Chess

From the humble status of wild-card entry at St Louis last year, the US Grandmaster, Wesley So (formerly of the Philippines) has rocketed to first prize laureate this year and also overall leader in the Chess Grand Tour standings. Final scores in St Louis were: So 5½; Anand, Aronian, Caruana and Topalov 5; Vachier-Lagrave and Nakamura 4½; Ding Liren 4; Svidler 3½; Giri 3.  The overall standings in the Grand Chess Tour are:   Player PointsPrize Wesley So 30$120,000 Magnus Carlsen 23$67,500 Lev Aronian 21.75$66,250 Hikaru Nakamura 21.5$62,500 Fabiano Caruana 16.75$58,750 Viswanathan Anand 14.75$51,250 Veselin Topalov 10.75$51,250 Maxime Vachier-Lagrave 17.5$40,000 Anish Giri 8.5$30,000 Vladimir Kramnik 8.

Grandmaster Michael Adams turned in a superlative performance earlier this month to win the British Championship for the fifth time. The first occasion was 27 years ago in Plymouth. Adams’s performance on this occasion included victories with the black pieces against the two former British champions David Howell and Gawain Jones. Adams’s score of 10/11 equals the record set up by Julian Hodgson. It is likely that this record will never be broken, since the English Chess Federation in their wisdom have decided from now on to reduce the number of rounds in the Championship from 11 to 9.

After the vote to leave the EU it is time to reclaim the good old English names for traditional openings such as the Ruy Lopez and the Centre Counter. Foreign subversion has gradually altered the correct name for the Ruy Lopez (1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5) to the less evocative Spanish Opening, while the Centre Counter (see this week’s game), which was good enough for Howard Staunton when he played Paul Morphy, was quietly changed on the continent to the Scandinavian Defence. I see no reason whatsoever why our Viking cousins should be able to lay any claim to the naming of this defence.

Mark Hall, curator of the Perth Museum, has recently drawn attention to the proliferation of board games in Viking burials. One site on the island of Rousay in the Orkneys, dating back to the 9th century, contains 25 board game pieces, while a similar site at Sanday, 25 miles to the north-east, has 22 playing pieces. Mr. Hall said (as quoted in the Times of 28 July): ‘Strategy and the skill of board games were closely linked to the warrior status of the dead. Placing the gaming kit in the grave served to remember or commemorate that status and skill and to make it available for the deceased in the afterlife.

Magnus Carlsen, the world champion, has added yet another tournament to his extensive list of victories. Although he must have been annoyed to incur a rare loss against Hikaru Nakamura in the first round, Carlsen then scythed through the field to emerge ahead by a substantial margin. Bilbao was one of those events where the organisers chose to award three points for a win, one for a draw and nothing for a loss. The final scores were: Carlsen 17, Nakamura 12, So and Wei Yi 11, Karjakin 9 and Giri 7. The fact that Sergey Karjakin, who has qualified to challenge Magnus Carlsen for his world title, and Anish Giri, who went through the Candidates tournament without a single loss, should have ended up in the bottom two slots, is a powerful indicator of the overall strength of this competition.

Sergey Karjakin, the challenger for Magnus Carlsen’s world title later this year, has announced in Bilbao, where he is contesting an elite tournament, that he wants to launch his challenge ‘anywhere but the USA!’ His stance poses an awkward problem for the World Chess Federation, which does not seem to have even contemplated an alternative venue, though no final arrangements have yet been announced. Disagreements over world championship venues have bedevilled former contests, and although we do not know the precise reason for Karjakin’s complaint, once one of the two protagonists digs in his heels it can be hard to shift them. So I propose that it is high time London hosted a world championship match. The most recent was Kasparov-Kramnik back in 2000.

To mark the UK’s decision to exit from the EU, I can think of no better example than the triple match victories of Howard Staunton against major European rivals, victories which established him as the de facto champion of the chess playing world. From 1843 to 1846 Staunton comprehensively defeated three leading opponents from France, Germany and Poland, St Amant, Horwitz and Harrwitz, in the process overturning the domination of France, which had previously been upheld by those great luminaries of the game Philidor and Labourdonnais. As a prominent Shakespearean scholar himself, Staunton could justly claim with Faulconbridge in King John (Act V Scene 7): ‘Come the three corners of the world in arms, and we shall shock them.

As we bid farewell to the great Viktor Korchnoi, it is worth pointing out that he was one of those rare players who at various times held a diversity of national titles. His record included winning the championships of the USSR, the Netherlands and finally Switzerland. I conclude my tribute to him this week with one of his classic wins in the French Defence. This week’s game is a Korchnoi masterpiece that I found in a new book on one of his favourite defences.    First Steps: The French Defence by Cyrus Lakdawala is published by Everyman Chess.

The first two legs of this year’s Grand Chess Tour have now been staged in Paris and Leuven. There will be follow-ups later this year in St Louis and London. The format of Paris and Leuven consisted of a rapidplay and blitz tournament at each venue. After the conclusion of these events the leading overall standings in the Tour are Carlsen 23, Nakamura and So 17.   Carlsen-Anand: GCT Rapid Leuven 2016 (see diagram 1)   Carlsen now shows excellent judgment by heading for an endgame which, at first sight, appears to give Black no problems. 21 dxe5 dxe5 22 Qxe7 Rxe7 One would expect that the extra queenside pawn would be more relevant than White’s doubled e-pawns. However, more important is that the white forces are very active and the e-pawns control important squares.

Local hero Shakhriyar Mamedyarov won the Vugar Gashimov Memorial in Shamkir, Azerbaijan by virtue of three consecutive victories at the last minute. Two of these wins came against the leaders Fabiano Caruana and Anish Giri. That catapulted Mamedyarov into a tie for first prize with Caruana, and then he went on to win the tie-break. This was a colossal performance by the Azeri frontrunner and it must have thrilled the home crowds. Full scores in the main tournament were as follows: Mamedyarov and Caruana 6 (out of 9); Giri 5½; Karjakin 5; Mamedov 4½; Harikrishna, Safarli and Radjabov 4; Eljanov 3½ and Hou Yifan 2½. Mamedyarov then went on to win the four-game play-off against Caruana by one win with three draws.

I had intended this week to write about the surprise surge by Mamedyarov which overturned all expectations in the elite Gashimov Memorial. Instead, the death of Viktor Korchnoi, known variously as Viktor the Terrible or the Leningrad Lip, represents a force majeure priority. An outspoken defector and three-times world champion contender, Korchnoi was one of the dominating figures of 20th-century chess.   This week, a win against the legendary Bobby Fischer and a puzzle position against his arch foe Anatoly Karpov. Comments based on those by Cyrus Lakdawala in Korchnoi: Move by Move (Everyman Chess).

Last week, commenting on Nigel Davies’s new book The Pirc Move by Move (Everyman Chess), I wrote about my win against Dr Jonathan Penrose which clinched the British Championship title for me. I want to expatiate further on the black defensive strategy which is predicated on flank development with the aim of destroying White’s pawn centre from the edges of the board. The Pontifex Maximus of this wing strategy was Duncan Suttles, the Canadian grandmaster, whose exploits are recorded in the multivolume Chess on the Edge: 100 Selected Games of Canadian Grandmaster Duncan Suttles by Harper and Seirawan (available on Amazon). My main contribution to the theory of this edgy branch of chess thought was to refine a system based on an early … Nc6. Here is one example.

The grandmaster Nigel Davies has just written a new book on the Pirc Defence, a variation in which Black sacrifices immediate control of the centre to White’s pawns, in the hope of a later counterattack, designed to paint the centre of the board black instead of white. Davies is a solid, dependable and reliable guide to an opening that was once considered heretical but is now mainstream. The game I have chosen to illustrate the principle theme of this defence is the victory I achieved against the ten-times British champion Jonathan Penrose in 1971. This game was instrumental in my winning the British Championship that year.

To great surprise, the former world champion Garry Kasparov staged a brief comeback when he participated in a blitz tournament held to celebrate the close of this year’s US Championship. His opponents were the top three from the championship and an 18-round competition resulted in the following scores: Nakamura 11, So 10, Kasparov 9½ and Caruana 5½.   It is astounding that at the age of 53, with no tournament practice whatsoever for some time, Kasparov can hold his own with the young tigers of the contemporary chess scene. Indeed, had he converted two winning positions against Wesley So, he would have emerged as the clear victor. Instead, in both cases, bad blunders transformed near-triumph into loss for him.

I think I hold the world record for the greatest number of chess books written (or co-written) and published. At the last count I managed to identify 199, with several of them translated into a total of 13 different languages. Last week, a new book by the prolific Cyrus Lakdawala dropped through my letterbox. Lakdawala seems to be producing a book every month and I fear he is threatening to overtake me. His latest tome is an exposition of various methods of combating the Sicilian Defence. These include an early c3, in order to build up a formidable pawn centre for White, a quick Bb5 and the feared Morra Gambit where White immediately plays 2 d4 and then continues in sacrificial style with 2 ... cxd4 3 c3, rather than trying to recapture the pawn.

World champion Magnus Carlsen has taken first prize in the Norway tournament at Stavanger which finished last month. Carlsen had dominated proceedings but was briefly derailed by a loss to the triple Olympiad gold medallist Levon Aronian of Armenia, who eventually emerged as the runner-up. As so often, Carlsen pulled a rabbit out of the hat in the last round, overcoming Eljanov to secure first prize. Scores (out of 9) were: Carlsen 6; Aronian 5½; Vachier-Lagrave, Topalov and Kramnik 5; Li and Harikrishna 4½; Giri 4; Eljanov 3 and Grandelius 2½.   Aronian-Carlsen; Norway Chess, Stavanger 2016 (see diagram 1)   Carlsen’s only vague hope here is 26 ... Bh3, speculating on the weak light squares around the white king.

Last week we saw the reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen taking a leaf from Alekhine’s book to destroy eccentric opening play by the Swedish grandmaster Nils Grandelius. This week we see Alekhine himself in action, launching a sacrificial maelstrom which destroys his hapless opponent. Alekhine once wrote, ‘It is especially with respect to the original opening of this game that people often speak of a “hypermodern technique”, a “neo-romantic school” etc. The question is in reality much simpler. Black has given himself over to several eccentricities in the opening which, without the reaction of his opponent, would in the end give him a good game.

World champion Magnus Carlsen takes much inspiration from the games of the former champion Emanuel Lasker. Lasker and Carlsen share the ability to manoeuvre at length in approximately level positions, without letting the situation dry up and become devoid of winning prospects. Such a style does not always lead to attractive games, and some of Carlsen’s victories have become so obscure that Viktor Korchnoi even accused the champion of hypnotism. Nevertheless, as Carlsen has become more confident, his style has evolved. As can be seen from the following game from the powerful Norway tournament which finishes this week, he is beginning to take risks and play in the sharp style of Morphy, Alekhine, Tal and Kasparov.

It is often asked how chess became so popular in the USSR. My answer is that most areas of creative thought were closely supervised by the state; literature, art and even music, as Shostokovich and Prokofiev found, were subject to government control. Shostokovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was severely criticised by the Communist Party Congress, for instance. Antagonising the state could be fatal. In chess, though, creative thought could flourish without interference from the commissars. The notion that chess moves could be ideologically unsound was rarely entertained. My theory for the popularity of chess would have had no currency within the Soviet Union.

The year 2016 is the anniversary of a number of significant events in the chess world. In 1946 Alexander Alekhine died in possession of the title, the only champion so to do. The following position is taken from Alekhine: Move by Move by Steve Giddins (Everyman Chess). Alekhine-Prat: Paris Simultaneous 1913 Alekhine concludes with a typically brilliant flourish. 22 Qh5+!! Nxh5 23 fxe6+ Kg6 24 Bc2+ Kg5 25 Rf5+ Kg6 26 Rf6+ Kg5 27 Rg6+ Kh4 28 Re4+ Nf4 29 Rxf4+ Kh5 30 g3 Black resigns 31 Rh4 mate is unstoppable. And in 1966 Tigran Petrosian became the first player since Alekhine in 1934 to defend his title successfully in a World Championship match. We join in the decisive 22nd game where Spassky could have announced his intention of playing 25 ...