Anyone could check all this?>

I'd be inclined to play 20...b6. I tossed it in Fritz and he gives a consistent eval of about -.85 to -1.00. He came up with 20...Qh4 21. Rfd1 Rfa8 22. Bb3 Rxb3 23. Bxd4 Bxd4 24. Rab1 Still a lot of work to do but the evals have improved a bit for Black.

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<88. Rh7! e.g. 88...Nd3 89. Be4 Nf2 90. Bg2 Be5 91. Rh5 Bf4 92. Rh8 Kc7 93. Rh7 Kc8 94. c7 h1=Q 95. Bxh1 Bxc7 96. Kc6 Be5>>

I was curious why black didn't play 96...Bd8. So I loaded the game into Houdini and found that white missed a winning forced line earlier.

The final position in the endgame, however, made me chuckle. It reminds me a great deal of an ending I played (from the Black side) against a 2175 in the 1988 Santa Cruz Open.

By one of those ironic twists that do seem to arise with unexpected frequency, this game saw me pitted against a fellow local, who held a one-zero positive score against me in tournament games to date, the other having been a French in which I chickened out of a queen sac which later proved a probable winner (although the position was complex enough that the controversy was never fully resolved), preferring instead to blunder a rook with check and lose immediately.

In this game (also an Alekhine), I had been thoroughly outplayed and was two pawns to the bad. But I surprised my opponent by exchanging down into a minor-piece ending — this because I foresaw the resulting position, in which my knight and king (the latter placed on c6, the only square from which it could manage this feat) could hold off the bishop and two pawns.

The game went on for over five hours because my opponent couldn't believe he'd allowed a draw; he even sacced a pawn at the optimum moment to entice my king out of his remaining pawn's way and nearly corral my knight. But, as in this game, he ultimately had to bow to the fates: I had just enough mobility left, and just enough control of the path to the queening square, that he abandoned his quest for zugzwang and accepted the draw offer I'd made as I moved my king to c6 some fifty-two moves earlier. He then stood up and shook hands like a gentleman, but the curse in his eye would have daunted the Ancient Mariner.

I am more of a curmudgeon on that point. I think they've been bad for a long time. To be fair, having to come up with one every day can't be easy. And even if "many" were works of art, there were far more that weren't. I sort of wonder if they should try one pun a week and let the other 6 just be untitled.

<The last year or so it's like someone has gone through the database, found a player named, say, Haast, thought of the pun "Haast Makes Waste", and then looked for a game that would sufficiently suit that pun. It's gotten a little tiresome. In the past many of the puns were real works of art.>

I have also suspected the same thing about searched out puns, and think it's usually pretty obvious when that was the methodology. In the user nominated 20 puns of a few years back, I thought maybe 3 were remotely interesting. "Men Without a Country" was genius. The rest were what really makes a bad pun-being obvious. Some topical news reference, a literary reference, a song title, such things are interesting. Finding a player named Kavalek and creating the pun "Kavalanche"? Really, now, that's one of the 20 best the membership can come up with?* Okay, back to being a curmudgeon.

Spassky vs Fischer, 1972>

I do indeed. That's exactly why I was aghast, because I also remembered that he subsequently described his playing the Alekhine in the game you cited as essentially an "accident."