Raymond Keene

White to play. This position is from Alekhine-Bogolyubov, World Championship (Game 4), Germany 1934. The black king has been driven out into the open. How can White conclude? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 8 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 each week I shall be offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

I am sorry to hear that the Australian master Max Fuller has died in Sydney at the age of 68. For about a decade Max was a fixture on the British chess scene and the high point of his career came when he was within just one move of tying for first prize in the British Championship, instead of sharing second. I was instrumental in the final outcome, since I was playing Black against Max in the last round. Had Max won, and my notes will reveal how this would have been possible, he would have shared first prize with fellow Antipodean, Bob Wade OBE. As it was, Wade won the championship outright. In 1975 Max also shared second place; he represented Australia many times in the Chess Olympiads, shared first prize in the Australian Championship and was appointed captain of their team in 1986.

The recently concluded Fide (World Chess Federation) World Cup held at Tromso in Norway resulted in a triumph for Vladimir Kramnik. The ex-world champion’s form has been variable this year, including shared first place in the London Candidates’ tournament, with Carlsen, but a disastrous last place finish in the Tal Memorial in Moscow. Kramnik missed out on the qualifying slot in London, when he crashed to defeat against the ever mercurial Ivanchuck in a tense final round. However, Kramnik gained his revenge in a crucial game against the same opponent in Tromso.

It is often said that the great chessboard artist, Polish Grandmaster Akiba Rubinstein, was afflicted during tournament play by an imaginary fly, which he sought in vain to swat away. As is the nature of imaginary beings, a case in point is the A Bao A Qu, the first entry in the bible of such entities, The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, they remain undetectable to the uninitiated. The A Bao A Qu, of course, lived invisibly on the stairway of the Tower of Victory in Chittor, Rajasthan, imperceptible to all but those who had attained perfect Nirvana. It was not widely seen.   Similarly, the offending fly was visible only to poor, distracted Rubinstein.

Nowadays it is standard, when publishing a chess game, to give the names of both players. This was not always the case. In the 19th century it was quite common to reveal the winner’s name while leaving the loser identified solely as ‘anon’ for anonymous. Occasionally this was for the perfectly good reason that the loser’s identity had been mislaid in the age before modern communications, though there could also have been the fear in certain cases that the defeated player, insulted at seeing his name in print attached to some chessboard calamity, might challenge the publisher to a duel.

The great Svetozar Gligoric passed away last week at the age of 89. Gligoric represented Yugoslavia at a time when that nation was second only to the USSR in terms of chess strength. Three times a world title candidate, Gligoric was able to defeat such champions as Fischer, Botvinnik, Tal and Petrosian. Petrosian seemed to bring out the best in him. Petrosian-Gligoric: Rovinj/Zagreb 1970; King’s Indian Defence 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 Nc3 Bg7 4 e4 d6 5 Be2 0-0 6 Nf3 e5 7 0-0 Petrosian avoided his favourite 7 d5 Nbd7 8 Bg5, because his opponent was very confident in his handling of the variation 8 ... h6 9 Bh4 g5 10 Bg3 Nh5. 7 ... Nc6 8 d5 Ne7 9 b4 Nh5 At that time 9 ... Ne8 or 9 ...

Britain’s top grandmaster Mickey Adams has won clear first prize in the tournament at Dortmund, ahead of former world champion Vladimir Kramnik. The full final scores (out of 9) were as follows: Adams 7; Kramnik 6½; Leko and Naiditsch 4½; Andreikin, Meier, Wang Hao and Caruana 4; Khenkin 3½; Fridman 3.   The last time a British grandmaster won outright at Dortmund was in 1980, when I took first prize, but the field then was far less impressive than the elite group over whom Adams triumphed. This week, some key extracts.   Adams-Andreikin: Dortmund 2013   Although this position features opposite-coloured bishops White’s active pieces and passed g-pawn create too many problems for Black.

David Howell turned in a sparkling performance in the 100th British Chess Championship in Torquay, which finished last week. In 2009 Howell also won at Torquay, so he must be hoping that the English Chess Federation selects the home town of Fawlty Towers as the permanent future venue for the British Championship. Scores at the top (out of 11) were as follows: Howell 9½; Hebden, Jones (the defending champion) and Gordon 8. Grandmaster Mark Hebden, aged 55, was undefeated and this week’s puzzle is a tribute to his continued resilience. Here is an example of Howell’s convincing play during the championship.

England’s leading female player, Jovanka Houska, recently called for a memorial to the late Tony Miles. The timing is fitting. Miles won the British championship in 1982 and the centenary British Championship concludes this weekend in Torquay, the scene of Miles’s victory.   The year after he won the championship, Miles also triumphed in the BBC Mastergame series, defeating the then world champion Karpov in the final. Mastergame is usually regarded as the gold standard for presentation of chess on television. Sadly, however, due to a BBC technicians’ strike, the 1983 series featuring this superb win by Miles was screened in Germany, but not in the UK. Here, then, is Miles’s win against Karpov, which never saw the light of UK television screens.

Lothar Schmid, chess grandmaster, the world’s greatest collector of chess books and the only arbiter trusted by Bobby Fischer, died earlier this year, and the chess world lost one of its great characters.   Schmid (born 1928) officiated as arbiter at three of Fischer’s matches, including the 1972 Match of the Century, where Fischer wrested the crown from Boris Spassky. The difficulties and challenges in 1972 would have exhausted the patience of a stylitic anchorite, but he went on to arbit further stormy matches between Karpov, Korchnoi and Kasparov.   Schmid returned as arbiter for Fischer’s 1992 swansong against Spassky in the former Yugoslavia, but this time he faced no problems.