Hello, everyone. This game was played in 1958 between Bobby Fischer and Samuel Reshevsky. Although this is a very short game, it's worth noticing that Samuel Reshevsky was a magnificient player. He had a very long chess career and in this career he played against 11 world champions. Of those 11 he defeated seven of them, including champions like Lasker Casablanca and Alexander Alekhine. So it's really hard to imagine that he could fall for a trap like this. But although you can find this game on the internet as "Bobby Fischer's Trap" or "Bobby's Trap", after this game Bobby actually said that he just read about this trap in an old Russian magazine from the 50s. Bobby also said somewhere around 1950s he considered Samuel Reshevsky to be the strongest player in the world. So let's see this short game between these two great rivals. Bobby is white and he plays e4. Reshevsky is black. He goes c5, the Sicilian Defense. Knight to f3. Knight c6. d4. C takes d4. Knight takes d4. And now g6, the Accelerated Dragon. Knight c3. Bobby goes for the Najdorf Variation. Not for the c4 -- the Maróczy Bind, which is more popular nowadays. Bishop to g7. Bishop to e3. Knight to f6. And here Fischer plays Bishop to c4, his signature move. Black castles. Black is also setting a trap here. He's hoping for white to play f3 and organize an attack with queen d2 with bishop h6. But this would be a blunder because the queen to b6 is a very ugly move for white. As he's attacking the B2 pawn. After white protects it somehow like bishop to d3, now black has this resource of playing knight takes on e4. And this is at least an equal position for black. Which Fisher doesn't allow of course. So in this position Fisher plays another of his signature moves, bishop to b3. This is a tricky move. This is the position that's called Bobby's Trap. He's inviting black to play knight to a5 and try to exchange this stronger light-square bishop. Which, for no reason, Samuel Reshevsky plays and falls for the trap. He plays knight to a5. And this is what happens next. Bobby plays e5. Now if Reshevsky captures on b3 then he simply loses a piece after E takes f6 and knight takes on b1. Okay, we can just play it. Here. And now this is knight is trapped because black has capture the pawn on g7. So after e5, if the knight goes on h5 then simply g4 and the knight is captured. So there's only one place for the knight to go and that's knight to e7. But this is a very big blunder. As Fischer plays bishop takes on F7. In here, black can easily resign. Which Reshevsky probably saw, but as I said they were great rivals and he didn't want to allow Fischer to get this miniature game... ...accomplished. Like I said, he could resign here, but he played the rook takes on f7. Here Fischer plays knight e6 and traps the black queen. There is no place for black queen to go. Again, this is another position where Reshevsky could have just resigned, but he decided to capture and give up his queen. He played a couple more moves and only after a couple of more moves he resigned. But it's interesting what happens if king captures on f7. If king captures on f7 then again knight to e6, trapping the queen. But now the king can capture here. King takes on e6. But this is even worse as black is getting checkmated. Queen to d5 check. King goes to f5. g4 check. King captures. Rook to g1 check. King to H4. Queen to e4 check. And after king h5, queen to e4 checkmate. A couple more moves are possible for black, but they all lead to checkmate, so... It doesn't really matter what black plays. So yeah, this is the position and this is move number 7, where Bobby played bishop to b3. This great grandmaster, Samuel Reshevsky, makes such a huge blunder on move 8 and plays knight to a5. And, well, the rest is history. So yeah, that's the game. I hope you enjoyed it and see you soon.
