Luke McShane

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.

In recent years, the battle for the number two spot in the world rankings has resembled the gentle undulation of a lava lamp. Players rise and fall, and others take their place. I counted 11 different players who have occupied that spot over the past decade, all while Magnus Carlsen sits at the apex. The world championship match between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren, in light of Carlsen’s abdication, had the convenient narrative of being a contest between the world numbers two and three. But neither Nepo nor Ding participated at the elite Norway Chess tournament, which concluded last week, and both were narrowly overtaken in the rating list, thanks to a return to form for two players from the US: Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana.

One of the quirkier books on my shelf is titled Kingwalks: Paths of Glory (Seirawan & Harper, 2021, Russell Enterprises). King safety is a fundamental imperative for chess – after all, checkmate is the aim of the game – so the exceptions where that instinct is best overridden tend to be rather appealing. Probably the most famous example is the game Short-Timman, from Tilburg 1991, in which England’s future world championship challenger marched his king far into enemy territory to assist with a mating attack. But Kingwalks identifies plenty of other possible motives for these adventures. King evacuations (vertically, or horizontally) in the face of an attack are common, but a king might also run away to prepare an aggressive pawn storm on the wing it has vacated.

Michael Adams took first place at the Chessable English Championship in Kenilworth last weekend, winning the tournament with 6/7. In the third round, he was on the ropes in the endgame against Mark Hebden, but survived after several unexpected twists. In the diagram position, Adams has two plausible captures available but surprisingly, neither is the best move. Instead 62…Nc4! is best, thanks to the unfortunate situation of White’s knight: 63 Re2+ Kd4 64 Nxa4 Rxa3 65 Nb2 Ra2 and the pin recovers material. Mark Hebden-Michael AdamsEnglish Championship, Kenilworth, May 2023(see left diagram) 62…Rxa3 This move attempts to improve upon 62…Rxc3 63 Rxb2 Rxa3 64 Rb4!

Aspirin, a greasy fry-up, even hair of the dog – all are popular options when nursing a hangover. The last thing you would choose to do is play a long game of chess, but that’s exactly the pickle in which Magnus Carlsen found himself during the first round of the 2012 London Chess Classic. The world number one had celebrated his 22nd birthday the night before, but dinner and bowling ‘turned into something else’ as he shared on the Norwegian podcast Sjakksnakk a few weeks ago. Carlsen shambled into a wretched position, but was granted a lifeline after one poor move from his opponent in the middlegame: ‘All of a sudden I felt like my whole hangover just got cured.’ The rejuvenated Carlsen decided it would be ‘epic’ if he managed to win the game.

The Four Nations Chess League (4NCL) season concluded last month in a resounding victory for Chess.com Manx Liberty. The team from the Isle of Man won all eleven matches, thanks to narrow 4.5-3.5 victories against both of their closest rivals, Chessable White Rose 1 and Cheddleton. On the final weekend, the Manx squad was boosted by the inclusion of veteran elite grandmaster Alexei Shirov, who won the only decisive game in the match against White Rose. Shirov conjured a firestorm of tactics against Jose Camacho Collados, the 2022 Welsh champion who is a lecturer in computer science at Cardiff University. Alexei Shirov (Chess.