Wednesday 9 November 2016

Raymond Deane: the answers

Yesterday we were looking at Gerald Mangan's caricature of Raymond Deane and asking what was happening on the part of the board that the caricature was obscuring


and what well-known game the position was taken from.

Noting that neither king was castled, that if there was a pawn on d5 we'd be able to see it and assuming that Black would be further behind in development than seemed likely if the f8-bishop was still on that square, I surmised that the bishop was on e7, the queen was on d8 and the d-pawn had gone to d5 and then been exchanged. Also d4 seemed likely for a white pawn and while the other one could be on e4, e3 seemed likelier as otherwise Nxe4 would work. This would give us this....


which, as it turns out, is correct!

But how to arrive at that position? I first thought it might be a Queen's Indian, with something like 1. d4 Nf6 2. Nf3 e6 3. c4 b6 4. Nc3 Bb7 5. Bg5 Be7 6. e3 d5 7. Rc1 dxc4 8. Bxc4 but it could also be an old-fashioned kind of Queen's Gambit Declined and, as it turned out, that's what it was. Old-fashioned as Pillsbury-Mason, Hastings 1895.

That game opened 1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Bg5 Be7 5. Nf3 b6 6. e3 Bb7 7. Rc1 dxc4 8. Bxc4 and you can play through the rest on chessgames.com with notes by Teichmann (where those notes are from, chessgames.com does not tell us) or, if you prefer, by reading Irving Chernev's Logical Chess: Move by Move


which book Raymond bought Gerald before the caricature was drawn.

Pillsbury goes on to win in fine style.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Old-fashioned as Pillsbury-Mason, Hastings 1985.

You might mean 1895.

ejh said...

I might, thank you

Anonymous said...

Mason gives away a tempo in that game by not waiting for Bd3/Be2 before taking on c4. Perhaps the influence of the 1895 game over the years is such that "everyone" knows this. In any event there are very few games that have reached the exact diagram position.

RdC