Luke McShane

It is one of life’s comforts to see a forgotten trinket being dusted off and appreciated afresh. So in chess, I am gently heartened to see a chess opening pass through that same phase of life. The game has its share of magpies, for whom a shiny new opening gambit is irresistible. Their approach has merit — after all, an ambushed opponent is a weakened one. But with time, the defence is remedied, and when the opening begins to look tarnished, it will soon be stuffed in the attic. It might be years, or decades, before it attracts any more attention. Even in the 19th century, some chess fashions had already been and gone, and come back around.

This Christmas, government guidance says that board games are out and quizzes are in. Thus, 12 questions for Christmas. Answers here. 1. The Candidates tournament decides a challenger for the World Championship. Seven rounds were played in Yekaterinburg in March, but scheduling the second half is proving difficult. Which player declared ‘I’m ready to play, so to speak, in a garage, basement, zoo or train station.’ 2. The Queen’s Gambit was watched by 62 million households in its first 28 days, according to Netflix. ‘I thought nothing would beat THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO SEVEN but this does’. Which American author tweeted that?

The Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour is back. This time, the series of online events is rebranded as the Champions Chess Tour with a total $1.5 million prize fund. It marks an ambitious step forward for the Play Magnus group, which floated on the Oslo Stock Exchange in October and is currently valued in the ballpark of $100 million. Norwegian companies NRK and TV2 have purchased domestic broadcasting rights for the tour, while a separate deal with Eurosport looks set to attract a fresh audience. Games will be played on the chess24 platform, and the tenth and final event in the series will finish on Sunday 3 October, 2021. It’s a mundane observation that chess tournaments usually end on a Sunday. Usually, participants and organisers have jobs to return to on Monday.

The juicy prospect of improvement constantly dangles above a chess player. Those morsels of knowledge one has acquired whet the appetite for others which lie just out of reach. Even players at peace with their ambient proficiency can’t help but acknowledge that their better games coexist with lousy ones. Once you admit that, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to the idea that replicating the good games might confer improvement. Unless you have the equanimity of a monk, wanting to play well becomes an unshakeable existential burden. Many chess books will promise to boost your results at the board. Usually, it is taken for granted that absorbing the book’s insights will generate the desired improvement.

Put yourself in the shoes of Aryan Gholami, the teenage master from Iran who was paired with an Israeli opponent in Sweden in January 2019. It’s a blitz tournament, so you’re due to begin in minutes. For political reasons, your country expects that you will refuse to play the game, and there may be repercussions if you do play it. Gholami duly forfeited the game. His ‘virtue’ of omission was celebrated back in Iran, where he was photographed with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and General Qasem Soleimani (the latter was killed in a drone strike earlier this year). Recent years have seen a spate of incidents in which Iranian players boycotted their games with Israelis. It is a paradox that this regrettable practice attests to a flourishing chess scene in Iran.

Writing in January, I described internet bullet chess, where the players have one minute for all their moves, as ‘popular, addictive and pointless’. Bullet games are shallow and unwholesome because if you stop to think, you lose the game on time. Never mind a junk food tax: taxing bullet chess is the real social imperative — or indeed banning it. Blitz chess, where the players have three or five minutes per move, is a much healthier proposition. The pleasure of a well-played blitz game goes beyond a mere adrenalin rush and the experience might well be beneficial — as part of a balanced diet, of course. Were he alive, I presume that Mikhail Botvinnik, the Soviet world champion, would take exception even with that.

I own a few chess books that could serve as a murder weapon, but none so hefty as Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games. Nicknamed ‘The Brick’ by its fans, its thousand-odd pages forgo instructional text in favour of an escalating procession of puzzles, mostly mates in 1, 2 or 3 moves. These illustrate the most important patterns in chess, which form the vocabulary of any skilled player. This is a primer with a pedigree: the book was written by Laszlo Polgar, the father of the famous Polgar sisters, who believed that geniuses are made, not born. The manifest effort of compilation demands commensurate exertion from the reader.

‘It’s chess. We’re all prima donnas.’ You can hear it spoken with a wink in the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, released two weeks ago in seven episodes of about an hour. My heart swelled to hear the game’s essence so appreciated: of course nothing else matters when you’re playing chess. So yes, we are prima donnas, thank you, and roundly indulged by this fine TV series, which is based upon the novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, published in 1983. (My edition includes an endorsement from Lionel Shriver on the cover.) Anya Taylor-Joy is mesmeric in the role of Beth Harmon, the novel’s troubled hero.

Geometry shmometry. The pirouette of a knight may be pleasing to the eye, but sometimes what I really crave is a demolition. I don’t mean a smash-and-grab king hunt. I want to see a crumbling edifice, a colossal concrete barrier wilting beneath a torrent of water, as in The Dam Busters. On the chessboard, diagonal chains of pawns are our barriers: daunting, manmade and ostensibly impermeable. Aron Nimzowitsch theorised in My System that pawn chains should be attacked at their base. Sound strategy, but when the base lies beyond reach, a more drastic bombardment can be called for, such as that which occurred in a recent game between two computers. Leela Chess Zero has been hunkering down since the opening, and Stockfish has lain siege. We join the game at move 150(!

It’s over. Magnus Carlsen’s undefeated streak in classical chess has finally come to an end, after 125 games. It is hard to exaggerate what an unlikely accomplishment this is: Carlsen faced top-flight opposition in almost every game, winning 42 and drawing 83. He was beaten by the Polish grandmaster Jan-Krzysztof Duda at the Altibox Norway Chess tournament (played over the board!) earlier this month. Carlsen’s preceding loss came against Shakhriyar Mamedyarov during a difficult period in late 2018. Back then, the talk of the town was Ding Liren’s progress toward what became a 100-game unbeaten streak, while Carlsen’s confidence looked at a low ebb. With gritted teeth, he defended his world championship title against Caruana.