Published: 6/9/2025
Hi everyone! Today I will be going over an interesting game between two very strong Grandmasters: GM Xiangyu Xu and GM Dmitrij Kollars. This was played in Round 2 of the Stepan Avagyan Memorial, a very prestigious round robin event.
The instructive part of the game started in the endgame, where GM Xu was up an exchange. However, the position wasn’t simple to win at all.
(Move 41 is where the critical moment begins)
What to take away from this game:
-Never get too comfortable. Even after playing such a nice sequence of moves with multiple rook sacrifices, you still have to be alert in order to finish the game.
-Take your time. Xu had 35 minutes when he played b5. I’m sure if he had spent 5-10 minutes before playing the move, he would have found the difference between playing h4 first and playing b5 immediately.
-Always look at your opponent’s ideas when calculating, especially when the position is simplified with few pieces on the board. Just by looking at potential counterplay that black would have in response to b5, we could realize that his biggest hope would be creating a past pawn on the kingside and giving up the d5 pawn which was bound to fall anyways.
I hope you guys enjoyed the interesting endgame and learned something new! Sometimes even the most simple looking endgames can be pretty complex 🙂
Leave a comment below if you have any questions or suggestions on what I should write about next.
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