Nf7+!!

What, just hanging the knight?  No!

8...  Rxf7
9.Bf6+

One shock after another.

9...   Kg8
10.Qg6+!



Boom!  A big crowd had gathered around the game watching the upset!  Ftacnik had to resign because of 10...hxg6 11.Rh8# mating with the only two pieces White has left, or 10...Kf8 11.Qh6+ Kg8 12.Rg4+ Rg7 13.Qxg7#

An amazingly deep combination.  My wife had seen all the way to 13.Qxg7+ when she played 1.Re4.  That's 25-ply in computer speak.  There's a reason she plays board 2 on our team, ahead of two Grandmasters on boards 3 and 4!  She has the tactical ability of a 2700 GM, and just needs to work on her openings and positional play.

[oded ross]

Very nice.
From 6...Bd4 I saw to the end instantly (you did spring some clues commenting the previous moves), but seeing that in a game from the initial position is a totally different thing.
This combination made me think that somewhat surprisingly there isn't an example from your games in the following thread.
BTW, any chance that she'll write something in the forum herself?

[backspace]

Wow, congratz to your wife for that combination.

Did she gain the majority of her tactical ability from this site? 25-ply isnt a joke and to even smell a combination 13 moves ahead of the win, while including numerous traps and necessary piece sacs is quite amazing.

starting to make me doubt if i can ever become an IM...

[richard]

Did she gain the majority of her tactical ability from this site?

As much as I wish this was true (from a marketing point of view :-) ), Milacik was a top level player well before using CT.

Regards,
Richard.

[uri blass]

<snipped>

She has the tactical ability of a 2700 GM, and just needs to work on her openings and positional play.

I do not buy the claim that she has a tactical ability of a 2700 GM.

I can expect 2700 GM to have better success in chess tempo and she had 126 problems that she failed out of 482.

2700 GM can certainly get easily better rating than standard rating of 2400 in chess tempo after 482 problems and milacik best active rating is 2370 and it is not that she has an extremely low average time.

I am sure that her fide estimate is lower than 2700.

Uri

[richard]

Uri,

As mentioned in a reply to you on a different thread a few days ago, the FIDE estimate is a rough estimate. The estimate does a reasonable job with users around 2000-2100 which is where most of the people that entered FIDE id's sit, but the regression doesn't have much to work with in lower and higher rating ranges so it becomes less accurate there.  I certainly wouldn't be using the FIDE estimate to prove or disprove anything.

Milacik has very low average recent solve times compared to other high rated users once you factor out those who are seeing problems more than once. Milacik has seen zero problems more than once.  There is one GM in the current top 10 standard list that I know of (they have opted not to list their FIDE id, so I will not name them) and Milacik's recent solve times are considerably faster than theirs.

It is very hard to know what rating a 2700 GM would receive on CT using the same amount of time as Milacik (and given we have no evidence that Milacik cares much about her rating or her average times we have no idea how close to her peak performance her current rating and average times are).

As an aside, there is certainly no rule that you have to agree with everything everyone says on the forum, but you might want to think about how you package up your disagreements sometimes, as I think sometimes your responses can look harsher and more combative than you perhaps intend.

Regards,
Richard.

[uri blass]

Nothing against milacik but here is the statistics of the top 10 in standard.

I guess that the average time is not correct because I have less than 5 minutes average time for standard but I cannot consider average time of 172 seconds as a very small average time(maybe it is relatively small to most of the top 10 but most of the top 10 are also weaker than 2400 fide rating so I expect more from people with rating of 2700 and I certainly expect them to get chesstempo rating above 2400 assuming that they use some minutes per problem even in case that they solve for the first time.

It may be interesting to compare average first time for users(unfortunately it is hard to know when a problem is first time and problem id is not enough and there are cases when you get practically the same problem even when the problem id is not the same).

1 silver83p 2585.4 69 921 81.98% 172 2010-03-15 12:11:55
2 manolash 2525.4 41 1807 85.33% 159 2010-03-15 10:16:38
3 cmuroya17 2451.5 34 9849 75.79% 304 2010-03-16 11:18:59
4 sathyats 2451.5 40 1703 55.96% 300 2010-03-16 12:13:49
5 klawe 2417.5 56 5701 63.87% 60 2010-03-04 17:44:33
6 marvellosity 2408.1 37 8219 72.38% 103 2010-03-15 17:56:26
7 putski 2390.7 35 5312 75.45% 145 2010-03-16 00:32:40
8 milly (FM) 2380.9 34 13679 85.04% 136 2010-03-16 12:32:42
9 glorofaz (FM) 2374.5 42 1010 69.41% 225 2010-03-14 15:33:22
10 milacik (IM) 2351.8 61 482 73.86% 172 2010-03-07 01:00:48

Edit:I can add that with all the respect for finding a long combination then tactics is also not missing shorter lines and the failures of milacik in standard are usually because of missing shorter lines.

She may be at 2700 level in finding long tactical lines but tactics is not only finding long lines.

[richard]

Hi Uri,

The user lists average time over entire solve history stats - which is what you are showing there - are not very good for this purpose, for as you point out the majority of those times are clipped to 5 minutes (times are no longer clipped to 5 minutes, but that is a very recent change).  The stats I was referring to which showed milacik had very low average times were based on the stats page value for "Average recent per problem time spent", this is a much better estimate for several reasons.  Most importantly, It doesn't clip times to 5 minutes, and it makes sure the time taken is more closely associated with the user's current rating instead of problems done many hundreds of problems ago which may have no relation to current ratings. It does have the disadvantage that it exaggerates the impact of recent problems for those who are seeing lots of duplicates. Milacik compares very favourably with the top 10 average solve times using the recent attempt times stat as opposed to the truncated 'lifetime average' stat you've shown (which make Milacik's time look closer to the others than they actually are, due to truncation severely underestimating several of the top 10 average estimates, others on the list have low average times from times when they solved problems much more quickly and had much lower ratings, others also have low estimates due to getting relatively high number of duplicates).

Regards,
Richard.

[drahacikfm]

First of all Uri, this thread is about the combination, not a detailed discussion of one sentence I wrote.  Please don't hijack the thread with an off-topic discussion.

Tactical ability in real tournament games is very different from tactical ability on CT where you KNOW there is a combination.  It's a very different skill.  I'm 2800 Standard on CT, but I am much worse than my wife at tactics in real tournament games.  So the two are not very related for high-level players.

Milacik doesn't care about CT ratings.  If she has a phone call or has to go shopping, she will often just make a move in a CT problem and fail.  She never keeps it on the screen for solving later.  She rarely spends a lot of time on a problem, and will just guess if she doesn't see it, while I will take an hour to find the answer. Also, she doesn't even know about the estimated FIDE rating, so doesn't care about her solve times, which means she might talk to people or prepare food for bubak, etc, while the time is running.  Her solve times could be much lower if she wanted.

In summary, any comments about her tactical ability in real games cannot be made by looking at anything in CT statistics.  A number of GMs over 2500 FIDE have made the comment that her tactical abilities are far higher than theirs.  Just her openings and sometimes positional play are not so good. For example, in the game I showed above she had a very bad position with White before the GM played 1...Nxb2?  And that former 2600+ GM didn't even know he was losing until after he played 6...Bd4, while milacik knew it after 1...Nxb2.

[drahacikfm]

This combination made me think that somewhat surprisingly there isn't an example from your games...

Most of my wins are rather boring.  A typical win is outplaying the opponent positionally so he has to give up a pawn, then I trade pieces into a pawn-up ending and grind out a win.  Or I get a winning position from my opening preparation, such as this weekend when I beat a 2200 FIDE with the Morra Gambit by winning the queen for a rook and two pawns on move 16, which was all home preparation from 10 years ago that I luckily remembered.  I can't remember the last time I played a nice combination, and have never played one like the combination above.  CT helps me see the combinations my opponent is threatening, so I can avoid them.

BTW, any chance that she'll write something in the forum herself?

Probably not, she has never read the forum (except the post I made here about her combination because I showed it to her) and doesn't have an interest in posting in any internet forums.

[drahacikfm]

Wow, congratz to your wife for that combination.

Did she gain the majority of her tactical ability from this site? 25-ply isnt a joke and to even smell a combination 13 moves ahead of the win, while including numerous traps and necessary piece sacs is quite amazing.

No, she got her tactical ability by solving problems in her weekly Saturday training in a small town of 50,000 people when she was 9 years old. Two of her classmates are now male Grandmasters.  It must have been a good school.  She won the Women's Championship of Czechoslovakia at age 13 and was known as a "witch" for saving lost positions with amazing combinations.  As in the game above.

[marvellosity]

...such as this weekend when I beat a 2200 FIDE with the Morra Gambit by winning the queen for a rook and two pawns on move 16, which was all home preparation from 10 years ago that I luckily remembered.

Wow, I love you... go Morra

[oded ross]

No, she got her tactical ability by solving problems in her weekly Saturday training in a small town of 50,000 people when she was 9 years old. Two of her classmates are now male Grandmasters.  It must have been a good school.  She won the Women's Championship of Czechoslovakia at age 13 and was known as a "witch" for saving lost positions with amazing combinations.  As in the game above.

Who are these two GMs?

[uri blass]

Wow, congratz to your wife for that combination.

Did she gain the majority of her tactical ability from this site? 25-ply isnt a joke and to even smell a combination 13 moves ahead of the win, while including numerous traps and necessary piece sacs is quite amazing.

No, she got her tactical ability by solving problems in her weekly Saturday training in a small town of 50,000 people when she was 9 years old. Two of her classmates are now male Grandmasters.  It must have been a good school.  She won the Women's Championship of Czechoslovakia at age 13 and was known as a "witch" for saving lost positions with amazing combinations.  As in the game above.

I think that it is sexism to consider somebody as a "witch" for saving lost positions

I know nobody who is going to use this negative word for men(and I know that in the past people burned witches).

I understand that nobody meant to burn her and it is only humor but I still think that it is wrong to use this word.

I can add that I am not surprised that her opening knowledge is inferior to men with similiar strength(after reading that she has to go shopping or needs to prepare food for bubak)  because it seems that she has no time to learn chess openings.

Uri

[richard]

I think that it is sexism to consider somebody as a "witch" for saving lost positions

I know nobody who is going to use this negative word for men(and I know that in the past people burned witches).

I understand that nobody meant to burn her and it is only humor but I still think that it is wrong to use this word.

At the risk of dragging this thread even further off topic, I think this is taking things completely out of context. While 'witch' can have negative connotations, It doesn't sound to me that it was being used that way here. In the context, it doesn't sound very different to saying something like, "Kasparov is a tactical wizard".  I assume by your reaction that you'd be horrified at this statement, which is apparently accusing Kasparov of being a person who dabbles in the dark arts.

Despite my bad example, can you please take Dahacik's advice and try and keep this thread on topic.  So far none of your contributions have even commented on the combination that is the central topic of this thread (neither do mine, but for some reason I find your flame-bait hard to resist, I'll try and exercise more restraint in the future). 

Richard.