Chess

Magnus Carlsen has won first prize in the elite Tata Steel tournament at Wijk aan Zee, Holland. Leading scores out of 13 were Carlsen 9, then Giri, So, Ding Liren and Vachier-Lagrave all in hot pursuit half a point behind. This week’s puzzle shows a crucial variation from one of Carlsen’s best wins. The player who made the greatest mark, apart from the world champion, was 20-year-old Anish Giri, who is maturing into a truly dangerous prospect, notching up himself a four-game winning streak. I kick off this week with a Giri victory from London against a former world champion.   Giri-Kramnik: London Classic Rapidplay 2014   In this last example from the Rapidplay, the former world champion Vladimir Kramnik takes opportunism a bridge too far.

Britain’s leading grandmaster, Michael Adams, started well in the London Classic, with a beautiful win against the rising star Fabiano Caruana. After that, Adams ran out of steam, finishing in next to last place. Fortunately he made up for this with an excellent performance in the Blitz section, where he tied for first place and won the trophy on tie-break. Scores out of ten were: Adams, Nakamura and Kramnik 6; Giri 5; Anand 3½; Caruana 3.   Adams-Nakamura: London Classic Blitz 2014 (see diagram 1)   As the great teacher and world champion Wilhelm Steinitz taught in the 19th century, it often pays to delay castling.

The exciting American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura compensated for his somewhat lacklustre performance in the London Classic section, held at Olympia just before Christmas, with an overwhelming victory in the Rapidplay arena. The top final scores were Nakamura 9½ and Giri 8½, while those on 8 included Kramnik, Caruana, Anand and Short. By its very nature, Rapidplay chess tends to be exhilarating rather than accurate and favours those who have a buccaneering spirit and a talent for opportunism.   Nakamura-Anand: London Classic Rapidplay 2014 (see diagram 1)   First off we see Nakamura outmanoeuvring former world champion Viswanathan Anand. It is axiomatic that a bishop in the endgame, unless heavily restricted by its own pawns, will tend to outgun a knight.

The key feature of the London Classic, which finished shortly before Christmas, was the resurgence of Viswanathan Anand, the former world champion. One might have expected him to be demoralised after his second drubbing at the hands of Magnus Carlsen, but he played steadily and his single victory, without loss, sufficed to share first prize and win the trophy on tie-break. The tie-break method centred on rewarding victory with the black pieces. The wins by Giri and Kramnik were both with White, while Anand defeated Adams with Black. The final scores (on the 3-1-0 system) were: Anand, Kramnik and Giri 7; Nakamura 6; Adams and Caruana 4. Also notable was the continuing poor form of Fabiano Caruana, whom I eulogised in last week’s column.

2014 was the year in which Magnus Carlsen confirmed his position as world champion, and also the year in which the dynamic new star, Fabiano Caruana, rose to the rank of world no. 2. For my game of the year I am choosing the crucial encounter from the Carlsen-Anand world championship match where Anand failed to spot a winning opportunity and went on to lose. This was a massive turning point, ensuring that a contest which had seemed within Anand’s grasp was decided in favour of the reigning champion. Traditionally, my game of the year is a brilliant example of the creative heights to which chess can aspire. In this instance, the sporting importance of the game outweighs its aesthetic defects, making it the defining moment in global chess from last year.

The London Chess Classic, graced by two former world champions Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik, as well as the world number two, Fabiano Caruana, is nearing its close. Full details can be found on www.londonchessclassic.com and there is still time for chess fans to visit the event at Olympia, since it runs to 14 December. The London Classic continues the great tradition of outstanding events and superlatively creative games which have been played in the capital. London has been the home to such outstanding champions of the game as Andre Philidor, Wilhelm Steinitz and Emanuel Lasker while Steinitz himself claimed that two of the supreme creative masterpieces of his time were played in London. Those two examples cited by Steinitz are given this week as the main game and the puzzle.

London chess fans are about to enjoy a great treat. The London Chess Classic will run from the 10-14 December with a tremendous line-up: Viswanathan Anand, fresh from his title challenge against Magnus Carlsen in Sochi; former world champion Vladimir Kramnik; world no. 2 Fabiano Caruana; as well as grandmasters Anish Giri, Hikaru Nakamura and Britain’s no. 1, Michael Adams. The venue, as usual, is London’s Olympia (www.londonchessclassic.com). London has been the scene of outstanding chess ever since the celebrated André Danican Philidor moved here during the late 18th century and dazzled London audiences with his displays of blindfold chess.

The Tiger of Madras has gone the way of the sabre-toothed tiger. Viswanathan Anand, world champion from 2007 to 2013, has now suffered his second consecutive match defeat at the hands of precocious Magnus Carlsen from Norway. On Sunday night Carlsen scored his third win, which clinched the World Championship title in his favour by the overall score of 6½-4½. Anand performed better than in their clash last year but kept failing to seize his opportunities as they arose. Symptomatic was the key moment of game six, which I published in last week’s column, where Anand missed a coup with his knight which would have shaken White’s position to its foundations. A victory there for Anand would almost certainly have reversed the overall result.

For reasons unknown, the world championship in Sochi between Carlsen and Anand is turning into a catalogue of disastrous blunders by both sides. Last week we witnessed Anand’s instantaneous implosion with one catastrophic move in game two, when he could still have resisted, while in game three Carlsen returned the favour, blundering material in a difficult, but not yet hopeless, situation. The nadir came in game six, when Carlsen committed a spectacular faux pas in a highly advantageous position. Anand could have wiped him out with his response, but without much consideration swiftly selected an alternative which handed victory straight back to the defending champion.

The common feature of the first two games of the World Championship match between Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen in Sochi has been that play was decided in a major piece endgame consisting of a queen and rook each. I have often maintained that Emanuel Lasker (world champion from 1894 to 1921) has been the role model for Carlsen’s style. Lasker was the leading exponent of such refined endgames where manoeuvring and filigree technique was of particular importance. In major piece endgames the slightest inaccuracy can spell either reversal of fortune or complete disaster, as we shall see from these extracts.

On Saturday 8 November the first game will be played in the three-week long rematch between defending world champion Magnus Carlsen and the man from whom he took the title last year, Indian grandmaster Viswanathan Anand. When Carlsen seized the title from Anand in Chennai last year, the magnitude of his victory was so immense that it would appear to have terminated Anand’s career at the top. Surprisingly, Carlsen then proceeded to display feeble form as world champion, losing a couple of games to lesser lights in this year’s Olympiad and turning in a lacklustre performance in the Sinquefield Cup in St Louis.

Tension has always existed between games of skill, such as chess or draughts, and games seemingly based on chance, like backgammon and poker. The Russian grandmaster and chess historian Yuri Averbakh has suggested that different kinds of games mirror changing human attitudes towards life, the universe and everything. So games of chance indicate the idea of the gods being in control, whereas games of pure skill suggest the start of the human assumption of responsibility. Of course, devotees of ‘chance’ games like backgammon would say skill is involved, in spite of the random element of the dice throw. An interesting new development is that poker and chess have started to ally themselves.

The irrepressible Fabiano Caruana has added to his laurels by sharing first prize in the Baku Grand Prix, which finished earlier this month. The surprise was that in the process of doing so he lost two games. Caruana had started to seem invincible after a run of wins, yet the fact that he only participated in first prize in Baku has in some way lessened the myth of his being unbeatable. The top scores in Baku were as follows: Caruana and Gelfand 6½/11; Tomashevsky, Nakamura, Grischuk, Karjakin and Svidler 6. Caruana’s fellow laureate was Boris Gelfand. Gelfand tends to be underestimated because of his normally conservative style, but his record at the top spanning several decades is impressive.

Tigran Petrosian seized the world championship from Mikhail Botvinnik in 1963, defended the title against Boris Spassky in 1966 and only relinquished it against the same dangerous opponent three years later. In individual play he defeated every other world champion whom he met over the board and in chess Olympiads he twice earned the gold medal on top board for the USSR for his personal performance. In two weeks time the Petrosian Memorial tournament will commence in Moscow with a powerful line-up, the precise details of which have yet to be announced. Meanwhile here is one of Petrosian’s typical manoeuvring victories with notes based on the must-have book for Petrosian fans, Petrosian: Move by Move by Thomas Engqvist (Everyman Chess).

Good news. Fabiano Caruana will be coming to London this December to participate in the sixth London Classic. This will be a great privilege for the London audience since Caruana is, in my opinion, now creating the best, most exciting, most aggressive and most accurate chess that we have seen since the glory days of Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov. In Standpoint’s current issue, Dominic Lawson, former editor of The Spectator, praises ‘Caruana’s astonishing and seemingly natural ability to calculate’ combined with his ‘immense aptitude for hard work’. This week’s game between Caruana and a former Fidé (World Chess Federation) champion ranks as one of the most impressive I have ever seen.

Recently Professor Jackie Eales gave a lecture in Canterbury on ‘Queenship in the Age of the Enraged Chess Queen’. (The title of course refers to the new powers conferred on the queen as a piece after the transition from the slower Arabic and medieval games.) In 1560 the bishop of Limoges, the French ambassador in Madrid, sent Mary Queen of Scots a chess book, having heard that she took great pleasure in the game. The author was the famous Saffran, described by the bishop as one of the greatest players ever seen, who had beaten all of Italy and the rest of the world. Professor Eales inferred that the ‘famous Saffran’ was none other than the Spanish expert Ruy Lopez, author of the book Libro De La Invencion Liberal Y Arte Del Juego Del Axedrez.

This week, a tribute to the one major Scottish contribution to chess, the invention of the Scotch game, later to become a favourite of Garry Kasparov. The following game, one of the earlier chess encounters whose record has survived, sees play devolve into a complex endgame. Ultimately the London side lose their footing, miss the right path and go down to defeat. Edinburgh Chess Club-London Chess Club: Correspondence match (Game 5) 1824-1826; Scotch Game 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 d4 Nxd4 The accepted main line these days is 3...exd4. One heavyweight example is Kasparov-Karpov, Tilburg 1991 which went 3 ... exd4 4 Nxd4 Nf6 5 Nxc6 bxc6 6 e5 Qe7 7 Qe2 Nd5 8 c4 Ba6 9 b3 g6 10 f4 f6 11 Ba3 Qf7 12 Qd2 Nb6 13 c5 Bxf1 14 cxb6 axb6 and now after 15 e6! White gained the advantage and went on to win.

The importance of pawn structure cannot be overestimated when planning chess strategy. Although Philidor (18th century) understood the importance of pawns in chess, in the 19th century the health and safety of one’s pawns was often thrown to the wind in the interests of tactical advantages. However, as chess thinking became more sophisticated and was explained by chess philosophers such as Steinitz, Tarrasch and Nimzowitsch, the crucial nature of the pawn constellation became apparent. In modern grandmaster chess, even the slightest weakness in the pawn armature can be fatal.

Fabiano Caruana has dominated the Sinquefield Cup in St Louis in a way that almost defies belief. The Italo-American grandmaster, just 22 years old, reeled off seven straight wins against an elite field which included the world champion, Magnus Carlsen, as well as two Olympiad gold medal winners. The final scores out of 10 were as follows: Caruana 8½, Carlsen 5½, Topalov 5, Aronian and Vachier-Lagrave 4, Nakamura 3.   To my mind, the most astonishing fact of all is that in every round from one to nine, until he conceded a well-played draw in round ten, Caruana achieved a winning position. This kind of dominance has not been seen since the best days of Garry Kasparov or Bobby Fischer, with whom Caruana is increasingly being compared.

Despite occasional evidence to the contrary, I have persisted in the belief that the ability to play chess well indicates a powerful intelligence. Goethe wrote that chess was a touchstone of the intellect, while Pascal called it the gymnasium of the mind. Arthur Koestler romanticised the mental power of chess devotees, writing: ‘When a chess player looks at the board, he does not see a static mosaic, a “still life”, but a magnetic field of forces, charged with energy — as Faraday saw the stresses surrounding magnets and currents as curves in space; or as Van Gogh saw vortices in the skies of Provence.’   Conversely, anyone with a strong intellect should be able to rapidly grasp the essentials of chess.