Chess board showing position after move 32.Nxg6 in Marin v Ljuojevic, 1987. FEN: [2r3k1/3b1p2/p2q2N1/1p1p2P1/3b3Q/3B1P2/PP6/1K2R3 b - - 0 32]

Yesterday I shared a puzzle I learned about via one of John Nunn’s books.

Today, Douglas Griffin—translator extraordinaire, man of a million photos, and apparent possessor of a photographic memory—shared a cool photo of Ljubomir “Ljubo” Ljubojević in action against Mikhail Tal in the 1979 Interzonal tournament in Riga.

The picture prompted me to look through my sprawl of notes and I found the interesting position depicted above, which I’d stumbled across in Chess Tempo many years (practically a lifetime) ago. The puzzle position comes from a game featuring Ljubo who, walking on a knife’s edge, finding a brilliant sequence that definitively nailed down the win against Mihail Marin in the 1987 Interzonal tournament in Szirak, Hungary. Can you spot what Ljubo did1? And did you (ahem) discover the hidden point of that first, completely non-intuitive (to this patzer), move2?

Here’s the funny thing: the top three in this tournament would advance—along with six more from two other Interzonals—to matches which would ultimately decide who would face the winner of the 1987 Kasparov-Karpov World Chess Championship3. Ljubo placed a respectable 7th (out of eighteen), but a playoff was required to determine the third coveted spot. A playoff between Lajos Portisch and none other than…John Nunn! Sadly for residents of the Nunn Nation of Nunnistan4, Portisch won two straight games to send Nunn home.

I love these kinds of unexpected, serendipitous connections.

  1. Narrator: ChrisL64 did not. ↩︎

  2. Narrator: ChrisL64 misses again. ↩︎

  3. The one in which Kasparov, down 12-11 to Karpov, would come back to win the final game and retain his crown. ↩︎

  4. Nunn Stans? Nunnsters? Nunnites? Nunnians? ↩︎