Can You Bear-in It?

Apologies right away for the pun. Sometimes the heat has an effect…

This is another position that had the experts of yesteryear stumped. Barclay Cooke chose 8/7 8/4, which aims to build a stronger inner board but mainly creates a static blot that could linger, while losing one of black’s landing sites. It’s a blunder, but still the second-best play available.

Now is the moment to leave one of our points in white’s outfield - while they have a blot and not many builders. And in this case 13/8 is clearly best. It maximises white’s pain if they do hit you - they lose an anchor and face several return shots - and it duplicates white’s 1’s. It also keeps our bar-point anchor - useful in case we do get hit. That safe anchor is the reason why the ‘clear from the rear’ move of 18/13 is also a blunder in this position.