Chess

If you play chess like a wet rag, sooner or later you will be made to regret it. In Nigel Short’s new book Winning (Quality Chess, 2021), that precept pops up in countless guises, and nobody is above criticism. Peter Leko ‘infamously offended the gods by attempting to draw his way to the title’ in his world championship match against Vladimir Kramnik in 2004. Mikhail Gurevich pursued a ‘craven objective’ in trying to draw his way to qualification at the 1990 Manila Interzonal. (He was undone by Short himself.) Bronstein’s chances against Botvinnik in 1951 perished with his ‘abject capitulation’ in game 23. Russian grandmaster Aleksey Dreev was punished for a ‘wanton act of timidity’.

Anyone who has attended the Varsity chess match knows that an online version just wouldn’t be the same. The annual event is held in great style at the Royal Automobile Club in London’s Pall Mall, and has tradition at its heart. This year’s, the 139th edition, could not be held at the usual time in March, but it took place last weekend, to coincide with the RAC Chess Circle’s Annual Dinner. Since the 2020 edition also took place just weeks before the onset of the first national lockdown, the mighty tradition of the Varsity match remains uninterrupted by the pandemic. (The last year without a contest was during the second world war.

I don’t like losing at chess. It feels bad in the moment, whether my position subsides like a failed pudding, or crashes like a severed tree. It feels bad right afterwards too, staring at a big fat zero on the scorecard. But worst of all is the lingering knot of disgust, because usually one’s mistakes are echoes of shortcomings one knew about already, and there is no hiding from them. The chorus from Radiohead’s ‘Just’ (from The Bends) could as well be an anthem for sulking chess players. You do it to yourself, you do And that’s what really hurts Is you do it to yourself Just you, you and no one else You do it to yourself… But last week I lost a game and felt, well, pretty much fine.

The hero pauses, plays the move, and announces ‘Checkmate!’ The villain crumples in shock. It’s a scene played out countless times on screen, but it so often looks ludicrous. In slow games between skilled players, checkmate on the board is much rarer than resignation. Occasionally, when the denouement is brisk and elegant, it will be played out to a finish. But in those cases, volunteering for the guillotine is a sporting gesture from the vanquished party. More often, the final phase of a chess game isn’t much of a spectacle. Extra piece, mop up some pawns, promote a pawn, hunt down the king, yadda yadda yadda. There’s no harm in playing it out, particularly if you think your opponent might stumble into a stalemate.

Since tennis matches are decided in sets, they are sometimes won by the player who has won fewer games. For example, with a 0-6, 6-4, 6-4 scoreline, 12 wins can beat 14. This statistical quirk goes by the name of Simpson’s paradox, and from a sporting point of view it is quite attractive. Even an abysmal start allows for a comeback. I’m not aware of chess matches ever being scored in this way. But when the Champions Chess Tour kicked off in the early months of the pandemic, the scoring system of the knockout stages was an appealing adaptation of that idea. Knockout matches were, in effect, decided over two ‘sets’, with each set lasting for four rapid games, played over one day.

I sat on the plane to the Isle of Man, leafing through a copy of Nigel Short’s new book, Winning. Since I was about to play a chess tournament, you would imagine that Short’s analysis of eight memorable tournament victories contained insights for my own campaign. Strange to say, that thought hardly crossed my mind. I was on my way to the Manx Liberty Masters, a ten-player all-play-all tournament, held in elegant surroundings in the town hall of the capital, Douglas. Dietmar Kolbus, who also captains the Manx Liberty team in the Four Nations Chess League, took on the demanding dual role of being a player and organiser.

Last year’s Netflix mini-series The Queen’s Gambit hit all the right notes. For the neophytes, it was quirky and intriguing. For those already smitten with the game, it was a rare joy to see that chess-wise, they mostly got the details right. Mostly. One awkward exception was the portrayal of Nona Gaprindashvili, the contemporary women’s World Champion, who held the title from 1962 to 1978. Now 80, she is suing Netflix, claiming false light invasion of privacy and defamation and seeking damages of ‘at least $5 million’. The point of controversy occurs in the final episode, when the heroine Beth Harmon is playing at an elite tournament in Moscow. The commentator intones: ‘The only unusual thing about her, really, is her sex.

I suspect many players perceive the chess board in rich contrast, like a heat map. Glowing bright red are those pieces which are attacked but not defended. A gentler shade applies to pieces which are vulnerable to attack in future, or squares that are ripe for occupation. In the diagram below, the intrusion 10 Nd5-e7+ is tempting, to win rook for knight. But Wesley So’s stunning move 10 Nf6+ showed an exquisite sense for the soft spots in Black’s position. The key point is that after 10…gxf6 11 Qh6, Black’s awkward clump of pieces have almost no way to influence the f6-square, so Qh6-f6 and Be1-c3 is very hard to meet. It is remarkable that the attack is viable even when White’s supporting pieces have yet to leave the barracks.

At the beginning of August, seeing his outstanding performance at the Fide World Cup in Sochi, I wrote that Ravi Haria ‘must now sense that the grandmaster title is well within reach’. But who could expect that he would achieve two more grandmaster ‘norms’ before the month was out? Haria, 22, now has all three norms (tournament results at grandmaster standard) he needs, and requires just a small boost to his international rating before he is awarded the title. Over-the-board chess has sprung back to life this summer, and Haria is one of many players making up for lost time.

A popular conceit among chess authors, particularly dead ones, is to describe a fine game as the execution of a multi-stage plan. In fact, a close inspection often reveals that the plan could only have been mapped out in hindsight, and the loser’s fate was entirely avoidable. Grand plans are overrated, but modest plans are indispensable. I like to wonder, what would I do with two or three moves? If I could place this piece anywhere on the board, where would it go? What would a prettier version of my position look like? Most of these ideas should be pruned ruthlessly, as they won’t survive contact with the enemy. But when you hit upon something the opponent can’t comfortably prevent, that’s a plan!

There be dragons! What we now call the Sveshnikov variation of the Sicilian defence was, in the 1970s, largely uncharted territory, and viewed with deep suspicion. Its modern name immortalises the Russian grandmaster whose pioneering analytical efforts, and practical success, put the variation on the map. Evgeny Ellinovich Sveshnikov died on 18 August at the age of 71. After his graduation in 1972, Sveshnikov worked towards a PhD at the Department of Internal Combustion Engines in the USSR. But his career turned towards chess, and in 1976 he was part of the Soviet team which won gold medals at the World Student Team Championship. The following year he was awarded the grandmaster title, and he went on to participate in nine USSR championships.

‘Exchange chess’ (also known as bughouse) is the chess equivalent of a three-legged race. It is played in teams of two, on adjacent boards with opposite colours, and it works best when nobody takes it seriously. The only essential rule is that when you capture an opponent’s piece, you hand it to your partner, who may later plonk it down on an empty square in lieu of moving a piece. A checkmate on either board wins, no matter how dire the adjacent situation. A long time ago, when we couldn’t convene a foursome, a friend taught me to play ‘one-board exchange chess’. This variant, which I now see is listed as ‘Replacement chess’ in the Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants, requires just two players.

Two years ago, the brilliant young Polish player Jan-Krzysztof Duda made a baffling decision. In the second game of his knockout match with Wesley So at the Moscow Grand Prix, Duda needed just a draw to advance to the next round, having won the first game with remarkable ease. Perhaps he was mindful that when one only needs a draw, excessively timid play is rarely rewarded. Even so, it was an eccentric choice to employ one of the wildest variations in the Sicilian Dragon. Duda’s risk barometer looked all out of whack — like a diner who has decided the mussels look a bit dodgy, and orders the pufferfish instead. (He went on to lose the game, and later the match.

As I write this, the Fide World Cup is underway in Sochi, the Black Sea resort in Russia which hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics. It’s a thrilling event for spectators, who get to watch high-stakes chess in all its forms — fast, slow, wonderful and blunderful. The main knockout event began with a field of 206 players (with 50 seeded into the second round), while the women’s event had half that number. Each match sees two classical games on consecutive days, followed by a day of tiebreaks at fast-paced time limits. It is a brutal competitive environment, and those who reach the final stages have spent almost a month in fear of that one mistake which would put them on the next flight home.

In the body of chess rules, castling is a clumsy protuberance. Once per game, you get to move king and rook at the same time, with a bewildering list of exceptions. (One dreads having to broach these gotchas with a novice opponent who has castled improperly.) Despite its convoluted logic, castling is nothing more than a convenience, and the game could function perfectly well without it. Five hundred years ago, the rules of chess were still evolving, with significant regional variations. The ‘king’s leap’, a precursor of modern castling, permitted the king to make one move as a knight jump (perhaps from e1 to g2), while in other forms it could step two squares any which way (so, for example, e1 to g3 was also on the menu).

In a game between top players, the opening moves signify not only the battleground they have embraced, but also the terrain they have avoided. In his prime, Garry Kasparov’s opponents would often duck the most critical choices, fearing the champion’s formidable advantage in home analysis of complex positions. But those who yielded an inch at the outset faced an uphill struggle of a different sort, and Kasparov won countless games from that psychological vantage point. Since his retirement in 2005, Kasparov has made sporadic appearances in speed events against the world elite, with respectable results. But his appearance earlier this month at the Grand Chess Tour’s blitz event in Zagreb was disastrous, as he scored just 2.5/18. What went wrong?

In his autobiographical book Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! the late American physicist Richard Feynman described how he amused himself by cracking open the safes at Los Alamos, which stored design papers for the Manhattan Project. He started out picking locks, which he describes like this: Now, if you push a little wire gadget — maybe a paper clip with a slight bump at the end — and jiggle it back and forth inside the lock, you’ll eventually push that one pin that’s doing the most holding, up to the right height. The lock gives, just a little bit, so the first pin stays up — it’s caught on the edge. Now most of the load is held by another pin, and you repeat the same random process for a few more minutes, until all the pins are pushed up.

Abhimanyu Mishra became the world’s youngest grandmaster last month, at 12 years and 4 months old. The boy from New Jersey achieved the milestone by scoring 7/9 at the Vezerkepzo GM Mix event in Budapest last month. In doing so, he has broken the record set almost 20 years ago by Sergey Karjakin, who became a grandmaster at 12 years and 7 months old, and went on to challenge Magnus Carlsen for the World Championship in 2016. His father, Hemant Mishra, made it clear that they treated breaking this record as an end in itself, which has required extraordinary dedication and persistence. Along the way, Mishra suffered a run of 35 games without a win — an exacting experience for any player.

It’s a joy to watch a player like Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, who can light a fire with his bare hands. Where most are content to develop their pieces in the opening moves, he has a knack for igniting the play at the slightest provocation. In the game below, Caruana’s move 9 h3 looks unremarkable, but Mamedyarov saw a ‘hook’ for his attack which began with 9…g5 (see diagram), since the imminent advance g5-g4 threatens to open the g-file, so that a rook on g8 can menace the White king on g1. Mamedyarov’s vigorous assault brought him an important win on his way to tournament victory at the Superbet Chess Classic, held in Bucharest last month. The event marked a welcome return for the elite Grand Chess Tour, whose 2020 season was cancelled.

Millions of people would see losing to Anand as a privilege rather than a disgrace. So it is simply astonishing that one lucky opponent, facing the Indian star in an online simultaneous display, squandered the opportunity by cheating. ‘Checkmate Covid, celebrity edition’, hosted earlier this month by Chess.com, was supposed to be a lighthearted event, with a handful of Indian celebrities taking on the former world champion to raise funds to tackle the pandemic in India. Billed as India’s youngest billionaire, Nikhil Kamath is the co-founder and CIO of Zerodha, an Indian brokerage company, but his claim to have been a chess champion in his youth looked doubtful when he blundered a pawn on the very first move.