Luke McShane

White to play. Adewumi-Shlyakhtenko, New York, November 2024. The dangerous passed pawn on a7 means that White is the side pressing for the win. Which move allowed 14-year-old Tani Adewumi to win the game? Please note that because of the Christmas printing schedule there is no prize for this puzzle. Last week’s solution 1…c3!

The World Championship match between Ding Liren and Dommaraju Gukesh is now underway in Singapore. The $2.5 million prize fund will be decided over 14 games of classical chess, and in the event of a 7-7 tie, there will be rapid tiebreaks on 13 December. Pre-match consensus had Ding, the reigning champion from China, as a heavy underdog, with only around a 20 per cent chance of victory. He has appeared afflicted by a psychological crisis since winning the title last year, and his recent form has been dismal. His challenger, 18-year-old Gukesh from India, has had a splendid run, climbing well above Ding in the world rankings.

‘I kind of played old man’s chess in that game,’ said Magnus Carlsen, after winning a game against S.L. Narayanan, a top Indian grandmaster, at the Tata Steel Rapid in Kolkata last week. ‘No long variations, just positional chess.’ None of his moves would have come as a great surprise to his opponent, while Narayanan’s mistakes were inconspicuous. Yet Carlsen steadily assumed control of the game, consistently sensing the optimal places for his pieces. S.L. Narayanan-Magnus Carlsen Tata Steel Chess India Rapid, November 2024 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 a6 4 Ba4 Nf6 5 O-O Be7 6 Qe2 6 Re1 is more common, and one standard continuation is 6…b5 7 Bb3 d6 8 c3 O-O 9 h3 Na5 10 Bc2 c5 11 d4.

To an outsider, we chess players might seem a rather uniform breed. Studious and contemplative, we spend hours absorbed in a board game to no apparent end. It is the archetypal thinker’s hobby. But within the subculture, there are many, perhaps even a majority, who identify as pragmatists, not thinkers. Results are the driving motivation. At the board, they are drawn to ideas which are likely to wrong-foot the opponent, with no special regard for their objective merits. In their study, they disdain the more obscure, frivolous or unrealistic chess problems such as the one in the puzzle below. What, they ask, is the purpose of seeking a subtle mate in 2, when a simple move like 1 Qxb8+ wins easily? For some players, the game’s rewards are not intrinsic at all.

Garry Kasparov retired from competitive chess in 2005, but has proved that at the age of 61 he remains competitive at the highest level. That is an extraordinary achievement in an time when just five of the world’s top 100 active players are older than 50. The former world champion joined a powerful field in St Louis for nine rounds of ‘Chess 9LX’ played at a rapid time control. Chess 9LX, in which the pieces on the back rank are shuffled at the start of the game, is an ideal format for Kasparov, who can count on pure chess skill, without worrying about his outdated knowledge of opening theory.

In 2016, the naming of a polar research ship was put to a public vote, and ‘Boaty McBoatface’ was the overwhelming winner. Should humanity’s fate ever be staked on a game of chess against alien invaders, I hope we don’t get a vote. If the internet has taught me anything, we would end up playing the Bongcloud Opening ‘for the lols’ and be vaporised. Even ignoring the saboteurs, the wisdom of crowds does not reliably select good chess moves. The recent game between former world champion Viswanathan Anand and ‘The World’ was a case in point.     In the first diagram above, you can see why the world voted for 14…Qd8xd5, which mops up a pawn, defends the pawn on e4, and attacks d2.

Two of England’s brightest prospects received a golden opportunity to play at the WR Chess Masters Cup, an elite knockout tournament held at the Langham Hotel in London last week. WR is Wadim Rosenstein, a keen chess player and CEO of the German WR logistics group, which last year partnered with Fide to organise the World Rapid and Blitz Team Championships in Düsseldorf.    Shreyas Royal recently broke the record to become the UK’s youngest grandmaster at the age of 15 years and seven months. In the first round of the knockout, he faced former world champion Viswanathan Anand. With two extra pawns in the diagram below, one would expect Anand to comfortably notch up the win.

Congratulations to Sir Demis Hassabis, who last week was awarded a Nobel prize for his work on AlphaFold, which uses artificial intelligence to predict the structure of proteins. Developed by DeepMind, AlphaFold belongs to the same family of work as AlphaZero, which revolutionised computer chess when it was released in 2017, and before that AlphaGo, which in 2015 was the first program to defeat a professional Go player. I had the honour of partnering with Hassabis for the Pro-Biz Cup at the London Chess Classic in 2021. Now CEO of Google Deepmind, at 13 he ranked second in his age group behind Judit Polgar. There is no doubt that his youthful fascination with strategy games sowed the seeds of his scientific achievement.

There’s a piece of chess clickbait which occurs with tiresome regularity. The players are deep in the endgame, but have so little time remaining that the game cannot be concluded with dignity. Pieces land in between squares, or get dropped and clatter across the board. In their final seconds, players will attempt to move before their opponent has completed their own move, which is just as farcical as it sounds. One should not blame the players: against a well-matched opponent, such situations are inevitable from time to time. The arbiters sometimes get flak for not intervening, but in the heat of the moment, nobody knows if a rook landed cleanly on a8 or just outside the lines, and interrupting the game to check would do nothing to improve matters.

Mistakes in chess come in pairs. Last month, and not for the first time, that nugget of wisdom thumped me on the nose. Representing England at the Olympiad in Budapest, my game against Luca Moroni was proceeding rather pleasantly. It was clear the Italian grandmaster had underestimated my sacrifice of rook for bishop in the middlegame, and I was about to recover my material investment with interest. Alas, my return was diminished by an elementary tactical oversight, missing the move 25 Na4xb6 (see first diagram). No matter – I was still a pawn to the good. I moved my rook which was under attack, and he responded in the obvious way. One minor hiccup need not derail an otherwise agreeable game. Oblivious to any danger, my crude blunder on the very next move allowed 27 Nb3xa5.

White to play. Kulaots-Kadric, Budapest Olympiad, September 2024. The Estonian grandmaster spotted a neat sequence to gain a decisive material advantage. What was his first move here? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 30 September. 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.