Raymond Keene

The annual London Classic, inspired and organised by the indefatigable Malcolm Pein, is now underway at London’s Olympia. The website is www.londonchessclassic.com and in the stellar line-up are Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, Veselin Topalov, Alexander Grischuk, Viswanathan Anand, Anish Giri, Lev Aronian, Michael Adams and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. This is the highest-rated tournament ever

Last week saw the death of the city financier Jim Slater. He was famous in chess circles for joining Henry Kissinger in persuading Bobby Fischer to play his 1972 World Championship match against Boris Spassky in Reykjavik. Kissinger’s contribution was a diplomatic phone call to Fischer, while Slater pumped extra cash into the prize fund

It is said that more books have been written about chess than about any other game, sport or pastime. I can well believe it. When the Chess and Bridge (shop.chess.co.uk) catalogue dropped through my letterbox last week, I counted 360 book titles, and I know that is just the tip of the iceberg. One book

I was not quite sure whether to be annoyed or relieved about the recent High Court decision not to recognise bridge as a sport. On the one hand, it’s a comfort to know that there is now little danger of British bridge and, pari passu, chess being classified alongside activities that feature perspiring individuals running

The two great Soviet world champion Russians, Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov, have almost always taken divergent paths. Karpov was the golden boy of the Soviet establishment, while Kasparov was an early supporter of glasnost and perestroika. A détente occurred when Karpov visited Kasparov in prison after he was incarcerated by the Putin regime for

Hou Yifan has won what must be considered one of the strongest, if not the strongest, all-women chess tournaments ever held. Staged in the opulent surroundings of the Casino in Monte Carlo, the organisers succeeded in arranging a line-up which could have been improved upon only if Judit Polgar had agreed to participate. Judit, after

When I first studied chess I thought it was a golden age for chess literature. There were the classics such as Nimzowitsch’s My System and Reti’s Masters of the Chessboard; a series of publications by Harry Golombek on his heroes Reti, Capablanca, Botvinnik and Smyslov; and Peter Clarke’s wonderful elucidations of the best games of

The Fidé World Cup, which finished last week in Baku, boasted over $1 million in overall prize money, with $100,000 going to the winner. The format consisted of short sharp knockout matches, hardly congenial to heavyweight contenders such as Kramnik, Topalov, Aronian, Nakamura and Caruana, who were all eliminated in the early stages. The final,

White to play. This is from Blackburne-Schwarz, Berlin 1881. What is the best way to deal with the knight check? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 13 October or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and

Paul Morphy, in a strange prefiguration of the later career of Bobby Fischer, was often described as ‘the pride and sorrow of chess’. In the late 1850s he blazed like a meteor across the chess firmament. He sprang to prominence by thoroughly defeating the German master Louis Paulsen in the New York tournament of 1857.