Chess

The German expression zugzwang means ‘compulsion to move’ and is most often seen in the endgame. Consider the following position on Diagram 1.   It is Black to move. If Black were not obliged to move he could draw by waiting for White to play 1 c7+ Kc8 2 Kc6 with a draw by stalemate. Instead Black is compelled to move, thus losing after 1 ... Kc8 2 c7 Kb7 3 Kd7 winning by pawn promotion to queen or even rook.   The most famous zugzwang occurred in this week’s game, a classic, where the great Aron Nimzowitsch reduced his opponent to an utter paralysis on a board full of pieces. Notes based on those by Garry Kasparov in his My Great Predecessors series (Everyman Chess).

Mickey Adams won the British Championship, which finished last week in Torquay, for the seventh time. Leading scores (out of nine) were as follows: 1. Adams 7½; 2. Howell 7; 3= Haria and Palliser 6½; 5= Gordon, Tan and Houska 6. Jovanka Houska has now won the British Women’s Championship a record nine times.   The key element in Adams’s success was his deadly ability to score with the white pieces, racking up five wins from five games as White. This week, an excursion around the Adams Avalanche.   Adams-Gordon: British Championship, Torquay 2019 (see diagram 1)   Black is relying on the pin along the a4-e8 diagonal to regain his pawn but he is in for a nasty surprise. 15 b6!

What distinguishes the expert from the amateur in chess is partly tactical fluency, but also the ability to map out long-term patterns, in other words to visualise a distant goal. Some champions were distinguished by their talent for rough-and-tumble tactics; among such illuminati one could mention Alekhine, Tal and Kasparov. Others, such as Capablanca, Reti, Nimzowitsch, Smyslov and Karpov, stood out by virtue of their ability to foresee routes to victory that could only have been vaguely discernible to the average chess eye. A new book Planning: Move by Move by Zenon Franco (Everyman Chess) explains this long-range vision and how to improve one’s prospects of achieving it.

There are comparisons to be made between tennis and chess. Player X (aka White) serves. Player Y (Black) responds. The advantage of playing White in chess and serving in tennis are similar. Losing your serve is nearly as bad for a tennis player as losing with White is for a chess player. But some champions have made a speciality of winning with the black pieces — Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Tal, Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov spring to mind. Magnus Carlsen does not readily fit into this category, but his increasingly dramatic victories with Black are becoming more common. This week, three Carlsen Black wins, out of five, from a recent elite event. The demolition of Anish Giri is particularly spectacular.

Sixty years ago, the great Mikhail Tal won the Candidates tournament by a massive margin to qualify for a world title match against Botvinnik, which Tal also won, equally convincingly. This week, in homage to Tal, one of his four zero wipeout games against Bobby Fischer, with notes based on those of eyewitness Harry Golombek from his book Fourth Candidates Tournament 1959 in the Hardinge Simpole edition edited by David Regis.   Fischer-Tal: Candidates Tournament Bled/Zagreb/Belgrade 1959; Sicilian Defence   1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 d6 3 d4 cxd4 4 Nxd4 Nf6 5 Nc3 a6 6 Bc4 e6 7 Bb3 Be7 8 f4 0-0 9 Qf3 Qc7 10 0-0 b5 11 f5 White should not permit his queen’s knight to be driven away from c3, so 11 a3 was indicated. 11 ...

Staunton was the most successful British player of all time, winning three matches against European masters in the 1840s which in modern times would certainly have qualified him to be recognised as world champion.   On the social medium of Twitter (@HowardStaunton), an anonymous writer has invented a witty and satirically trenchant imitation of Staunton. The voice is spot on and whoever lurks behind the Twitter handle is clearly extremely erudite and evidently an expert on 19th-century British chess.   I am offering a champagne lunch at Staunton’s old haunt (and the traditional home of British chess), Simpsons-in-the-Strand, to anyone who can reveal the identity of the Staunton tweeter.

This year Tigran Petrosian would have celebrated his 90th birthday. The Armenian grandmaster and world champion was noted for the profundity and originality of his strategic concepts, as well as his quasi-invincibility in high level contests. He was certainly my role model when I was a student of chess in my teens, a chess hero to emulate along with Aron Nimzowitsch, Richard Reti, Alexander Alekhine and Mikhail Botvinnik.   Petrosian-Gligoric: Zagreb 1965; Grunfeld Defence   1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 Nc3 d5 4 Nf3 Bg7 5 e3 0-0 6 Bd2 c6 7 Be2 Ne4 8 0-0 Nxd2 9 Qxd2 e6 10 cxd5 exd5 11 b4 In this structure White plans to establish an enduring bind on the queenside. 11 ... Nd7 12 b5 Nf6 13 bxc6 bxc6 14 Na4 Bf5 15 Bd3 Ne4 16 Qc2 The c-file is White’s playground. 16 ..

The King’s Indian Defence is one of Black’s most dynamic reactions to closed openings such as d4/c4 and Nf3. Black sacrifices space in the centre but gains flank counter-chances on both wings in compensation. It has been a favourite of the pioneering Soviet grandmaster David Bronstein, who was followed enthusiastically by like-minded aggressors such as Mikhail Tal, Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov.   A new book, First Steps: The King’s Indian Defence by Andrew Martin (Everyman Chess), is an excellent introduction to this complex system. Notes to the following game are based on those in the book.   Brown-Mamedyarov: PRO League, chess.

The elite tournament at Stavanger in Norway has resulted in yet another victory for the world champion Magnus Carlsen. The format was unorthodox in that draws were replayed as so-called Armageddon blitz games. In such cases White has more time but any draws count as Black wins. Classical wins count as 2-0, whereas Armageddon wins count as 1½-½. The random factor is therefore very high and I doubt that the format will catch on. Final scores (out of a possible 18) from Stavanger were: 1. Carlsen 13½; 2= Lev Aronian and Yu Yangyi 10½; 4= Fabiano Caruana and Wesley So 10; 6 Ding Liren 8½; 7= Viswanathan Anand and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave 8; 9= Shakhriyar Mamedyarov and Alexander Grischuk 5½.

The Isle of Lewis chess pieces are one of the proudest possessions of the British Museum and also the National Museum of Scotland, which shares the hoard discovered on Uig in 1831. They represent the oldest complete chess sets in the world, with only a few pawns and a rook missing from one set. Now the rook has turned up from a back drawer in a private home and Sotheby’s are estimating a potential sale price of £1 million. The Lewis pieces are made from Walrus tusk, known as morse ivory, and give valuable insights into the Viking civilisation and environment from which they sprang.   This week, a game by that modern Norwegian descendant of Vikings, the world champion Magnus Carlsen, played on the traditional Viking turf of Stavanger.

An unusual tournament has taken place at the Lindores Abbey Whisky Distillery in Scotland, namely a double-round competition between four of the world’s elite, including world champion Magnus Carlsen. The final scores out of six were as follows: Magnus Carlsen 3½, Ding Liren and Sergey Karjakin 3, Viswanathan Anand 2½, and this week I focus on the decisive games from this most imaginative event.   Carlsen-Anand: Lindores Abbey Stars 2019 (See diagram 1)   Anand, as Black, had doubtless prepared a defence against the dangerous-looking 21 Qb3. In fact, after 21 Qb3 Black can defend with 21 ... Rb8 22 Qxf7+ Kh8 23 Nxc5 Nxc5 24 Rxc5 Ne5 with strong counterplay.

Gawain Jones has fought his way to the no. 1 position on the UK ranking list by a series of recent successes in the world team championship, the Reykjavik Open, and now by scoring first prize in the Sigeman closed invitational tournament in Malmo, Sweden. Gawain’s live rating is now 2,709, ahead of Howell and Sadler on 2,692, Adams 2,690 and McShane 2,688. Leading scores in Malmo (out of 7) were: Jones 5, Harikrishna 4½ and Grandelius 4.   Hillarp Persson-Jones: Sigeman & Co, Malmo 2019   1 c4 c5 2 Nc3 g6 3 g3 Bg7 4 Bg2 Nc6 5 Nf3 d6 6 0-0 e6 7 a3 Nge7 8 Rb1 0-0 9 b4 White has chosen a fairly sedate version of the English Opening where he hopes to gain a slight initiative on the queen’s flank.

One of the most irritating defences to meet when playing 1 d4 as White is the Benko Gambit (1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 c5 3 d5 b5). It was foreshadowed by a Ruy Lopez between Nimzowitsch and Capablanca from St Petersburg 1914. In that classic game, White won a queenside pawn in ingenious fashion, only to see the black forces pour down the open lines occasioned by the pawn loss and destroy White’s queen’s flank.

This year’s Grand Chess Tour kicked off in the Ivory Coast with a significant innovation, the first ever tournament in Africa involving a reigning world champion. Magnus Carlsen duly triumphed in the overall scores of a combined rapid and blitz event. The champion, however, did not have it all his own way. Carlsen easily won the rapid section but suffered a scare in the blitz when Maxime Vachier-Lagrave twice defeated the champion and won a barely credible eight games in a row. This remarkable parade was, though, insufficient to jeopardise Carlsen’s victory, since his lead from the rapid section was too vast to overcome.

The French Defence appears to be somewhat cautious in nature but can in fact lead to disruptive middlegame clashes. It was a favourite of such aficionados of counterattack as Aron Nimzowitsch, Mikhail Botvinnik and Viktor Korchnoi. One of my favourite lines was espoused by world champion Tigran Petrosian, for example in the following win against a world championship candidate. Notes to the following game are based on those in Opening Repertoire: The French Defence by Cyrus Lakdawala (published by Everyman Chess).   Olafsson-Petrosian: Bled 1961; French Defence   1 e4 e6 2 d4 d5 3 Nc3 Bb4 4 e5 Qd7 5 Qg4 White engages his queen, going for the soft spot on g7. 5 ... f5 6 Qg3 b6 7 h4 Bb7 8 Bd3 This is logical now that Black has committed his bishop to b7. If Black now plays ...

In my column of 20 April I reported on the overwhelming victory by world champion Magnus Carlsen in the elite Gashimov Memorial tournament at Shamkir, Azerbaijan. Almost immediately he went on to repeat his annihilation of the world’s best by taking first prize at the Grenke tournament in Baden Baden and Karlsruhe, in Germany.   After struggling in his World Championship contest against Fabiano Caruana in London, Carlsen appears rejuvenated, and is treating the world’s elite rather as Alexander Alekhine dealt with the illuminati of his day at the great tournaments of San Remo 1930 and Bled 1931. My theory is that Carlsen, a quick learner, has absorbed lessons from the astounding games of AlphaZero, the brainchild of Demis Hassabis CBE and his DeepMind group.