But I have probably written enough such essays: I have begun to repeat myself. So this is the last of the series, with apologies to any readers who have an appetite for more of the same.

It coincides with the 20th anniversary of what we must now consider to be the most significant match in chess history. Not the Fischer-Spassky match: that was as long ago as 1972. No, it’s the match played at the beginning of May 1997 — between the world champion Gary Kasparov and the Deep Blue chess computer program.

IBM had sponsored the programmers, led by its employee Feng-Hsiung Hsu, in order to demonstrate what had hitherto been impossible: that computers could beat the world’s best carbon-based life form at a pursuit thought too amorphous to be captured by algorythms and digital calculations.

Kasparov had beaten Deep Blue in a match the previous year and was confident he could do so again. He underestimated just how fast IBM’s programmers had been improving their ability to make the machine “understand” chess — and the pure number- crunching power of computer chips was increasing dramatically: the theoretical maximum search speed of Deep Thought in 1997 was a billion positions per second.

Kasparov’s confidence was only increased when he won the first game of the rematch. But in the next game he was — as we learnt immediately afterwards — completely disconcerted by what he saw as strategically masterful moves by an opponent hitherto regarded as a mere calculating machine. So perplexed was Kasparov that he resigned the game in a drawn position: his state of mind was not improved when this was pointed out to him afterwards by one of his team.

This illustrated one of the biggest advantages that machine has over human. We become exhausted and upset — which affects both our concentration and our peace of mind. The computer program has no fear because it has no feelings. And it never runs out of energy, unless it is unplugged (which, of course, is what Dave the astronaut does to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when he realises that the computer — which also played chess in the film — is bent on destruction).

This helps explain Kasparov’s otherwise inexplicable performance in the final game of the match, when the scores were level and it was all to play for. The human champion, right in the opening, allowed a sacrifice already known to be dangerous: it had occurred in previous grandmaster games. In his book, Behind Deep Blue, Hsu suggests that Kasparov had bet that the machine would not play a move that involved giving up material for an attack of uncertain outcome. But Deep Blue did exactly that. Hsu records: “Gary acted a little surprised, but then . . .” Well, you can read what actually happened next in the game notes at the end of this column.

In the intervening 20 years, computer programs have developed at such a pace that the difference in chess ratings between those “things” and the world’s current top player, Magnus Carlsen, is about as wide as between me (a mere county-standard player) and a strong grandmaster. In other words, they are completely invincible.

Some see this as “the death of chess”. But while there have been sad consequences — something of the mystery of the game has been destroyed and with it the mystique of the greatest human players — more young people than ever are playing and enjoying the game. And while it is true that both the opening stages of the game and the endings have been increasingly solved by the programmers, the middle-game is still delightfully obscure: we remain enthralled by the creativity shown by humankind as they battle for intellectual supremacy over the 64 squares. And chess remains, as I wrote in my very first column, “beautiful enough to waste your life for”.

Here, then, is the final game from the 1997 match that ended the chessboard supremacy of carbon over silicon. 1.e4 c6 (Kasparov plays the Caro-Kann Defence; far from his usual choice, but apparently suitable against his non-human challenger) 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 dxe4 4.Nxe4 Nd7 5.Ng5 (This looks strange, but there is a point, as we will see) Ngf6 6.Bd3 e6 7.N1f3 h6?! 8.Nxe6! (Precisely so! Deep Blue sacrifices for an obscure attack — not the sort of move then associated with computers, which prioritised material gain) Qe7? (This is probably Kasparov’s biggest mistake. Later it was shown that Black’s best defensive chances lie in capturing immediately with 7…fxe6, since after 8.Bg6+ Ke7 Black will be able to place his Queen on c7, challenging the crucial h2-b8 diagonal). 9.0-0 fxe6 (if 9…Qxe6 10.Re1 pins and wins the Queen) 10.Bg6+ Kd8 11.Bf4! (It was discovered afterwards that all the previous moves were in Deep Blue’s “Opening Book”. But this first move of its own calculation is excellent) b5? (Another mistake from Kasparov. He seeks to prevent White from playing c4, but this just allows more attacking lines to be opened) 12.a4 Bb7 13.Re1 Nd5 14.Bg3 Kc8 15.axb5 cxb5 16.Qd3 Bc6 17.Bf5! exf5 (Kasparov jettisons his Queen for Rook and Bishop, in a vain attempt to reduce White’s attacking potential) 18.Rxe7 Bxe7 19.c4!…

At this point, to the astonishment of the watching television audience, Kasparov could be seen to mutter something before rushing from the board waving his arms in a gesture of angry helplessness.

In fact, his resignation after just 19 moves was hardly premature, as can be seen by the plausible variation 19…bxc4 20.Qxc4 Nb4 21.Re1 Re8 22.Rxe7 Rxe7 23.Qxb4 Re6 24.Qc4 Rf6 25.Ne5 and Black’s entire position drops off. Sic transit . . .

The post A Beautiful Waste appeared first on Standpoint.

However, it was only 20 years later that Steinitz won the first match contractually described as “for the Championship of the World”. This was against the Polish-born, London-based Johannes Zukertort, who, following victory in the great London tournament of 1883 three points ahead of Steinitz, was the obvious challenger.

The mercurial Zukertort went into a 4-1 lead, but as the event travelled around three cities of the US in sapping conditions, was mercilessly ground down by Steinitz. Zukertort never recovered from this exhausting and, in the end, humiliating experience. He died two years later at the age of 45.

Steinitz met his own nemesis in the form of Emanuel Lasker, who — 35 years younger than the champion — took the title in 1894 and then crushed Steinitz in a second match in Moscow over the winter of 1896/97. This had a devastating effect on the old ex-champion, almost an echo of what he had done to Zukertort a decade earlier. He suffered a mental breakdown and was confined for months in a Moscow asylum, before being released to travel back to New York, his home since leaving England in 1883.

He was, on and off, an inmate in various similar institutions in New York until what was described as “a pauper’s death” in the Manhattan State Hospital on Ward Island in 1900. Legend has it that Steinitz, in one of his final periods of confinement, boasted he could “beat God giving Him odds of a pawn and the move”. There’s no conclusive evidence that he said any such thing, but it has helped — unjustly — to make Steinitz almost more remembered as an example of a lunatic world champion than for the epitaph he deserves: the inventor of modern chess.

This was recognised by the man who precipitated his first nervous collapse. After Steinitz’s death, Lasker declared: “I, who vanquished him, must see to it that his great achievement, his theories, should find justice and I must avenge the wrongs he suffered.”

There was a clear connection between Steinitz’s theories and what Lasker referred to as “the wrongs he suffered”. Born with a club foot into a poor Jewish family in Prague, Steinitz moved to Vienna in his early twenties to make a living as a journalist — with earnings from chess played for stakes in coffee houses a mere supplement. It was only after he won the Vienna championship in 1861 that it occurred to him that he could become the best. But when he moved to London, his chess journalism led to the so-called Ink War, an increasingly vitriolic battle with British commentators on the game.

The final straw, for Steinitz, came when The Field, for which he had been sending weekly reports from the Vienna international tournament of 1882, published an  anti-Semitic article sneering at his victory in the event, while celebrating the (less successful efforts) of the British-born competitors. It was this that impelled Steinitz to emigrate to New York — from where he continued to articulate his contempt for the English chess analysts. Of one’s game annotations, he wrote: “No man can have gathered so much ignorance, even at an English University: it must have been gathered by a syndicate.”

This war of polemics was in large part based on the distaste of the English chess commentators for Steinitz’s attempt to turn chess from an art into a science. In the first part of his career Steinitz faithfully imitated the prevailing so-called “Romantic” style, which favoured attack at all costs, and a cavalier attitude to mere material gain. But in the late 1860s he began to study the games of the German Louis Paulsen, who had gained some success by demonstrating that defence, when carried out systematically, could defeat all but the most well-justified attacks.

In the Vienna tournament of 1873, Steinitz finally felt sure enough to launch what amounted to a completely new way of playing chess, based not on the sudden inspiration of genius (which so captivated the chess writers of the day) but on what he called “accumulation theory” — later popularised by his admiring conqueror Lasker as “the accumulation of small advantages”.

Although almost one and a half centuries have passed since Steinitz first set out those theories, they remain as valid and as important now as they were then. And Steinitz’s opponents in the Ink War, anti-Semitic or otherwise, lie in the dustbin of history.

Anyone who has studied Steinitz’s games knows his anti-Romantic “accumulation theory” did not rule out brilliant finishes. Perhaps the most glorious example of Steinitz combining profound positional harmony with a glittering cadenza of tactics came during a successful defence of his world championship against the first Russian grandmaster, Mikhail Tchigorin, in 1892. This game certainly made a profound impression on me, when I first played through the moves.

1.e4 e5. 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Nf6 4.d3 (This is typical mature Steinitz: he plans to manoeuvre his pieces behind a “closed” pawn structure: the clash of forces will be deferred) d6 5.c3 g6 6.Nbd2 Bg7 7.Nf1 0-0 8.Ba4 Nd7 9.Ne3 Nc5 10.Bc2 Ne6 11.h4! (Steinitz was the first to set out how a flank pawn attack was most appropriate when the centre is blocked. Tchigorin therefore attempts to open things up) Ne7 12.h5 d5 13.hxg6 fxg6? (Positionally, it was better to capture towards the centre with 13…hxg6. Tchigorin’s choice leads to trouble on the now completely open a2-g8 diagonal) 14.exd5 Nxd5 15.Nxd5 Qxd5 16.Bb3 Qc6 17.Qe2 Bd7 18.Be3 Kh8 19.0-0-0 Rae8 20.Qf1! (Despite its innocuous appearance, this is actually part of a plan to deliver checkmate) a5 21.d4 exd4 22.Nxd4 Bxd4 23.Rxd4! Nxd4?? (Tchigorin completely misses the point of Steinitz’s play. After 23…Rf7 24.Rdh4 Kg8 his position would be horrible, but not hopeless) 24.Rxh7+! Kxh7 25.Qh1+ (now we see the idea behind 20.Qf1!) Kg7 26.Bh6+ Kf6 27.Qh4+ Ke5 28.Qxd4+ and Tchigorin resigned: it will be mate next move.

The post From An Art To A Science appeared first on Standpoint.

More recently, when the current world champion Magnus Carlsen became a Grandmaster at the age of 13, he never travelled to a tournament without a pile of his favourite Donald Duck comics: perhaps more surprisingly, at 26 he still enjoys them. His longstanding affection has been rewarded by being made into a character in the Norwegian version of the strip cartoon.

It is a far cry from the childhoods of chess prodigies of the pre-Disney age. I have been reading Edward Winter’s superb compendium of archival material from the life of José Raúl Capablanca, probably the most naturally-gifted exponent in the entire history of the game. Its first chapter, “Prodigy”, gives the impression of a boy with a maturity quite beyond his chronological age.

A 1916 article under the title “How I Learned to Play Chess” sees Capablanca recording, “While I do not claim that my memory was that of a Macaulay or a John Stuart Mill, yet it is a fact that at school, after a second reading of seven pages of history, I could recite them verbatim.” It’s hard to imagine the pre-teen Fischer or Carlsen wanting to read seven pages of history even once, let alone twice.

Now a new prodigy for the 21st century has burst forth — and, not surprisingly, from India, where chess has boomed in the wake of the triumphs of its first world champion, Viswanathan Anand. In June this year, R. Praggnanandhaa became — at the age of just ten years and nine months — the youngest person ever to attain the rank of International Master, beating the 27-year-old record of the Hungarian Judit Polgar. To gain the title, it’s necessary to produce three tournament results of International Master ranking — so just one freakish performance is not enough.

Praggnanandhaa is certainly a glutton for chess knowledge. His first formal chess teacher, Grandmaster R.B. Ramesh, recorded how when he came across the boy at the age of eight, in his class: “He raised his hand and said that he wanted to learn everything I could teach. I’ve never heard an eight-year- old say something like that.”

But it turns out that this prodigy (from a far-from-affluent Chennai home) is in other respects like any other ten-year-old. His father, Rameshbabu, told a visiting feature writer from the Indian Express: “He is too young to know the value of becoming an International Master. He just likes to play and win, and he likes to watch TV like other kids his age.”

Indeed, when the man from the Express asked the skinny doe-eyed prodigy what his favourite programmes were, he rattled off a load of cartoon titles “in his squeaky pre-adolescent voice: Chota Bheem, Mighty Raju, Tom and Jerry”. His father then complained good-humouredly to the reporter: “Sometimes he refuses to come to the table to eat because his programmes are on. So I have to sit next to him and feed him.”

It is his mother, Nagalakshmi, who accompanies the family prodigy to tournaments — the father had contracted polio as a child, which limits his movements; and in October she travelled with him to the Isle of Man Open, at which, thanks to large cash prizes put up by a locally-based internet poker firm, many of the world’s strongest players were taking part.

In the final round, Praggnanandhaa caused a sensation by forcing the Paraguayan Grandmaster Axel Bachmann to resign after only 18 moves — a massacre. Given that his opponent had won a number of strong Grandmaster tournaments, including the 2015 World Open, Praggnanandhaa’s victory was immediately compared with the so-called “Game of the Century”, when in 1956 the 13-year-old Bobby Fischer unleashed a tour de force of tactics to defeat the American master Donald Byrne.

That was the game which first sent Fischer’s name around the world and it still appears in countless chess anthologies. My own view, for what it is worth, is that while Praggnanandhaa’s opponent was much stronger than Fischer’s, he put up much less resistance. Basically, Bachmann was caught cold by the Chennai comic kid. On the other hand, Praggnanandhaa is still only 11. At that age, Fischer was in no way master strength: his extraordinary spurt happened when he was 13.

Who knows what this young Indian will be achieving in two years’ time? It might depend on how much time he devotes to chess and how much to watching Tom and Jerry. But then, as Magnus Carlsen has demonstrated, cartoons and chess can work very well together. Anyway, here is the remarkable demolition of the winner of the 2015 World Open, Axel Bachmann, by the cartoon-loving 11-year-old Praggnanandhaa.

1.d4 Nf6 2.Bf4 g6 3.Nc3 d5 4.Qd2 Bg7 5.Bh6 0-0 6.Bxg7 Kxg7 7.0-0-0 (The decision to castle Q-side shows Bachmann wants a very sharp attacking game: he gets his wish, but not in the way he imagined.) c5 8.e3 Nc6 9.f3? (The idea is to support either e4 or a lunge in the direction of Black’s king with g4; but it is far too slow) c4 10.e4 b5! 11.exd5 Nb4 12.Nxb5 Nxa2+ 13.Kb1 Qxd5 14.Na3?? (A terrible blunder. The best move was 14.Nc7, though after the forcing continuation 14…Qb7 15.Bxc4 Rb8 16.Nb5 Be6! 17.Bxe6 Qxb5 18.Bb3 Nb4 Black’s threat of Nxc2 gives him a clear advantage) c3 15.bxc3? (The only chance was 15.Qf4, though White’s position would be dire) Rb8+ 16.Ka1 Qa5 17.Kxa2 Nd5 (It’s just possible that Bachmann missed this, the only — but entirely sufficient — justification for the youngster’s Knight sacrifice) 18.Ne2 Be6! (It’s not every day you see a Bishop’s first developing move produce an unstoppable threat of mate. Bachmann resigned, sparing himself the even greater indignity of 19.c4 Nb4+ 20.Kb3 Na2+ 21.Ka2 Bxc4+ 22.Ka1 Qxa3 mate). The chess equivalent of Jerry hitting Tom over the head with a cast-iron frying pan.

The post Tom and Jerry Tactics appeared first on Standpoint.

But one man has fought to try to make it so, and he is the person most responsible for the US victory against all international rivals over the 64 squares. His name is Rex Sinquefield: this 71-year-old chess enthusiast has over the past decade spent an appreciable chunk of his vast fortune (built up in the mutual fund business) attempting to make America the centre of world chess, and replacing its traditional stronghold of Russia.

The US team at the 2016 Olympiad in the Azerbaijani capital Baku was augmented by two recent additions, the world’s second- ranked player Fabio Caruana and the man ranked sixth, Wesley So. These two young chess superstars had previously represented, respectively, Italy and the Philippines. But they were both pulled into the embrace of the US Chess Federation as a result of the millions that Sinquefield had been investing to make his home town of St Louis, Missouri, the unlikely capital of international chess. As a result, both have chosen to live there or nearby, as has the previous US number one player (until Caruana’s defection from the Italian flag) Hikaru Nakamura.

Both Caruana and So were devastatingly effective on boards one and three for the US team (Nakamura found himself relegated to board two). This promped a marvellously sardonic comment from the Norwegian world champion Magnus Carlsen, after the event. Having first tweeted that he was “so proud of my teammates” for coming fifth, Carlsen added: “Probably need an even better squad to go further though, wonder if Caruana and So are still for sale.”

Carlsen is not the first to poke fun at this. Last year on the Daily Showits then presenter, Jon Stewart, said this about Sinquefield’s grand chess strategy (after the New York Times had reported on the defections to team USA): “America is making a concerted effort to buy top foreign chess players in an attempt to win next year’s Chess Olympiad gold medal. The US is buying up nerds! Nerd mercenaries — nerdcenaries!”

Very funny. But it’s actually unjust to Sinquefield, whose largesse is by no means directed merely at the superstars of the chess world. He has set up the St Louis Chess and Scholastic Center, a three-storey 6,000-square-foot building where anyone can watch some of the world’s best players in action and also study the game themselves. It works closely with more than a hundred Missouri schools, funding the teaching of chess in an area, sadly, more associated on our screens with street violence and racial tensions than civilised intellectual combat.

And Sinquefield — who himself had a far from easy childhood in a Catholic orphanage — clearly sees this as a civilising mission. He told the New Yorker magazine that he believes chess represents “everything valued by Western civilisation, and maybe Eastern civilisation: intelligence, judgment, study, hard work, intuition, calmness under pressure — all of that is on the line with chess”.

Sinquefield’s chess ambitions have not all been realised. He had backed Garry Kasparov’s campaign to wrest control of FIDE, the world chess governing body, from its pro-Putin president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. At the previous Olympiad and FIDE general assembly in 2014 Sinquefield attempted to persuade national federations to back Kasparov (an implacable foe of the Russian regime) with a pledge that if his man were elected he would put many millions of his billion-dollar fortune into supporting the game globally.

Ilyumzhinov, who has since been placed on a US Treasury sanctions list for alleged involvement in “materially assisting the Syrian regime” (through the medium of oil trading), somehow persuaded the delegates that his money was better than Sinquefield’s. This must have been a very unpleasant and even disillusioning experience for the American chess Maecenas; and so Sinquefield did not travel to Baku to witness the US triumph. Actually, its success was in doubt until the very last. The Ukraine team performed magnificently, especially in the absence of its previous number one, Vasily Ivanchuk, who with typically unfathomable eccentricity chose instead to play in a draughts tournament.

At the end of the Olympiad’s 11 rounds the US and Ukraine were tied with 20 match points out of a maximum possible 22, with Russia third on 19. In a bizarre tie-breaking formula, Team USA were declared the winners only after the most hideously complicated calculations based on the performances of their respective opponents.

But since the US had beaten Ukraine in their head-to-head match, there could be no begrudging their gold medal. Afterwards, Sinquefield, who is a modest man, played down his part in the achievement. Asked by the New York Times about his role in getting the dual US/Italian citizen Caruana to switch federations, he joked: “I did my part by not playing.”

Not surprisingly, Sinquefield is himself a very keen player, who likes to have up to 20 games on the go at any one time, on the internet; and he has employed Jennifer Shahade, twice US women’s champion, as his coach. But is he any good? Well, as it happens, last year he was one of my opponents in the BBC Radio 4 chess interview series Across the Board. We played via the internet, with his moves — and disembodied voice — coming down the line from St Louis. The computer allotted Sinquefield the White pieces.

1.e4 g6 2.d4 Bg7 3.Nf3 d6 4.Bc4 Nf6 5.Nc3 Bg4 (Rex’s jovial comment on the game at this stage: “I don’t like players who lie in the weeds and are sneaky, like you”) 6.0-0 Nc6 7.Be3 0-0 8.h3 Bxf3 9. Qxf3 e5 10.dxe5 Nxe5 11.Qe2 Nxc4 12.Qxc4 Re8 13.f3 d5! 14.exd5?? (Rex played this blunder very quickly: I had the feeling he was too distracted by our conversation to concentrate properly) Rxe3 15.Ne4 Nxd5 16.Rad1 c6 17.Nc3 Qb6 18.Nxd5? cxd5 19.Rxd5?? (This cataclysmic error was also played rapidly: of course the position was hopeless) Rc3+.

Finally seeing that the discovered check wins his Queen for nothing, Rex resigned. When I asked him if he had enjoyed our encounter, he laughed: “You know what I’m going to say: ‘Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?’”  

The post Vivat Rex! appeared first on Standpoint.

There is no argument about who is the strongest player in the world. Magnus Carlsen has led the official FIDE list since 2010. But when the latest rankings were released in August, a new name had seized the fiercely-contested second place: Maxime Vachier Legrave. With a storming series of tournament victories, the 25-year-old Frenchman had left in his wake a number of more established figures, notably the two ex-world champions Vladimir Kramnik and Viswanathan Anand.

In the modern era, France has not been associated with chessboard supremacy. But two centuries ago the Café de la Régence in Paris was where the world’s best chess players could be found. In the 1820s Louis de la Bourdonnais was considered to be the strongest of all, having defeated his mentor Alexandre Deschapelles.

These names are now seldom spoken of. However, they had a mighty predecessor, whose influence persists to this day: François-André Danican Philidor (1726-1795). This scion of a family of French court musicians was one of the most fluent composers of his time: his output included no fewer than 24 comic operas (though apparently he was a man without personal wit). Philidor’s bust still stares out imperiously from the façade of the Paris Opera.

But while he also had a remarkable talent for chess, he did not turn to the game professionally until a mishap in his musical career. He travelled to Holland in 1745 with a 13-year-old harpsichordist (called Lanza) — who died. Without the attraction of a female prodigy, the concerts were all cancelled. Stranded, Philidor decided to earn his crust over the 64-square board rather than in the concert halls — and eventually in the coffee-houses of London, where strong chess players from the continent were able to profit by teaching and displays.

The latter was Philidor’s route to glory: he had developed a particular skill for playing without sight of the board. His party trick, so to speak, was to play three such “blindfold” games simultaneously. At the time, this was considered so extraordinary that those involved signed affidavits lest otherwise it would not be believed such a thing had happened.

But for Philidor chess was not just an opportunity to put on a show. He was an astonishingly deep thinker about the very essence of the game, and set out those thoughts in a 1749 work Analyse du jeu des Échecs. One of its chapters contained analysis of the endgame with rook, bishop and king versus rook and king alone. This remains the trickiest endgame regularly occurring in grandmaster play: the disposition of the five pieces in which the side with the Bishop can force a win is known to this day as “the Philidor position”.

A critical game in the Moscow world championship tournament six months ago, that between Fabiano Caruana of the US and Russia’s Peter Svidler, reached exactly one of the positions that Philidor proved was a win with best play. But Caruana, who if he had won might well have qualified to play a title match against Carlsen, missed his chance. As he said later: “I saw the Philidor position so many times and I just forget every time what I’m supposed to do!”

Philidor’s grasp of chess strategy was so far ahead of his time that he might almost have been an alien from a more advanced planet. As David Hooper and Ken Whyld put it in their wonderful Oxford Companion to Chess: “For the first time the strategy of the game as a whole was explained. For the first time concepts such as the Blockade, Prophylaxis, Positional Sacrifices and Mobility of the Pawn Formation were laid down.”

It was in his understanding of pawn structures that Philidor was most revolutionary: he was the first to recognise that the weakest of all the pieces were actually the most important. Or, as he put it: “My main purpose is to gain recognition for myself by means of a new idea of which no one had conceived . . . that is, good play of the pawns. They alone are the soul of chess . . . the winning or losing of the game depends entirely on their good or bad arrangement.”

So it is fitting to end with this Philidor victory against John Bruehl from one of his celebrated three-game blindfold displays, at Parsloe’s Chess Club in London on May 8, 1783 — a triumph for les pions. 

1.e4 e5 2. Bc4 c6 (Philidor shows his intention to build a powerful pawn centre as early as move 2: he threatens 3…d5) 3.Qe2 (Bruehl counters Philidor’s idea: if now 3…d5 4.exd5 cxd5 5.Qxe5+) d6 4.c3 f5 5.d3 Nf6 6.exf5? (ceding central control for no good reason) Bxf5 7.d4 e4 8.Bg5 d5 (Philidor now has exactly the central pawn mass he aimed for) 9.Bb3 Bd6 10.Nd2 Nbd7 11.h3 h6 12.Be3 Qe7 13.f4 h5!? (Any other player of the day would have gone on the attack with 13…exf3 14.Ngxf3 Nh5. But Philidor’s blocking 13…h5 — directed against White’s idea of playing g4 — is exactly in accordance with the prophylactic strategy set out by Aron Nimzovitch in his revolutionary work My System almost a century and half later) 14.c4 a6 15.cxd5 cxd5 16.Qf2 0-0 17.Ne2 b5! (Philidor tightens his grip on the light squares, with the idea of manoeuvring his Knight to c4 — again a concept later identified with Nimzovitch) 18.0-0 Nb6 19.Ng3 g6 20. Rac1 Nc4 21.Nxf5 gxf5 22. Qg3+ Qg7 23.Qxg7+ Kxg7 24.Bxc4 bxc4? (Philidor too dogmatically follows his own rule of “capturing towards the centre”. 24…dxc4 was much stronger, with the idea of moving his Knight next move to the fabulous square d5) 25.g3? (25.b3 immediately was better) Rab8 26.b3 Ba3 27.Rc2 cxb3 28.axb3? (28.Nxb3 was best, with the idea of landing on c5) Rbc8 29.Rxc8 Rxc8 30.Ra1 Bb4!? (Philidor gives up a pawn rather than allow Rooks to be exchanged after 30…Rc1+) 31.Rxa6 Rc3 32.Kf2 Rd3 33.Ra2 Bxd2 34.Rxd2 Rxb3 35.Rc2 h4!? (Another pawn sacrifice, to activate his Knight) 36.Rc7+ Kg6 37.gxh4 Nh5 38.Rd7? (38.Rc6+ should draw comfortably, but Smith has missed Philidor’s idea) Nxf4! 39.Bxf4 Rf3+ 40.Kg2 Rxf4 41.Rxd5 Rf3 42.Rd8 Rd3 43.d5 f4 44.d6 Rd2+ 45.Kf1 Kf7 46. h5 e3 (This central pawn roller is the apotheosis of Philidor’s strategy. But if White had now played 47.Rd7+, he could still have drawn, with the idea 47…Ke6 48.Rd8 and if 48…Rxd6 49.Re8+ will pick up the deadly Black e-pawn) 47.h6?? f3 and White resigned, as there is no way to stop one of Black’s pawns from queening. A strategic symphony by Philidor.

The post Les Pions de Résistance appeared first on Standpoint.

“I will continue to play chess until my death,” said Viktor Korchnoi in an interview marking his 80th birthday in 2011. Now that moment has come — and if there is a heaven we can be sure that for Viktor it would consist of an eternal chess game.

Korchnoi, who in tournament play defeated no fewer than nine past, present and future world champions, never succeeded in his lifelong ambition — to be world champion himself. He lost two world title matches against Anatoly Karpov, in 1978 and 1981; and it was not long after he narrowly lost a 1974 match against the same opponent — the final eliminator for the right to challenge the reigning champion Bobby Fischer — that Korchnoi defected from the Soviet Union.

Karpov was a dutiful member of the Communist Party, and 20 years younger than Korchnoi, so Viktor had become convinced he would only be “allowed” a chance to win the world title if he became a free man. But although he became a political hero to dissidents, he was not one of them. As he told an interviewer, having claimed asylum in the Netherlands after playing (and of course winning) a tournament there: “I am not a defector, I didn’t betray my country. Unless I betrayed to be able to move a bishop, or to get a better pawn structure . . .”

Needless to say, the Soviet authorities didn’t see it that way. For years, they refused to grant exit visas for Viktor’s wife and son, effectively keeping them as hostages to put intolerable psychological pressure on the man Soviet publications referred only to as “the opponent” while he was playing for the highest title against Karpov.

Korchnoi, however, was better able to withstand adversity than most of us could even imagine. As a child, he lived through the Nazis’ siege of Leningrad, during which most of his immediate family died of hunger. As he wrote in his memoir, Chess Is My Life, it was only because he used the accumulated ration cards of his relatives that he too did not perish. In short, Korchnoi was a survivor.

He also wrote how he decided at the age of 13 that he would devote his life to chess; we might wonder if the most noticeable element of his chess style — a tremendous ability to hold seemingly indefensible positions and later switch to devastating counter-attack — emerged from what he had learnt during the siege of Leningrad.

But I’m not sure what could explain his unique longevity as an active grandmaster. Most GMs are ready to retire from frontline chess in their fifties. While it is not a physical game, the struggle requires intense and unremitting concentration for many hours of mind-to-mind combat: it really is best suited to the young and highly-motivated. Korchnoi, however, never lost the intensity of his motivation and an absolute lack of complacency fuelled by remorselessly objective self-criticism. Astonishingly, he remained in the world’s top 100 until he was 75 and in the year he turned 80 he beat the 18-year-old Fabiano Caruana, already ranked 25th — and now the strongest player after world champion Magnus Carlsen. 

Later that year he played a simultaneous display lasting several hours against a group of selected young talents. By then Viktor could walk only with the aid of a stick, but he sharply rebuffed someone who asked if he needed to sit down to take a rest.

Even after he later suffered two serious strokes, Viktor’s determination to play on remained undiminished. Thus it was that last year, at 84, he played a “rapid” match against an old adversary, the former world championship candidate, Wolfgang Uhlmann, himself a sprightly 80.

The Spanish novelist and chess enthusiast Arturo Pérez-Reverte witnessed this. I can do no better than quote his account:

They wheeled him out in front of a chess board to face Uhlmann. Korchnoi appeared to be oblivious to everything, absent, gazing at us bewilderedly while people took photos . . . then Korchnoi began to play and the miracle occurred. The ancient, absent invalid fixed his eyes on the chessboard and, without looking once at his opponent, except through the pieces — those eyes of his — eyes which had seen corpses strewn on the streets of Leningrad, the eyes of the dissident whose wife was deported to Siberia and whose son was sent to prison, the eyes of the man who was persecuted by the KGB to the point that they considered murdering him . . . those same eyes played out two memorable games.

From time to time he turns a little to look at his clock and it is clear that, although his faculties have been reduced to a minimum, the thousands of games and millions of moves registered in his memory continue to be played out independently, almost automatically. And as we realised this [my friend] Leontxo and I looked at each other in astonishment, thinking the same thing: the very last corner of his brain to fade would be chess.

This, however, would not be how Viktor would have wanted to be remembered. It seems more fitting to end with Korchnoi’s most devastating victory over his arch-enemy Anatoly Karpov, the 21st game of their first match, in 1974. At this stage, Korchnoi had been written off by all the commentators. But as ever, his spirit fed off adversity.

1. d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 (a modest development by Korchnoi, giving little indication of the ferocity to follow) e6 3.g3 b6 4.Bg2 Bb7 5.c4 Be7 6.Nc3 0-0 7.Qc2 c5 8.d5 exd5 9.Ng5 Nc6 10.Nxd5 g6 (Obviously not 10…Nxd5 11.Qxh7 checkmate!) 11.Qd2! (This was Korchnoi’s idea, an ingenious theoretical novelty) Nxd5 12.Bxd5 Rb8?? (Black had to play 12…Bxg5 removing Korchnoi’s knight, though White would still be better) 13.Nxh7! (Clearly Karpov had completely missed this. The point is that after 13…Kxh7 14.Qh6+ Kg8 15.Qxg6+ — exploiting the Bd5’s pin of the Black f-pawn — Kh8 16. Qh6+ Kg8 17.Be4 f5 18.Bd5+ Rf7 19.Qg6+ it’s all over) Re8 14.Qh6 Ne5 (the only way to defend the f-pawn) 15.Ng5 Bxg5 16.Bxg5 Qxg5 (Horribly necessary, as after 16…Qc7 17.Bf6 there is no defence to Qh8 mate) 17.Qxg5 Bxd5 (Karpov threatens Bxh1 and if Korchnoi recaptures with 18. cxd5 then Nf3+ wins White’s Queen) 18. 0-0 (Neatly dealing with both threats) Bxc4 19.f4! and Black resigned: 19…Nc6 20.f5 Re5 21.Qf4 is a wreck beyond even Karpov’s legendary skills to salvage.

The post Korchnoi Plays His Last Move appeared first on Standpoint.

The post Armenian Underdog appeared first on Standpoint.

The post Mated By The Mufti? appeared first on Standpoint.