20-10-2013, 09:18 AM
Having been away for a week, I return to find the thread continue from the original mention of "Scotland's Chess Centenary Book" (1984) via Capt Mackenzie to the world-famous Barbier-Saavedra study (Glasgow Weekly Citizen 1895).
Barbier found the original "draw" (and he had the original inspiration to move Black's King from h6, where it had been placed in the 1875 Potter-Fenton game that started it all, to a1, from which wonders occur).
Saavedra, however, noticed that White can actually win (from the diagram shown earlier in this thread) - very cleverly!
According to John Roycroft in his outstanding "Test Tube Chess", which is still a landmark introduction to the study in chess after some 40 years, Saavedra's "discovery of [that] single move [by White] that led to a win ... is unquestionably the most famous of all endgame studies."
Try working it (all!) out!! You can, of course, google this these days.
But perhaps we should extract the story from M D Thornton's concise summary at p.36 of "Scotland's Chess Centenary Book" and give it due pride of place in the CS History Archive ... which already notes (thanks to our excellent chess historian) that Barbier sadly died shortly after the publication of one of Scotland's greatest ever gifts to the chess world!
Oddly enough, Potter also apparently died that year before the creation of the final (corrected) study.
Barbier found the original "draw" (and he had the original inspiration to move Black's King from h6, where it had been placed in the 1875 Potter-Fenton game that started it all, to a1, from which wonders occur).
Saavedra, however, noticed that White can actually win (from the diagram shown earlier in this thread) - very cleverly!
According to John Roycroft in his outstanding "Test Tube Chess", which is still a landmark introduction to the study in chess after some 40 years, Saavedra's "discovery of [that] single move [by White] that led to a win ... is unquestionably the most famous of all endgame studies."
Try working it (all!) out!! You can, of course, google this these days.
But perhaps we should extract the story from M D Thornton's concise summary at p.36 of "Scotland's Chess Centenary Book" and give it due pride of place in the CS History Archive ... which already notes (thanks to our excellent chess historian) that Barbier sadly died shortly after the publication of one of Scotland's greatest ever gifts to the chess world!
Oddly enough, Potter also apparently died that year before the creation of the final (corrected) study.