Why Didn't Firouzja Follow Kasparov's Footsteps?

Back in 1996, GM Garry Kasparov won 4-2 in a match versus the Deep Blue supercomputer. It turned out to be the last convincing human victory over an artificial chess player. The very next year, Deep Blue took revenge 3.5-2.5, and pretty soon matches like these stopped making any sense.

The sixth game of the first Kasparov-Deep Blue match was quite remarkable. Deep Blue voluntarily entombed a rook and a bishop!

Reportedly, while the super computer was 'thinking' before playing 30...Bb8??, GM Joel Benjamin, who was the main chess consultant of Deep Blue's team, gasped in horror "Oh my God, it is thinking about playing 30...Bb8!"

While today's chess engines cannot be even compared to their ancestors from three decades ago, if you push the analysis/magnifying glass button on the above diagram, you will still see that even today's Stockfish 16 doesn't see a big difference between 30... Bb8 and 30... Bd8. Indeed, from the computer's perspective. Black is lost in both cases, but from the human's standpoint, the move 30...Bd8 should be played without thinking—since after 30...Bb8 Black simply has no chances whatsoever!

The point of this article is not to discuss computer chess, though. Look at the position in the diagram and notice how hopeless Black's position became after its Ra8 and Bb8 lost their mobility. All White then needed to do was prepare an attack on the opposite side of the board, being essentially ahead in material by rook and a bishop. It might take a lot of time, but a breakthrough is inevitable.

Positions like these happen in tournament games more frequently than you might think. For example, here is a game of my own:

Notice that I followed the standard strategy outlined above, opening the position on the opposite part of the board where there is an extra rook and minor piece. It took quite some time, but Black had no chance!

In most of cases, strong players avoid such hopeless situations, preferring to lose some other way. Here is an example from a classic game of Alexander Alekhine:

Black won the game with a direct attack on the queenside, prepared by the move 23...Bd7! Couldn't White have prevented it? Yes he could, by pushing his own pawn to a4, but look what would have happened then:

To demonstrate the power of these patterns, let me show you one more game of mine. Here I trapped only a bishop, since the a-file was open and Black's rook escaped the entombment. Still, playing essentially down a bishop is no fun...

Now you can imagine my surprise when I saw the next game from the recently concluded Candidates Tournament.

As you can see, GM Ian Nepomniachtchi decided to impersonate Deep Blue and played the same suicidal looking moves 28...Rh8 and 29... Bg8. The real question is why didn't GM Alireza Firouzja follow in Kasparov's footsteps and play 30.g6? Understandably, engines are not impressed by this move. On the official live transmission page, Stockfish 16 gives White only +0.94 and provides an eight-move-deep variation. As you could see in the examples above, it usually takes a lot of time to break the opponent's position on the opposite side of the board and therefore it is difficult for an engine to see the whole extent of the damage due to the so-called horizon effect. But once you start playing thru these moves and therefore push the 'horizon' further away, the evaluation starts crawling up and goes over +4.

While it is impossible to play this long variation just like a computer, the general idea of breaking Black's queenside with the c2-c3 move is quite obvious, especially for a super GM. My only explanation of Firouzja's big miss is that the controversy over his shoes affected his concentration. 

I hope you learned the main lesson of this article: come for your games wearing soft, comfortable shoes that don't make any noise. Just kidding! Even wearing expensive, soft designer shoes is not a guarantee that FIDE won't fine you. So, it looks like the only sure thing in our unpredictable world is that trapping your opponent's rook and bishop should win a game!