One of the quirkier books on my shelf is titled Kingwalks: Paths of Glory (Seirawan & Harper, 2021, Russell Enterprises). King safety is a fundamental imperative for chess – after all, checkmate is the aim of the game – so the exceptions where that instinct is best overridden tend to be rather appealing. Probably the most famous example is the game Short-Timman, from Tilburg 1991, in which England’s future world championship challenger marched his king far into enemy territory to assist with a mating attack. But Kingwalks identifies plenty of other possible motives for these adventures. King evacuations (vertically, or horizontally) in the face of an attack are common, but a king might also run away to prepare an aggressive pawn storm on the wing it has vacated. Or a king may act boldly in anticipation of an exchange of queens.
By default, kings get tucked away near corners for their own safety, so it is unusual to see a king needing to get out of the way of its own pieces. Elaborate manoeuvres are extremely rare, such as in the game Oll-Hodgson, Groningen 1993, in which Julian Hodgson moved his king from g8-h7-g6, clearing a path for Rd8-h8-h5-f5.
But a curious case arose in the following game from the ECU Senior Championships, which concluded in Acqui Terme last weekend. Almost 20 moves earlier, White sacrificed a rook and hounded Keith Arkell’s king from the kingside all the way to a7. Now it is safe, and Arkell remains a rook up, but both players were down to about a minute or so, and it remains far from obvious how to combat the passed pawns on h5 and e6. 55…Nd2 looks tempting, but 56 Qg7 dodges Nd2-f3+ and prepares to trundle the h-pawn forward.
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