Chess

‘Every day is different’, people like to say about their jobs. For the world’s best chess players, that’s only partly true. The game will be different, but the day will look much the same, and so will the international hotel room. In fact, professional players love a routine: they keep their energy for the game, not on deciding where to eat. That monastic focus can’t be taken for granted, especially when you’ve already achieved the highest goals. When Vladimir Kramnik, the former world champion who defeated Garry Kasparov in London in 2000, announced his retirement from chess last year, he put it down to a drop in motivation. The results of his games had stopped mattering quite so much to him.

Besides the Grand Chess Tour final, an abundance of chess was played at this year’s London Chess Classic. More than 2,000 children visited the festival, which was organised by the charity Chess in Schools and Communities. Fittingly, two talented youngsters shared first place in the Fide Open event — 14-year-old Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa from India and 18-year-old Anton Smirnov, from Australia.   Michael Adams added another title to his collection by winning the British Knockout Championship. He had a close shave in the quarter finals, narrowly surviving an Armageddon game against the promising young player Marcus Harvey, who sailed through a qualifying tournament with 8.5/9 the previous day.

Ding Liren, from China, was a convincing winner of the 2019 Grand Chess Tour, which reached its climax in London last weekend. The Grand Chess Tour Finals, a four-player knockout, was the flagship event at this year’s London Chess Classic. The match format was a blend of classical (slow), rapid and blitz games. Although the slower games held more weight in the scoring, the very inclusion of faster time limits reflects their increased status in the modern game.   The first semi-final, between Magnus Carlsen and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, went to a tiebreak. The Frenchman won a topsy-turvy game in his beloved Najdorf Sicilian, as Carlsen went astray amid wild complications. In the second semi-final match Ding defeated Levon Aronian with a dominant performance in the rapid games.

There is a gritty fight scene in The Bourne Supremacy, in which Jason Bourne (played by Matt Damon) faces down his adversary Jarda at an apartment in Munich. Both men are skilled assassins, but they aren’t wielding their weapons of choice. The villain’s hands are tied, but he lands the first blow with his elbows. He somehow turns up a kitchen knife, and frees his wrists on some shattered glass furniture. Bourne rolls up a magazine and you know he could kill with it. You wish someone would answer the shrieking telephone. They’re soon back to bare knuckles and slamming into the tables. At last, Bourne throttles him with an electric power cord, and the audience breathes a sigh of relief.

Magnus Carlsen is the star attraction at this year’s London Chess Classic. The festival, now in its 11th edition, runs from 29 November to 8 December at the Olympia Conference Centre in Kensington. The World Champion will play in the final leg of the Grand Chess Tour, in a four-player knockout event with a $350,000 prize fund which begins on Monday 2 December. He will be joined by Ding Liren, Levon Aronian and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave.   ‘The Classic’ as the festival is affectionately known, features a wide variety of events, including a Fide-rated Open tournament, weekend events, and a ‘Super Blitz Open’ on the final Sunday.

Reimagine democracy. Reimagine capitalism. Reimagine education. For all the reimagining thrown at big ideas, they don’t seem much perturbed. You can reimagine a problem too, but it probably won’t be fruitful. It won’t help you find the end of the Sellotape, or balance the books (unless you worked for Enron).   But some problems really are amenable to a fresh perspective. According to legend, the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was tasked at primary school with adding up the numbers from 1 to 100. The obvious approach is (to quote the King of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland) ‘Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’ Gauss saw the problem in a different light.

When Daniil Dubov advanced his queen’s pawn in Batumi last month, he might as well have chewed the head off a bat and set fire to the board. For diehard chess fans, it was a true rock’n’roll moment, still more transgressive for being done in a team event on behalf of Mother Russia. The 23-year-old had just come from a grotty performance at his previous event. ‘They asked me to calm down and not play some ridiculous lines,’ he said with a grin.   His brazen sacrifice is steeped in history. In 1918, Frank Marshall unleashed the related gambit with 8… d5 against José Raúl Capablanca. Never mind that he was not the first to try it, and that Capablanca won the game: Marshall’s concept was vindicated in the long run.

‘If the ball came loose from the back of the scrum, which it won’t of course…,’ said Boris, about his prospects of becoming prime minister. Disingenuous or not, it’s surely not a job won by determination alone. One needs a little help from events.   Despite a strong start, Wang Hao, from China, downplayed his chances of winning the Fide Chess.com Grand Swiss, so fierce was the competition. The field comprised most of the world’s top 100, plus a number of promising juniors, women and players from the Isle of Man where the event was held. But his score of 8 points from 11 games marked a career breakthrough for a player who has generally ranked just outside the world’s top 20 for a decade.

Impelled by his engineer’s mindset, the former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik wrote a short essay to answer a simple question: ‘What is a combination?’ I like his succinct conclusion, which certainly captures the essence: ‘A combination is a forced variation with a sacrifice.’   Like the fizz in champagne, the sacrificial element is the sine qua non and the va va voom. In its absence, a forcing manoeuvre of the pieces may, like wine, still have much to recommend it, but it is a different libation. Nonetheless, an avid taxonomist might like to ponder Nigel Short’s victory against Jan Timman from Tilburg 1991, where the sacrifice of a rook is incidental to an extraordinary king procession. (The game can be found online.

‘Poor indoor air quality hampers cognitive performance significantly’, concluded a recent study in the IZA (Institute of Labour Economics). Of course, ‘fresh air is good for you’ fits squarely in the category of things you knew already, but the research was specifically about chess: ‘An increase in the indoor concentration of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) by 10 µg/m3 increases a player’s probability of making an erroneous move by 26.3 per cent.’ Intriguingly, the effect seems most pronounced when players are in time pressure.   By my reckoning, that makes it pretty easy to induce mild stultification: burning a few incense sticks ought to do it. It’s scarcely credible now, but smoking at the board was once commonplace.

‘Chess is a constant struggle between my desire not to lose and my desire not to think.’ I’m fond of that wry insight, neatly expressed by German grandmaster Jan Gustafsson. For a select few, such as the late, irrepressible Viktor Korchnoi, the desire not to lose burns through life like the Olympic flame. For the rest of us, only youthful naivety makes it easy to summon maximal mental effort. Thereafter, the struggle is perennial, like a pile of dirty plates in the sink; sometimes you can’t bring yourself to care. But letting this notion occur to you too early in life is a career-limiting move for a chess-player.   Upon reaching the final of the World Cup, Teimour Radjabov spoke frankly, reflecting on the tension endured by the players.

‘Visky,’ said the man driving the taxi.   ‘Risky?’   ‘Visky.’   ‘Ah… whisky! Or vodka.’ I grinned as I got out. ‘Maybe see you last year,’ I ventured in bungled Russian.   There was no bottle to hand, but my wounded ego was soothed by the prescription. I’d been freshly eliminated from the World Cup in Siberia in a blitz tiebreak by Daniil Yuffa, an amiable young Russian. Two years ago, Daniil appeared on a Russian talent show (and YouTube). He simultaneously played three games of chess — blindfolded — and accompanied his own spectacle with a classical piano medley. Two days after beating me, he was out too. So it goes.

In my pantheon of heroes a particular place of honour is occupied by the hypermodern grandmaster Richard Réti, the first to adopt the double fianchetto since the days of Howard Staunton.   Réti-Yates: New York 1924; Réti Opening (See diagram 1)   12 Rc2 This manoeuvre connected with this rook move must have struck onlookers as nothing short of revolutionary. Réti is planning to place his queen, the most powerful piece, on the extreme flank at a1. This is consistent with his theory that occupying the centre with pawns in classical style, as Black has chosen to do, exposes the pawns to pressure from the wings. 12 ...

I am often asked which players I admire most and which grandmasters, writers and champions exerted the most influence on my own chess development. In general I was most impressed by the strategists and writers such as Richard Réti, whose games were brilliantly elucidated in an anthology by grandmaster emeritus Harry Golombek OBE, and Aron Nimzowitsch, who expounded his own theories in the two didactic masterpieces, My System and Chess Praxis. Others who fall into the strategic category are Mikhail Botvinnik and Tigran Petrosian; and two superlative tacticians in the persons of Alexander Alekhine and Mikhail Tal.   In the weeks ahead I will be coupling creative achievements by these heroes with games of my own which were plainly inspired by illustrious forebears.

The Hungarian/American grandmaster Pal Benko has died at the age of 91. Among his numerous distinguished achievements was his double qualification for the World Championship Candidates tournaments of 1959 and 1962, eight victories in the US Open, his invention of the Benko Gambit (1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 c5 3 d5 b5) and his prowess as a subtle composer of endgame studies. Over the board, he defeated such eminent opponents as Tal, Fischer, Petrosian, Smyslov, Korchnoi, Keres and — as seen in this week’s game — Najdorf.

Ding Liren, the Chinese grandmaster, has scored a career best in the Classical time limit section of the Grand Tour in St Louis which concluded late last month. Ding tied for first prize with world champion Magnus Carlsen in the main tournament, and then went on to crush the champion in the quickplay tie-break.   Carlsen was on the verge of holding a draw in this game, until Ding decanted a vintage win in the endgame.   Ding-Carlsen, St Louis 2019 (see diagram 1)   This is the position from the first play-off game where Carlsen lost on time. Black has control over the g8-square so the win is not straightforward. The key to White’s winning plan is to relocate the rook to the a-file and establish the bishop on the a1-h8 diagonal.

The classical section of the elite Grand Tour event in St Louis, which ended earlier this week, resembled a peace conference rather than a chess tournament. Well past the halfway stage, less than 10 per cent of the games had been decisive. Something must be done about this tendency and there are various solutions.   The first and most obvious is to switch to considerably faster time limits. There has been a nod in this direction by Grand Tour organisers, with their addition in St Louis of both a rapid and blitz section. Ramping up time limits, however, means sacrificing the games’ quality, which diminishes as the time limits decrease.

At St Louis, world champion Magnus Carlsen met with unexpected setbacks in both the rapid and blitz sections. In both cases his play was unusually lacklustre and his self-assurance seemed to crumble. I can’t imagine Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik or Kasparov ever uttered such words about their own play as Carlsen did when he said: ‘Everything’s going wrong. My confidence is long gone and now I just don’t really care anymore. My number one wish now is for the tournament to be over, it cannot come soon enough.’ Lev Aronian was the overall winner.   Yu Yangyi-Carlsen: St Louis Blitz 2019 (see diagram 1)   19 Nxf6+ Bxf6 20 gxh5 c3 21 Qg2 Kh7 This defensive measure proves too slow. The best chance was counterattack with 21 ...