Luke McShane

White to play. A position taken from Chess Improvement (perhaps from Luchowski–Gridnew, Moscow 1992.) Black’s menacing pieces make the situation look desperate. How can White turn the tables? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 7 December. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qc8+! Kxc8 (or 1...Kd6 2 Qe6#) 2 a8=Q+ Kd7 3 Qe8+ Kd6 4 Qe6 mate.

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.

We are what we do. Alas, in its zeal to suppress the virus, this government would have many people doing not very much. Since March, many musicians, actors, sportspeople and more have had precious few opportunities to perform. In his 2008 book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell claimed that the hundreds of live performances played by the Beatles in Hamburg 1960-1962 were a key ingredient in their later success. If he is right, 2020 marks a daunting setback for countless aspiring artists. Government handouts can mitigate the long-term damage to their careers, but they cannot possibly make them whole. Chess is in the same boat: it’s a communal activity where performance and practice are central.

I can’t tell you why the Armenian grandmaster Tigran Petrosian was found guilty of cheating last month, because I don’t know. The event was the 2020 PRO Chess League, an online team event organised by Chess.com. Petrosian (not to be confused with his namesake, who was World Champion in the 1960s) was playing for the Armenia Eagles, who appeared to overcome the St Louis Archbishops by 9.5-6.5 in a David and Goliath final. Petrosian’s 3.5/4 score against the mighty Archbishops’ squad (including wins against Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So and Leinier Dominguez) was exceptional. After his games were investigated and the results overturned, the title (and $20,000 first prize) was re-awarded to the team from St Louis.

It is nigh on seven months since I sat opposite a flesh and blood opponent, so I expected to feel unusual playing my first games in the Schachbundesliga, Germany’s team competition. I had no special concern on grounds of health. German case numbers look (relatively) low, the playing hall was cavernous, to facilitate social distancing, and the organisation was slick. Rather, I feared that the trappings of Covid might tarnish the atmosphere. There was talk of mass testing before the event began. Plexiglass screens divided the board, and players wore masks as they paced around. Handshakes were out, hand sanitiser was in — tiny bottles wherever you looked. There was no coffee. No coffee! What gritty reportage might one dispatch from this brave new world? Nothing of the sort.

Send in haste, repent at leisure. It is a cruel certainty that you will sooner or later text your intimate thoughts to the wrong person, or hit ‘reply all’ by accident. The second you spot this, your heart will leap into your mouth. That sensation is much like how a mouse slip feels during an online game of chess, when you move a piece and release it on the wrong square. If the universe is merciful, it hardly matters and the game goes on. In the worst case, you’re done for: it’s time to resign. Internet chess provides another way to shoot yourself in the foot. To make a ‘pre-move’, you draw an arrow on the board to indicate a move before it’s your turn. As long as your move is legal, it will be played regardless of what your opponent does.