Master profile
Xu Tianhong
徐天红
- Games
- 890
- Years of the dated games
- 1990–2008
- Archive record
- 233W · 450D · 207L
National titles: Men's national individual champion: 1989
The player
徐天红 (Xu Tianhong) was born in Taizhou, Jiangsu, on 8 May 1960. He began professional training in 1977 and joined the Jiangsu team the next year. Eighth place at the 1984 national championship made him a master, and the 1989 national title made him a grandmaster. In 1993, in Beijing, he won the world individual championship and became China's third world champion, and he later became a vice-president of the Jiangsu chess institute.
His most frequent opponent in the archive was Lü Qin: they met 108 times, and more than half of those games were drawn. As Red he played the Central Cannon in 310 games.
The first game below is a win with Black over 吕钦 (Lü Qin) at the 2000 team championship. The second is a win over the teenage 许银川 (Xu Yinchuan) at the 1990 individual championship, a year after Xu Tianhong's national title.
In the archive
| As Red / as Black | 452 games as Red, 438 as Black |
|---|---|
| Score | 58.2% as Red, 44.5% as Black |
| Most played systems | Central Cannon as Red (310 games) · Screen Horses as Black (189 games) |
| Best-scoring system | Five-Seven Cannons as Red: 60.1% over 89 games |
| Most frequent opponent | Lü Qin (108 games) |
| Longest game | 324 plies against Wang Yuefei in 2007 |
Xu Tianhong - Lü Qin, 2000
2000 National Team Championship · 2000 · Lü Qin (red) vs Xu Tianhong (black)
Xu Tianhong, the 1989 national champion, has Black against Lü Qin and beats him with a counterattack. Lü Qin was known for fast attacks, which makes a counterattack against him hard to pull off.
The soldiers clash on move four, both sides keep their chariots, and the fight sharpens around move seventeen with five captures in ten plies. Xu's defence holds and then strikes back, and a horse gives the final check. On a good day, Xu Tianhong could out-calculate almost anyone.
Black won · 41 moves
The starting position.
Key moments
All the moves
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Xu Tianhong - Xu Yinchuan, 1990
1990 National Individual Championship · 1990 · Xu Tianhong (red) vs Xu Yinchuan (black)
The reigning champion against a rising one. In 1990 Xu Tianhong was the player everyone wanted to beat, and Xu Yinchuan was a teenage prodigy. Here the older player has red and shows the youngster that the gap between them is still there.
It is a long, controlled game with no capture until move twelve, and it opens up late, with seven captures in ten plies around move twenty-nine. Xu Tianhong keeps the better of the remaining pieces and wins the ending. Xu Yinchuan went on to win six national titles, and this game shows him before the first of them.
Red won · 51 moves
The starting position.
Key moments
All the moves
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