Chess

An excellent recent article by Dominic Lawson in Standpoint magazine reminded me of the greatness of Paul Keres. The Estonian grandmaster,whose centenary falls this month, was silver medallist in no fewer than four world championship Candidates tournaments. (I will be writing about him next week.) Another illustrious player (one with the same first name) is Paul Morphy, the victor of Bobby Fischer’s favourite masterpiece. I saw Fischer demonstrate this game to Fidel Castro during the 1966 Olympiad in Havana and it forms the topic of this week’s analysis.

The London Classic, the end of the million-dollar Grand Tour, was something of a damp squib. A surfeit of draws meant the event largely boiled down to who was most effectively able to despatch the cellar dwellers Anand and Topalov. Top scores out of nine were as follows: Carlsen, Giri and Vachier-Lagrave 51/2 each, Aronian 5, and Britain’s Mickey Adams 41/2. What to do about such a preponderance of drawn games? In the past, whenever the threat of draw death has loomed, some charismatic genius — Alekhine, Tal, Kasparov — has emerged to revitalise the game at the top. But the reigning champion and overall Grand Tour winner, Magnus Carlsen, effective as he is, simply does not possess this kind of dynamism.

As the new year begins, I pay a final tribute to the city financier Jim Slater, who did so much to support British chess and who was instrumental, with Henry Kissinger, in rescuing Bobby Fischer’s challenge against Boris Spassky from Reykjavik 1972. Slater offered £50,000 to increase the World Championship prize fund, created awards and prizes for the first British grandmasters (of which I was a grateful recipient) and sponsored tournaments to promote British chess. This new year column celebrates Jim Slater’s first foray into sponsorship of chess. He died towards the end of 2015.

By the time this article appears, the London Classic at Olympia and the newly created brainchild of the indefatigable Malcolm Pein, the introduction of the British Knockout Championship, will have been underway for some time. The prize fund in the Classic is $300,000, this being part of the new global Grand Chess Tour which has tournaments in St Louis and Norway, where the overall prize fund available amounts to over $1,000,000. Given the lavish support for these two events, a recent article in the Guardian by Stephen Moss entitled ‘Grandmaster Crash — How English Chess Pawned Its Future’deserves attention.

The annual London Classic, inspired and organised by the indefatigable Malcolm Pein, is now underway at London’s Olympia. The website is www.londonchessclassic.com and in the stellar line-up are Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, Veselin Topalov, Alexander Grischuk, Viswanathan Anand, Anish Giri, Lev Aronian, Michael Adams and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. This is the highest-rated tournament ever held on British soil, though Nottingham 1936 can challenge for quality given that five world champions were competing, namely Emanuel Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Euwe and Botvinnik. London has been the scene of many brilliant games, jewels in the crown of chess art. This week I give two examples of coruscating brilliance.

Last week saw the death of the city financier Jim Slater. He was famous in chess circles for joining Henry Kissinger in persuading Bobby Fischer to play his 1972 World Championship match against Boris Spassky in Reykjavik. Kissinger’s contribution was a diplomatic phone call to Fischer, while Slater pumped extra cash into the prize fund and said Fischer was ‘chicken’ if he did not come out to play. Slater also supported British chess by offering thousands of pounds in incentives for the first British grandmasters and by sponsoring tournaments to promote British talent. I won the first of these, from which this week’s game and puzzle are taken.

It is said that more books have been written about chess than about any other game, sport or pastime. I can well believe it. When the Chess and Bridge (shop.chess.co.uk) catalogue dropped through my letterbox last week, I counted 360 book titles, and I know that is just the tip of the iceberg. One book that caught my eye in the catalogue was the unlikely entry Best Larsen’s Bent Games of Chess. I know that Bent Larsen, a supergrandmaster who in his time defeated Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Fischer and Karpov, sometimes resorted to weird openings, but the catalogue typo seemed to be taking things a little far. The game below is based on one from a new book on Larsen, Larsen Move by Move by Cyrus Lakdawala (Everyman Chess).

I was not quite sure whether to be annoyed or relieved about the recent High Court decision not to recognise bridge as a sport. On the one hand, it’s a comfort to know that there is now little danger of British bridge and, pari passu, chess being classified alongside activities that feature perspiring individuals running around in underwear. Chess should, in my opinion, be dignified by elegant surroundings, with the players in formal attire, as in the fictional sequence of the James Bond movie From Russia with Love, or the encounters between Nigel Short and Garry Kasparov that were screened by Channel 4 in 1987.

The two great Soviet world champion Russians, Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov, have almost always taken divergent paths. Karpov was the golden boy of the Soviet establishment, while Kasparov was an early supporter of glasnost and perestroika. A détente occurred when Karpov visited Kasparov in prison after he was incarcerated by the Putin regime for taking part in a public protest in Moscow. But their ancient opposition continues. Kasparov’s new book, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the enemies of the free world must be stopped (Atlantic), is a challenge to the Kremlin and the Russian president. Kasparov prepared for its publication by emigrating to New York.

Hou Yifan has won what must be considered one of the strongest, if not the strongest, all-women chess tournaments ever held. Staged in the opulent surroundings of the Casino in Monte Carlo, the organisers succeeded in arranging a line-up which could have been improved upon only if Judit Polgar had agreed to participate. Judit, after many years at the top of female chess, has finally retired. Leading scores in Monaco were as follows: Hou Yifan 9/11; M. Muzychuk and Koneru 7; Cramling and Pogonina 6. It was unfortunate that there was no British representation in this stellar competition. Indeed, ever since 1976 when the English women’s team won the silver medals in the Haifa Olympiad, there seems to have been a steady decline in English women’s chess.

When I first studied chess I thought it was a golden age for chess literature. There were the classics such as Nimzowitsch’s My System and Reti’s Masters of the Chessboard; a series of publications by Harry Golombek on his heroes Reti, Capablanca, Botvinnik and Smyslov; and Peter Clarke’s wonderful elucidations of the best games of Mikhail Tal and Tigran Petrosian. In the recent past chess authors have tended to rely too much on computer analysis and databases. Fortunately, we are now in a second golden age, where the computer is the servant rather than the tyrannical master. Garry Kasparov’s mighty My Great Predecessors series on world champions may be the best series of chess books ever written.

The Fidé World Cup, which finished last week in Baku, boasted over $1 million in overall prize money, with $100,000 going to the winner. The format consisted of short sharp knockout matches, hardly congenial to heavyweight contenders such as Kramnik, Topalov, Aronian, Nakamura and Caruana, who were all eliminated in the early stages. The final, as befits an ultimate shoot-out, lasted much longer, and extraordinarily the ten games between Sergei Karjakin and Peter Svidler all ended decisively. Karjakin came back from the grave on more than one occasion to secure the laurels, but the tournament was mainly notable for the egregious blunders committed by both sides.

Joseph Henry Blackburne was the leading British tournament player towards the end of the 19th century. It could be said that he challenged Steinitz for world matchplay supremacy, though he could not hold his own with the great Austrian strategist. A monumental new book by chess scholar Tim Harding represents a huge contribution to chess literature. Harding has produced a full biography with many games, and has done far more than just reproduce 19th-century commentary. In this week’s game he pinpoints a critical fulcrum, missed by previous commentators, where Blackburne could have seized the advantage.

Paul Morphy, in a strange prefiguration of the later career of Bobby Fischer, was often described as ‘the pride and sorrow of chess’. In the late 1850s he blazed like a meteor across the chess firmament. He sprang to prominence by thoroughly defeating the German master Louis Paulsen in the New York tournament of 1857. Based on this success, Morphy travelled to Europe where, in quick succession, he inflicted match defeats on the established European masters such as Lowenthal, Harrwitz and finally Adolf Anderssen, who was very much regarded as champion after his victory at the London tournament of 1851. Morphy’s victories were so great that we tend to regard him as a titan of chess, but this week’s game shows that he was also human.

My grandmaster colleague James Plaskett has two passions, the pursuit of the mythical giant octopus (ongoing) and a fascination with coincidence. Is the latter just a concatenation of unrelated circumstances, or does it have some deeper meaning, signifying something in the air at a particular time? How, for example, does one explain the virtually simultaneous, yet certainly isolated, discovery of the calculus by Newton in England, Leibnitz in Germany and Kowa Seki in Japan? So Plaskett would, I am sure, be intrigued by the coincidental publication by two quite different publishing houses, of two books, both by American authors, about simplification, liquidation and the exchange of pieces?

This week I conclude my coverage of the St Louis leg of the million dollar Grand Tour.   Carlsen-So: Sinquefield Cup, St Louis 2015 (see diagram 1)   Although Carlsen is a pawn down here his knight is so much better than Black’s bishop that this small material imbalance is essentially irrelevant. 29 a4 Bd8 30 Rd4 Kf8 31 Rfd1 Rc6 32 Ne3 Bb6 33 Nc4 Bxd4 34 Nxa5 This zwischenzug regains the pawn. 34 ... Qb6 35 Nxc6 Bc5 36 Qd5 e3 37 a5 Qb5 38 Nd8 Ra7 39 Ne6+ Ke8 40 Nd4 Carlsen could have terminated the game more swiftly with 40 Nxc5 Qxc5 41 Qg8+ Kd7 42 Qxh7+ Kc6 43 Qxg6 when the pressure against d6 kills any black counterplay. 40 ...

The Sinquefield Cup in St Louis, one of the strongest tournaments of all time, has been convincingly won by the Armenian grandmaster and triple Olympiad gold medallist, Levon Aronian. Unusually for such a high-level tournament, a number of games ended in vicious attacks which resulted either in checkmate or decisive material gain. To start with, here is Aronian demolishing the world no. six.   Aronian-Caruana: Sinquefield Cup, St Louis 2015 (see diagram 1)   The black king has become badly exposed and Aronian now sacrifices material to relocate his pieces in that sector. 25 Ne4 Nd4 26 Qh5 Nxc2 27 Nxg5 Bf5 28 Rf1 Qf6 The key point is that 28 ... Bg6 29 Rf7+ mates quickly.

England’s top grandmaster, Michael Adams, exerts a powerful influence over the elite player David Navara. In rating terms Navara and Adams are about equal, but in practice Adams has a 4-0 record against his Czech opponent.   Navara-Adams: Biel 2015; Queen’s Gambit Declined   1 c4 e6 2 Nc3 d5 3 d4 Nf6 4 cxd5 exd5 5 Bg5 The well-known Exchange Variation of the Queen’s Gambit Declined. White has a number of strategies in view, one being an advance of the queenside pawns, as favoured by Petrosian. The alternative is to advance in the centre with f3 and eventually e4, as espoused by Botvinnik. Kasparov has even been known to inject a new element by castling queenside for White. 5 ... c6 5 ...

I have never met David Smerdon, the Australian grandmaster and author of Smerdon’s Scandinavian (Everyman Chess). Last week I gave a ringing endorsement of his new book and I must say that in my mind’s eye I visualise him as some swashbuckling buccaneer of the chessboard, complete with eyepatch, wooden leg, tricorn hat and probably a parrot. Under Fidé’s regulations this dress code would probably have him thrown out of any tournament, so I am sure that the real-life Smerdon is far more unobtrusive. Here, though, is a further example of the freebooting style which characterises Smerdon’s new publication.   Moylan-Smerdon; Sydney 2003; Scandinavian Defence   1 e4 d5 2 exd5 Nf6 3 d4 Bg4 4 Be2 Bxe2 5 Qxe2 Qxd5 6 Nf3 e6 7 0-0 Be7 7 ...

The Australian grandmaster David Smerdon has written a truly exciting book about some of the byways in the Centre Counter or Scandinavian Defence. The old main lines started 1 e4 d5 exd5 Qxd5 3 Nc3 and generally condemned Black to a long defence. The apparent activity of the black queen tended to be outweighed by White’s lead in development and the fact that the queen itself, more often than not, degenerated into a target rather than a great and mobile force.   Smerdon is quite candid about the dangers which his advocated move of 2 ... Nf6 would entail. But the variations are dramatic, it represents a one-stop shop as a black defence against 1 e4, and in spite of heavily computerised analysis, the tactics never conclusively work out in White’s favour.