A Refutation to Navara's King March

I meant to write this article much sooner, but school work has forced me to stay away from this blog for some time now... While I often use this blog as a way of expanding upon the ideas presented in my book, Chess Structures - a Grandmaster Guide, this time I chose to talk about a different subject, Navara's king march, played in Biel a few months ago.

This topic was brought to me by Paul McGann, a chess player and physician from Baltimore. He was fascinated with Navara's King March, and Kavalek's analysis of the game, but was able to find some defficiencies in this analysis too. Over the course of a few weeks, we discussed some lines over email, until he decided to let his computer run for four days straight. A clear conclusion emerged: the King March has a refutation! In this blog I will show you the refutation found by him.

While I do think Navara's King March will go down in history as a notable example of courage and determination to play for a win, this finding is very interesting. It reminds us of how powerful computers are, and how amazing possibilities can be uncovered by today's machines. Let's see the refutation then. We will deviate from the original game with move 24...Bd3!!