Chess

Bodhana Sivanandan won the gold medal in the World Girls U8 Championship in Sharm El Sheikh earlier this month, making her the first English world youth champion since 1998, when Nicholas Pert won the U18 event and Ruth Sheldon won the Girls U18. I witnessed Sivanandan’s enormous talent when we played a casual game of speed chess at ChessFest in Trafalgar Square in July. I knew of her accomplishments, which included tying for second place in the UK women’s blitz championship at the age of seven last year. But naively, I chose an offbeat, slightly risky opening. It soon transpired that she knew it at least as well as I did. A few moves later I was, for a brief moment, utterly lost. I won the game in the end, but was left in no doubt about her prospects.

The Jonathan Penrose Memorial Chess Challenge, held at Colchester Town Hall on 7 October, was a felicitous tribute to the ten-time British champion, who died in 2021, and would have turned 90 on that very day. Before it was razed by Boudicca, Colchester was one of the earliest Roman settlements on these isles. More recently, it was awarded city status as part of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations, and 2023 has been deemed a ‘Year of Celebration’ for the city, with a series of cultural events. Penrose, who was born in Colchester, was honoured with a simultaneous display given by eight-time British champion Michael Adams.

Magnus Carlsen was, as he said, ‘completely crushed’ in the second round of the Qatar Masters earlier this month. His opponent, 23-year-old Alisher Suleymenov from Kazakhstan, is a grandmaster, but on paper nowhere near to the level of the world elite. He played the game of his life, but his achievement was undermined by Carlsen’s intemperate comment (on X) that ‘as soon as I saw my opponent was wearing a watch early in the game, I lost my ability to concentrate’. Predictably, this began a frenzy of gossip, though the world no. 1 soon clarified that he was not accusing his opponent of cheating. The sad truth is that a miasma of mistrust is encroaching year by year.

‘Chess, an ancient game of strategy…’ – that’s what they write on the packaging in department stores. But in real life, playing a game of chess feels more like fighting fires, half of which you kindled yourself. Whatever grand ambitions you have, right now your queen is under attack and the next priority is your shaky kingside. But, first let’s go and attack that bishop! A game of chess is just one damned thing after another. Even for the world’s best players, any planning is mostly implicit, since they recognise the contours of the game at a glance. In such and such position, the bishop belongs here and the knight belongs there, and this is the pawn break you aim for.

A queen and king can force mate against a lone king – that is as fundamental as it gets. Almost all regular players know that to be true, and they also know how to execute it. But players are regularly confronted by the distinction between ‘knowing that’, and ‘knowing how’. Many know that king, bishop and knight can force mate against a lone king. But I would bet with confidence that only a minority of those who know that fact could actually demonstrate it. The technique is somewhat abstruse and, since the endgame arises so rarely, it is easily forgotten. Imagine – you spent an hour practising this endgame… but that was five years ago. Now you’ve actually got it on the board, but it is, so to speak, a cold, rainy night in Stoke.

Novice chess players can seem spellbound by the power of their own queen, zigzagging hither and thither in desperate search of bounty. You soon learn that on the chessboard strength is weakness and weakness is strength; the queen must flee from any attack while a pawn is, well, only a pawn in your game. Experienced players acquire a more mercantile approach – every piece has its price. In fact, being ready to dispense with an ostensibly valuable piece in service of a higher goal is the mark of a skilful player. Making great play of this is the chess game from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, presumably one of the most widely viewed chess scenes in cinema history.

The former world champion Vishy Anand has described the current crop of young Indian talents as a golden generation. At last month’s Fide World Cup, four of the quarter-finalists were Indian. Most eminent was 17-year-old Gukesh, who recently entered the world top ten, narrowly overtaking Anand himself. Praggnanandhaa, 18 years old, went as far as the final, where he was beaten by Magnus Carlsen. The others were Erigaisi, who turned 20 earlier this month, and Vidit, almost a veteran at age 28!    All four players were back at the board at the Tata Steel India Rapid and Blitz, held in Kolkata earlier this month. Impressive as they are, it was reassuring to see that the teenagers have not entirely eclipsed the older generation.

Hans Niemann is back. The American grandmaster drew worldwide attention last year when he was alleged to have cheated by Magnus Carlsen. Niemann responded with a $100 million defamation lawsuit against various parties. That was dismissed by a federal judge in June, though Niemann could still have pursued some of his claims in a state court. But in late August, the website Chess.com (one of the defendants) released a joint statement with Hans Niemann and Magnus Carlsen to move on from the issue. What a delicate compromise it was! Chess.com reinstated Niemann to their platform, but stood by their October 2022 report, which set out the case that Niemann had cheated extensively online.

‘How do you become a grandmaster?’    ‘You must climb the mountain, and defeat the opponent at the top.’ Alas, the answer is not nearly so succinct, and when I get asked the question, I remind myself to spare the finer details. The gist is that you must outperform an ‘average’ grandmaster over the course of an event of around ten classical games. Each time you clear that bar you earn a ‘norm’, and racking up three norms earns you the title. There is no limit on the number of grandmasters in the world, and since their introduction in 1950, a couple of thousand players have attained that level. By definition, achieving a norm involves surpassing one’s current abilities, which are measured with great precision by the international rating system.

A fortnight ago, I wrote about Magnus Carlsen’s narrow escape against the German teenager Vincent Keymer at the Fide World Cup in Baku. That brush with mortality seemed to galvanise the world no. 1, who coasted to the final with convincing victories in his next three matches, against Ivanchuk, Gukesh and Abasov. His next opponent was another exceptional talent, 18-year-old Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa from India, and Carlsen’s triumph in the tiebreak secured victory in perhaps the only major event which he had never managed to win before.    Nevertheless, Praggnanandhaa had perhaps even more reason to be satisfied with his own performance. His achievement became front-page news in India and drew praise from Narendra Modi.

England teams brought home a raft of medals from the European Senior Teams Championship, held last month in Swidnica, Poland. England’s first team were top seeds in the over-50s event, with an all-grandmaster lineup (Mark Hebden, John Emms, Keith Arkell, Glenn Flear and Chris Ward). They faced a serious challenge from Slovakia, whom they defeated in the final round by 2.5-1.5. Mark Hebden was the standout performer, winning the individual gold medal on top board with a 7.5/8 score. His game against Jonathan Hill, from England’s third team, had a neat finish. Jonathan Hill–Mark Hebden European Senior (50+) Team Championship In the diagram position, capturing the rook on Rc2 would allow the a7 pawn to promote. Instead, Hebden sowed confusion with 52… e2.

If you love chess enough to play hundreds of tournaments you will, sooner or later, play like a numbskull. You lick your wounds, go to bed, and hope the engine belches into action the next day. As a wise man once told me, the great comfort of a knockout tournament is that if you play badly, at least you get to go home. Except that doesn’t apply to Magnus Carlsen, or at least not yet. The world no. 1 is the top seed at the Fide World Cup, currently underway in Baku, Azerbaijan. But he suffered two serious glitches on consecutive days in his fourth round match against Germany’s Vincent Keymer, one of the world’s top juniors.

Three cheers for last week’s news leak, indicating government plans to support English chess. According to Dominic Lawson, the president of the English Chess Federation (ECF) and The Spectator’s former editor, his conversation with Rishi Sunak, setting out the significant role played by chess players in the wartime codebreaking effort at Bletchley Park, proved particularly compelling. The plans include expanding chess in schools and public parks, as well as £500,000 of funding over a couple of years for the ECF to develop the men’s and women’s international teams.  As I wrote in April, chess has been starved of funds due to not being officially classified as a sport.

Three protagonists shaped the action at the British Championships, held at De Montfort University in Leicester last month, with sharply different stories to tell. ‘Business as usual’ was a fair description of the top seed Michael Adams’s performance, who was undefeated on 7.5/9 and secured his eighth championship title by a comfortable margin. His closest pursuer for much of the event was Daniel Fernandez, whose energetic play earned him six wins in the first seven games. But his tournament unravelled in the penultimate round when he succumbed to a mating attack from a tense middlegame. In the final round, Fernandez was a heavy favourite, at least on paper. But his opening play looked impulsive, as if the previous day’s disappointment still weighed heavily.

In the 12th and final game of the women’s world championship, a pivotal role was played by a modest knight retreat from China’s defending champion Ju Wenjun. Her immediate purpose was to restrain a dangerous passed pawn. But that simple measure set in motion a deeper plan, which challenger Lei Tingjie was unable to prevent. Ju used both her knights to establish an unshakeable central blockade, and Lei’s immobile pawns were destroyed a few moves later. The match was a triumph of tenacity for Ju, who was outplayed by her compatriot in exemplary style in the fifth game, and trailed at the halfway point. Thereafter, play moved from Shanghai to Chongqing, where Ju seemed to gain in confidence, equalling the score in game 8.

Nine wins in a row. What are the chances? That’s how Magnus Carlsen began on the first day of blitz (fast) chess at the the Zagreb Grand Chess Tour. My guesstimate is that Carlsen wins no more than half of his blitz games against the standard of opposition that he faced in Croatia, where his toughest rivals included Alireza Firouzja, Fabiano Caruana and Ian Nepomniachtchi. So I think you would be more likely to see a coin land on heads nine times in a row than for Carlsen to repeat that achievement. (In slower games, where decisive games are less frequent, his chances would be lower still.

‘Lipton’s writing is characterised by its rigour, and though his working through of alternative hypotheses can be demanding for the reader, his positions are always stated with great clarity’. That line is taken from an obituary of Michael Lipton, published in the Financial Times, who died in April at the age of 86. Lipton was a development economist whose early work was based upon a close observation of farming techniques of the rural poor. Rather disarmingly, the CV on his website attributed his education to ‘the people of Kavathe village, Satara district, Maharashtra, India 1965-66’ right after Haberdashers’ School, Balliol College, Oxford and MIT.

Magnus Carlsen broke into a smile while pondering his 64th move. Vishy Anand grinned back at him, both players revelling in the tension and complexity of their game from the Global Chess League, held in Dubai last month. They were down to less than a minute each, and India’s five-time world champion had just pulled a rabbit out of a hat, with a sacrificial promotion which seemed to ensure a draw by stalemate. Carlsen paused before summoning some even more powerful sorcery, which left Anand only the narrowest chance of escape. In the first diagram below, 59…b4 looks promising, but 60 Nf1+! wobbles the Black king off its ideal spot, and 60…Kd3 61 cxb4 c3+ 62 Kc1! is a dead end.

Somewhere in hell, there is a cavernous hall filled with row upon row of people playing online speed chess. Their games bear not a trace of exuberance or wit. Instead, these wretched souls are confronted with utterly sterile positions, perhaps a lone king and rook on each side, but their flinty, remote adversaries will not agree to a draw. Instead, they shuffle the pieces back and forth – a pointless rook check here, a king sally there, and before long our infernal victims have run out of time, and lost. They curse at the injustice, and yet the next game is groundhog day. If you play enough games online, you too will run into one of these unscrupulous opponents, who stop at nothing in pursuit of the full point.

David Hodge is the 2023 British Chess Solving champion, after winning the Winton British Chess Solving Championship in Nottingham last month. Hodge is now a two-time champion, having first won the event in 2019. Above left is a position which caught my eye, taken from the Category B event, which is aimed at less experienced solvers. The problems are slightly less formidable than those in the main event, though still replete with beautiful ideas. This is White to play and mate in 4, composed by Chimedtseren (Probleemblad, 1973). If you don’t want to see the answer, skip forward a couple of paragraphs. One approach is to arrange a mating pattern with Rb3-b1-d1 and Bg2-f1, but that falls short, e.g. 1 Rb1 a4 2 Rd1 Kb5 3 Kb7 h3 4 Bf1+ c4 denies the mate.