Played on Squares 4: Woolf

So far this account of chess and the Bloomsbury Group has looked (in episode 1) at a proper chesser who played seriously at university and who appeared to continue to do so for the rest of his life: John Neville Keynes, Maynard's father. In episodes 2 and 3, we looked at Roger Fry who also took his chess rather seriously, albeit at a less exalted level than Keynes Senior. In fact, so seriously did Fry take his chess that he felt it necessary to cheat to win. Perhaps we could call him an improper chesser.

Now, in episode 4, we move on to examine the chess life and times of Leonard Woolf (1880-1969).

Bust by Charlotte Hewer at Monk's House
From here

Although the evidence for his chess playing is regrettably slight, there is, nevertheless, a telling anecdote from 1921 that shows that he had a golden opportunity to make a breakthrough chess-wise: not though, it should be said, into the dizzying heights, but at a rather more modest level.

Sunday puzzle

I saw this puzzle briefly over a cup of coffee in the bar of a near-deserted business hotel in an industrial park north of Zaragoza a few weeks ago.

It was in El Periódico de Aragón but the paper didn't seem to give any details as to the origin of the puzzle, so let me know via the comments box if you know it. But please, only post solutions and suggestions that you've worked out yourselves without computer aid!

White to play and draw.

Reeling in the years

So what's Ray been up to this week? I believe he's been in Mexico, but while he's been away, his columns in the Times have been treating us to Petrosian. Here's his column from Saturday, August 24 2013, offering us Petrosian-Botvinnik, the nineteenth game from their 1963 match.

As ever with any old game that Ray chooses to annotate, the challenge for the reader is to find out where the notes have been cribbed from and in this instance we can locate them in a 2006 Batsford book written by Raymond Keene and Julian Simpole and entitled Petrosian vs the Elite.

The column game is number 23 in the book, appearing on pages 83-88.

Nightmare over for The Riddler

[Don't let today's bonus post stop you from reading Martin's excellent Broadmoor Chess Club versus The World from yesterday]

I thank the reader who sent me these cuttings (the text of which you can read at the conclusion of today's post)

“Not guilty.” That’s what the jury said. The judge's direction was to dismiss the allegation, the prosecution having decided to offer no evidence at all after some of what they had intended to present to the court had been ruled inadmissible. Colin English had been held in custody for eighteen months awaiting trial for the killing of Therese Terry. Twenty years ago today he walked out of Liverpool Crown Court a free man.

This failed prosecution from so long ago is of interest to us because the quashing of the murder charge brought an end to much more than English’s imprisonment. The collapse of the trial also put a stop both to a book that a certain Raymond Dennis Keene was intending to write* not to mention his suggestions that the Prime Minister should draft in a think-tank of chessers to help tackle the issues of the day. What it didn’t kill off, however, was the myth that had grown up around the case.

The Black Queen Murder Mystery in brief: English was suspected of involvement in the disappearance of Terry, but the police couldn’t prove it so brought in a chess Grandmaster – RDK himself – to solve the devilish crime. “Police pass sinister poser to Times chess man” in The Times on Saturday 21st July morphed into “Grandmaster breaks the code in mystery of hidden grave” in The Sunday Times on the 22nd. Write a chess book in a weekend? A mere triffle. Raymond Dennis Keene cracks murders overnight!

That’s how the media told it at the time. That’s how Ray tells it now. If you take a look at his CV, you will find the sole entry for 1990 reads,

1990 Dramatically solves the Black Queen Murder Mystery for Lancashire police.

The myth lives on.

“It is like something out of Batman,” said Keene yesterday.
“The Joker has given the police an insane clue but thinks they are too stupid to solve it. So the police call in Batman.”

The Sunday Times 22/07/90

“Times chess man cracks ‘missing woman’ riddle” was the headline that appeared on the front page of The Times on Monday 23rd July, an article we reproduced last year. How to justify it now we know that nobody was convicted of the crime? OK, so English wasn’t found guilty as a result of Keene’s intervention, but did Raymondo perhaps help the police …

… identify a suspect?

No. Colin English was arrested in June. RDK didn’t get involved until late July.

… find a corpse?

No. Therese Terry’s body was never found.

… identify the area where Terry’s remains might be discovered?

No. True, Keene did suggest a likely location, but the officer in charge of the case, Detective Superintendent Fletcher, “had believed for some weeks that Mrs Terry was buried near Limerick” (The Times 24/07/90 Volunteer Detectives), i.e. long before Ray was ever contacted.

… in any way at all?

Perhaps is the best that we can say here. Our man Fletcher was quoted as saying “Thanks to Mr Keene, we may be much closer to solving this mystery” (The Sunday Times, 22/07/90), but, then again, The Garda “confirmed that they had read Mr Keene’s analysis but had not launched any new lines of enquiry as a result.” (The Times, 24/07/90).

So what exactly did Keene do? Remembering the case on chessgames, back in 2004 he writes,

the information i (sic) derived from the diagrams supported what the police already felt they had deduced in the case

I like that ‘supported’. Still, whether or not you conclude that Raymondo simply reflected back to the police what they had told him about the case - and whether or not you decide that Fletcher’s comment to The Sunday Times was merely polite PR – even if we take Keene at his word, it’s clear that his involvement in the investigation into Terry’s disappearance falls an awfully long way short of solving the case, “dramatically” or otherwise.

Multiple front-pages in The Times; coverage in all the national press; world-wide attention (Ray claimed interest from America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Italy**). It was - and is - a great story, and it must have been an exciting time for RDK. Still, while it's easy to see why the press lapped it up, and although it's perhaps understandable that Ray got a bit carried away and maybe even came to believe the hype, the fundamental truth remains: the 'Black Queen Murder Mystery' is a media-created myth and nothing more.

I drew heart from my recollection of a Sherlock Holmes story, “The Dancing Men”, in which Holmes breaks a singularly barbaric and recondite code which utilises little figures of dancing men. This case was redolent of that fictional forerunner

The Times 23/07/10

And here, with the conclusion of the Colin English/Therese Terry case, we end our Raymondo Memorial Sergeant Pepper tour:-

23rd July, 2010
Times chess man cracks ‘missing woman’ riddle

13th January, 2011
Keene's Gambit

10th February, 2011
Keene's Move

17th February, 2011
Checked Again

27th November, 2011
Nightmare over for The Riddler

If there’s one thing we can all agree about Ray, it’s that he’s super-GM standard at publicity, both for himself and for chess in general. The Black Queen Mystery and the Keene-Miles affair mark the high point and the nadir of the RDK PR machine. It’s curious - but somehow not a coincidence, I’m sure – that in such a long career the two extremes should come so close together.

Twenty years ago today? For sure, and yet the fact that Keene is a skilled media manipulator and the aftershocks of his departure from the (then) BCF remain very contemporary issues for British chess. We'll back with more on that tomorrow.

Nightmare over for The Riddler
By John Ryall

Brighton Evening Argus
27/11/91


THE Chess Board Mystery ended in checkmate for detectives.

Colin English, the Sussex man they called The Riddler, was formally cleared of murder today.

Mr English, 31, was held in custody for 18 months accused of murdering vanished divorcee Therese Clare Terry. The 45-year-old disappeared from her home in Preston, Lancs, in January last year and has not been seen since.

After the verdict at Liverpool Crown Court he said he was convinced Mrs Terry, last seen in January 1990, was still alive. He said: “She informed everybody she was leaving to return to Australia. She had not ties, no home, no family here, and it was not a great mystery that she had gone again.”

Mr English, 31, from Holters Way, Seaford, had been kept in custody since his arrest in June 1990. At Liverpool Crown Court today he was cleared by a jury on the judge’s directions after prosecuting counsel John Rowe, QC, yesterday offered no evidence on the charge of murder.

The decision to abandon the case against computer designer Mr English followed two weeks of legal arguments about police evidence. His solicitor, Paul Rooney, said after the case his client plans to sue the police.

Mr English was nicknamed The Riddler after he drew a chess puzzle which police believed would lead to where Mrs Terry was buried.

Fraud charges against Mr English involving Mrs Terry’s money were left on file. Yesterday, friends called at Mr English’s home to celebrate with his wife, Yvonne, 32, who has three children. She said: “I’m so relieved this nightmare is over.”

Mystery of the vanishing lady
By Paul Bracchi

Brighton Evening Argus
27/11/91

WHERE is Therese Clare Terry? That is the question which remains unanswered nearly two years after she disappeared.

Police believe she is dead. But they failed to produce the single most important piece of evidence in any murder investigation – a body. Yesterday, the Sussex man accused of killing her walked free from court after the case against him collapsed.

Today, the mystery of the ‘vanishing lady’ continues. If divorcee Mrs Terry is dead, where is her grave? If she is alive, why does she not come forward? The bizarre story has all the elements of a classic detective novel – but the last page is missing.

Chapter One: Mrs Terry leaves her Lancashire home in January last year and travels to Ireland with a mystery man. She is never seen again.

Chapter Two: Police arrest her friend, Colin English, from Seaford, and hold him for questioning over her disappearance.

Chapter Three: Mr English is nicknamed The Riddler after he sets detectives searching for the missing woman a series of chess puzzles.

Chapter Four: Chess grandmaster Raymond Keene is brought in to crack the code. He believes the ‘journey’ begins in Sussex and ends in Limerick. Irish police begin the search for her body.

Chapter Five: English, who later says the chess riddle was an elaborate hoax, is charged with murder but is cleared by a court.

The final chapter …? The story made headlines in newspapers around the world. Mr Keene, an organiser of the Hastings Chess Congress, emerged as a central character in the plot. He was presented with a puzzle, featured on this page, and told: “Solve it.” The Times chess correspondent immediately went to work.

He said at the time: “I realised the figures that look like sevens – what police had taken them to be – were maths vectors symbolising movement.”

Mr Keene believed that:
The figures on the triangular British Isles were I Sussex, II London, III Preston.
The bigger drawing was a cross section of Ireland and was not only a map but a chessboard.
Like a chessboard, the large map was cut in two and a mirror image made so there are two Dublins shown as IV and two Corks shown as V. Limerick is VI.

Mr Keene said: “I was able to pinpoint where certain players were on certain dates and elements were the confirmed by police.” The trail ends in Limerick with the message BK BP Do This is where he thought Terry was allegedly buried.

Mr English later admits the puzzles were an elaborate hoax to get police off his back.

* See The Chess Murder in Hans Ree's, The Human Comedy of Chess

** See his interview with Cathy Forbes, CHESS November 1990 (vol 55, #8)

Times chess man cracks 'missing woman' riddle

The Times
Monday 23rd July 1990
Page 1

Times chess man cracks ‘missing woman’ riddle

Two police forces were today examining an analysis by The Times chess correspondent of a complex puzzle which they believe could disclose the whereabouts of a missing woman, who disappeared from her home near Preston, Lancashire, in January.

The only clued the police had was a diagram which looked like a chess puzzle, drawn by a man arrested on fraud charges who they believe knows what happened to her.

The police called in Raymond Keene, the chess correspondent, who explains here how he cracked the suspect’s code.

Keene: called in by police to solve complex puzzle*

I was contacted at the end of last week by Detective Superintendent Roy Fletcher of the Lancashire constabulary with the most bizarre request I had ever encountered. Superintendent Fletcher had arrested a man, a computer expert from Seaford, East Sussex, who was suspected not only of having defrauded his girlfriend of her substantial life savings amounting to £27,000, but also of having disposed of her body sometime in January this year at an unknown location in Southern Ireland. The suspect refused to indicate to the police where the body was concealed, although he did admit freely to having buried the woman. The only clue he would give the constabulary as to the victim’s whereabouts was, as Superintendent Fletcher put it do me, a chess diagram and a sequence of chess moves. Superintendent Fletcher knew of me through my chess contributions to The Times and asked if I would help to crack the deadly code. I asked him to fax the chess diagram and the moves, which he promptly did.

I had expected the fax to consist of a chess diagram and moves similar to the daily winning move position which I publish in The Times. I had expected that a conventional chess diagram with recognisable chess moves would probably represent the co-ordinates of some point on a map and that the chess pieces in the diagram would stand for the players in this legal endgame. What came through on the fax lines did not justify my initial optimism. It consisted of two pages, one with a crudely drawn map entitled “Area for Game” while the other page consisted mainly of a very obscure series of unconventional chess moves with the heading “Timescale for game”. Initially, these two sheets made about as much sense to me as if they had been written in Babylonian cuneiform. The “Area for game” sheet consisted of three amorphous blobs (one of which had even been crossed out) which could have represented anything, from a pond, a lake or a farm or an estate

[article continues on page 2, column 3]

‘I was beginning to thing it was going to be insoluble, but I drew heart from Holmes’


to a country. The sole connection with chess, apart from the title, was the word “Black” scrawled in the left hand corner. The other page was almost as bad. References to a Black king, queen and pawn and a White king and pawns were again the sole chess connection immediately apparent.

I was beginning to think that it was going to be insoluble, but at this point I drew heart from my recollection of a Sherlock Holmes story, “The Dancing Men”, in which Holmes breaks a singularly barbaric and recondite code which utilises little figures of dancing men. This case was redolent of that fictional forerunner. Confronted with the dancing men Holmes said: “These hieroglyphics have evidently a meaning. If it is a purely arbitrary one, it may be impossible for us to solve it. If, on the other hand, it is systematic, I have no doubt that we shall get to the bottom of it.” These words acted as an inspiration as I embarked on cracking the chess move code late on Friday night.

There appeared to be yet one more literary reference, whether by accident or design, in this curious conundrum. Looking at the sequence of moves, all of them above the line across the centre of the page appeared to be made by black. As is well known, in chess black and white, the two opposing forces, must move alternately. This curious monopoly of moves by one side reminded me of the chess problem at the start of Lewis Carroll’s book Alice through the Looking Glass. In this the heroine Alice enters a looking glass world of reflections and mirror images peopled almost entirely by chess pieces. The mirror image motif is an important one, and will recur with great significance. As Lewis Carroll observed in his preface, “the alternation of black and white is perhaps not so strictly observed …”

Now, fortified by literary allusions, which I am sure were also not a million miles from the mind of the suspect who had created this bizarre document, was the time to attack the code and extract what meaning, if any, could be obtained. Let us look at the page “Timescale for game”. In the left hand column at the top we evidently see a series of days of the week with dates attached. They start with Saturday 13th January 1990 and run through from top to bottom to Wednesday 24th January. This is the period in which the action clearly takes place. Next, obviously there is a reference to chess pieces. Without knowing what these pieces refer to there was no hope of further progress. I deduced that the black king should refer to the suspect, that the black queen signified the victim while the black pawn was, in all probability, the suspect’s brother who, as the police had told me, has been in Ireland accompanying the duo. The game is initiated by the arrow indicating that the black king writes to the lady-in-waiting. There is no such chess piece and never has been. I deduced that the lady-in-waiting must refer to the status of the victim before the game begins, i.e. she is waiting for the game to start and once it has started she appears as the black queen. I operated on this assumption throughout the remainder of my analysis.

The next thing to establish was the identity of the white king and the white pawns. Since white opposes black in chess one has to seek a possible opponent for the suspect and it can only be the police. It is psychologically interesting to note that the suspect has symbolically chosen the black pieces for himself and that he has decided that in this case, contrary to all the rules, that black will move first. I now turned my attention to trying to understand the section “White king – all pawns”. Here, I had to enter the realm of speculation but this seemed to me to be a scarcely veiled insult to the suspect’s assessment of the competence of the police force. There has to be a white king, without kings on both sides there can be no chess game, but it seemed to me here that the suspect was dismissing the police force (perhaps the white king refers specifically to the chief investigating officer) as no better than a collection of pawns, menial foot soldiers with no directing strategy.

The “board” and moves supplied to the Lancashire police with suggested explanations by Raymond Keene

[Click on the map for a closer look: JMGB]

If true this gives an essential clue to the suspect’s psychology, one of tremendous intellectual arrogance, allied with a perverted ingenuity and rooted in the belief that he can dangle all sorts of intellectual clues in front of the police’s nose without their being able to solve them. In this case, I earnestly hope that he will have been proved to have underestimated the resourcefulness of the force.

Now I looked at the game moves. In discussion of the document, Superintendent Fletcher had suggested to me that the first line opposite Saturday 13th read “BK17VI”. On this assumption the code is uncrackable. I came to the conclusion, upon which all the rest of my work is based, that the symbol which appears to resemble a seven is in fact a vector sign indicating movement from one place to another. Treating all apparent sevens as vectors in this fashion means that we can start read off some of the lines of moves. Thus the line opposite Saturday 13th, following this interpretation would appear read “Black king moves from 1 to 6”. This is all well and good, but what on earth do the figures 1 and 6 represent? To determine this I had to shift back the focus of attention to the sheet labelled “Area for Game”, consisting of the three hideously anonymous blobs.

At this point there was a sudden flash of inspiration caused more or less by looking at The Times’ British Isles weather map on the back page of the paper. What if the triangular blob on the right were to represent the UK mainland while the crossed out round blob on the left were to be a crudely drawn representation of Ireland which the suspect had then crossed out and rejected as inadequately detailed for his purposes of taunting the police with the conundrum of locating the victim’s body? In that case the large blob which dominates the centre of the page suddenly becomes a representation of the section of Southern Ireland in which the drama took place, replacing the crossed out circle to the left of the triangle which shows the UK mainland. It should be noted that the UK mainland indication is, as one would normally expect, on a north/south axis. The map of Ireland, however, has been revolved so that east is at the top and west is at the bottom. By carrying out this rotation the map begins to make sense.

Having identified the outlines as countries, the number fits into place. We know that the suspect lived in East Sussex, that the victim lived in Preston and that Dublin, Cork and Limerick figured in their journey. I now deduced that I on the “Area for Game” page represents London, III is Preston, IV is Dublin, V is Cork and VI is Limerick.

A serious problem now arises, namely on the map as to why are there two IVs and two Vs? As is well known, there is only one Dublin in Ireland and only one Cork. I attacked this problem by treating the map of Ireland as a chessboard. The line drawn from London to Limerick in this case not only acts as the trajectory of a journey but also as a dividing line between the two halves of a chessboard which are mirror images of each other. In modern chess notation, the algebraic variety as used in The Times, a grid reference system gives one name only to each square of the total of 64, be it a1, c4, e5, g8 or whatever. Nevertheless, in the old fashioned descriptive chess notation, which The Times abandoned in 1986, each square had two names, depending on which side of the board one was situated. There were two King Five squares, there two Queen Four squares and so on. It seemed to me therefore that the suspect had taken a large section of the map of Ireland and reduced it to a chessboard with black playing on the left adopting the principles of the old descriptive notation.

Armed with this information I now tried to decipher the game. The game proper starts after Wednesday 17th January when a black line is drawn across the page. The arrow pointing upwards above that indicates a preparatory phase for the game when the suspect may even have travelled to Limerick or arranged for someone to do so on his behalf, indicating premeditation of the dark events which were to follow.

Using my insight into the code, and the identity of the particular pieces I now offer my translation of the events of the next six days on the page “Timescale for Game.”

Thursday 18th January: Suspect’s brother travels from London to Dublin, victim travels from Preston to London, suspect travels from Seaford to London.

Friday 19th January: Suspect and victim travel from London to Dublin (victim makes a telephone call to say ‘we are in Dublin’).

Saturday 20th January: Suspect and victim use victim’s credit card both to obtain cash and in some way to enable them to hire a car. I identified circles as indicating some sort of financial transaction while V appeared to relate to a credit card transaction. The police later confirmed that there were six Visa card transactions during this period. I believe the C referred to the hiring of a car.

Sunday 21st January: The suspect and his brother inflict grievous harm (GH) on the victim. The words “do this” seem particularly sinister in this context. The brackets with V34 indicates two further uses of the Visa credit cards to obtain cash.

Monday 22nd January: Suspect and brother use Visa card for the fifth time to obtain cash. Suspect and victim (who may now be dead) travel to Limerick or its environs.

Tuesday 23rd January: The suspect returns to Dublin and uses the Visa credit card for the sixth time. The suspect considers himself safe or successful. The hired car is sent back and the suspect and his brother return from Dublin to London.

Wednesday 24th January: The macabre game is at an end.

What has white been doing all the time? If you look at the “Timescale for Game” sheet it seems to me that the notation at the bottom of the page reads as follows “Move 1, white king and white pawns search back and forth between Dublin and Limerick. [Sic re: absence of closing “] This confirms the suspect’s dismissive attitude towards the British police and the Irish Garda as he sees them fruitlessly thrashing around between two conurbations.

There are of course aspects of this deciphering, in spite of the internal consistency of much of it, with which I am not totally happy. On the page “Timescale for Game” page the curious compass-like symbol at the upper right is not clear to me. The arrows emanating from the sentence “We are here” may conceal some deeper meaning while the circled H on Monday 22nd could refer to many things, perhaps a hotel.

On the “Area for Game” page, figure 1 in a circle with EOT after it could be the Eire Officer of Tourism, not the exact title for the organisation but possibly one established in the suspect’s mind. It is known that he used the tourist office to aid the hiring of a car. The capital letters EEC may simply refer to the obvious to set the game in its overall geographical context but the letters NPS prefaced by a 2 in a circle are still opaque to me.

Where does this place us in locating the body? It is my firm belief that the body is located at HG some miles probably to the north-west of Limerick. The initials HG are a grotesque mirror image reflection of GH grievous harm on Sunday 21st January. They may also refer to a small isolated location, such as a farm, bog or even landmark with such initials. There is also an indication so simple it can be overlooked namely “her grave”. Finally Superintendent Fletcher tells me that both suspect and victim are devout catholics, so in this sense HG may refer to “hallowed ground”. If the suspect’s psychology is as I read it, his bizarre sense of humour and sense of intellectual superiority may well have led him to inter his victim at night in the grounds of a local church. I wish the Garda and the police well in their task of locating this lonely grave and Times readers will be kept informed of any further progress in cracking the recalcitrant code. Superintendent Fletcher seemed delighted with the advances made over the weekend and armed with this new information his men should receive a fresh boost in their morale. I am reminded of one more Sherlock Holmes story “The Retired Colourman” in which the great man says “Amberley excelled at chess – one mark, Watson of a scheming mind.” I hope in this case that the schemes of the suspect will be duly frustrated.”





Ray Keene Index







* I couldn't find the photo of Raymondo that The Times used on the net. This one is close enough [photo from chessgames.com].

Mid Season Rapidplay

It’s slightly later than planned but today we have the final report on the S&BCC mid-season Rapidplay which took place on Tuesday and Thursday last week.

Congratulations go to Alan Hayward who scored three wins out of three on the second day to finish a point clear of the field on 5.5/6. If you play all your nearest rivals and you give up just a solitary draw there’s little doubt that you’re a deserving winner. Last summer Alan was leading the club championship going into the fifth round but then came up against the John Bennet Gambit and his challenge rather faded away. I’m sure his victory last week will more than make up for that disappointment.

The final scores were ...

5.5 – Alan H
4.5 – Martin S, Andrew P
4.0 – Jan K
3.5 – Morgan D
3.0 - Jonathan B, Gary S, Ash K
2.5 – Robert B, Dave H
2.0 – Angus F (3 games), Barry B, David S, Stan R
1.0 – Dean L-M (3 games)
0.0 – Marc P

Aside from Alan’s win we should give an honourable mention to Jan’s third place finish. I’m pretty sure it’s the best ever performance of one of the library players at one of our rapidplay events. As for the leader at the half-way stage ... well let's just say your humble scribe failed to trouble the scorers in the remainder of the tournament.

One of the things I had trouble with, both in our event and at the Richmond Rapidplay on Sunday, was striking the right balance between the need to think and the need to move. Take the following position from my round 4 S&BCCMSR game against Andrew Ponting ...

Black to play

This is a fairly standard position from one of my pet lines in the French. The only difference is that the light-squared bishops have already left the board which should in principle favour Black. Anyhoo, Andrew has just played 12. Bd2 leaving me with the choice of trying to snatch the c-pawn or castling.

Taking on c2 is often suicidal in this line but I felt it should be possible here although I also thought it would be risky. A few minutes of reflection didn't change this assessment in the slightest so I decided to go 12. ... O-O as the safer option. I should probably have just done that straightaway, either that snap off the pawn and trust my intuition that I'd be able to find some moves for Black regardless of how White would respond. Either way I would have been able to move more or less instantly. I certainly would have been glad to have the extra time on my clock later on.


PUZZLE CORNER:

From the diagram above, one possible line of play was 12 ... Qxc2, 13 Rc1 Qe4+, 14 Ne2 O-O.

White to play

Now 15 f3 doesn't trap the queen (as I'd thought it would at the time) but how about 15 Rc7? In fact although it looks pretty dangerous the tactics seem to work out and Black's fine.

How does Black respond to the rook invasion?


So not the greatest second half of a tournament for me but that's the nature of quickplay events I suppose. There will always be plenty of ups and downs in this form of chess and it certainly could have been worse for me.

Take this game, one of the very last to finish in the whole tournament. With both flags hanging it seemed that either side could lose on time at any moment.

Black to play

If "!" means good move and "?" means bad move, what's the symbol for "oh dear"?

Grass Arena V

J Healy V M Lia, Barbican Open - 1980.

White (to move) is a piece down and threatened with exchange of queens. If White moves his queen away, then his knight his doubly attacked by Black's queen and bishop. How, in this seemingly desperate situation, did White turn the tables?

More by luck than judgement the last Sunday before Christmas finds us at a series end. Today we have our final puzzle from www.thegrassarena.net. This one, like all the others, started life as Leonard Barden's Evening Standard chess column.

So no more chess puzzles but I'm hoping to write a post or two about John Healy's life and chess career in the new year so if anybody has any information about the man himself please do get in touch.


Previously ...

TGA IV
TGA III
TGA II
TGA

Wednesday puzzle

My photo was in the local paper last week, you'll be thrilled to know. Still, it does serve the purpose of illustrating that chess news gets more coverage in a local paper in a rural part of Spain than it does in any English metropolitan newspaper I can think of. Click on the photo for a larger image, if you really think it's worth it.

As you can see it's Black to play in a fairly placid and uncomplicated position (you'd probably guess I was playing even if you didn't know already). The question then is a simple one: reconstruct the move order that led to the featured position. The closest wins. They don't win anything though, they just win.

[To save you the trouble, the picture itself is not from the round which is the subject of the article (though this is) and the game in the photo is therefore not the one briefly described in the piece!]

[Additional note: this piece briefly appeared on Sunday, having been scheduled to self-publish at a relatively early hour, but on getting up I decided to take it off again to give more space to Saturday's obituary.]

Sunday puzzle

White to play.

Sunday Puzzle

Today Sunday's puzzle is, Four-Handed Chess:

Why?

Never going to be as good as the real thing, is it?

But . . . perhaps I judge too soon. The above chess set was owned by Captain George Hope Verney who invented in the Victorian era a particular form of Four Handed chess, whereby the players sat opposite each other team up to try to mate the other team's kings, and it indeed gained some popularity. In fact, says the link above, Verney formed a club for four-handed chess in London in 1883/4, "which was inaugurated October 13, 1885 with 80 members. The club existed till the second World War, i.e., it existed more than half a century!"

Fancy a game? Well, a set itself might set you back a bit. The one pictured above was located by Richard T. here at the website of auctioneers Gorringes, who recently auctioned it with an estimate of £500-800.

Finally, thanks to Richard for the tip-off.

Sunday puzzle

White to play and mate in three moves.

(CH Wheeler)

Sunday puzzle

White to play and win

(Duras, 1927)

A Pair of Sunday Puzzles

"500 Master Games of Chess. Love it," commented PG about Tartakower & Du Mont's classic, having perused a certain picture of my cat-occupied chess books. "Went through the lot when I was about nine. It made me the player I am today. (Take that any way you wish!)"

The way I took it was as an excuse for a dawdle down memory lane, and flicking through the falling-out pages I re-encountered this old position from Rubinstein - Hromadka (1923), where it's white to play. The killer-move that white unleashed is implied in the text below, so take a little while to try to solve this one before scrolling down:

Puzzle 1:
White to play,
and pounce.

. . . which in turn reminded me of something else entirely different. In this position (Young - Kittsley, 1902) from the neighbouring book Chess Middlegames by Laszlo Polgar, it's white to play, and - supposedly - win:

Polgar's solution is 1. Qe4! Qxh5 2. Qxh7+ etc, adding the variations 1...Qxe4 2.Nf7 mate and the more interesting 1...Rdf8 2.Qxg6! hxg6 3.Rd3! gxh5 4.Rh3 +-.

Now assuming that you've solved today's first puzzle, you'll see that the connection between today's two positions is more, of course, than their geoegraphical proximity on my book-shelf. It's that both feature the queen wafting into an attack on herself in empty space, but with devastating effect on the opponent's position. Quite the manouver: so regal, so aloof, so final, so beautiful; something of the feline about it, certainly a motif deserving its own name. Except, alas, in this second position after 1.Qe4, black has a far more satisfactory defence* than those offered by Polgar, after which white is at best equal. Puzzle 2 today is for you to fish that one out.

* maybe not - see the comments.

Sunday Puzzle

It's almost six months since we last took a trip to the rather bizarre shores of Chess Now. That was for episode two. This morning, for your viewing pleasure, we give you episode three. The attentive amongst you may recognise presenter Tana from the original broadcast.

Anyhoo, today's question is ... how long do you think it will take before the sexually abusive phone calls start arriving in the Chess Now studio? Go on, have a guess. It will make watching it even more fun/slightly less nauseating*.





* delete according to preference.

Sunday Puzzle

White to play and draw

This problem, inspired by Reti, is taken from Ian D. Mullen's chapter on endings in Master Chess: A Course in 21 Lessons (Pergamon Press, 1985).

If it's true that knowing what to look for reduces the need for calcuation then looking at this post first should make the solution much easier to find.

Puzzle Me This . . . Puzzle Me - That!?

Pretty much everyone knows about ChessVibes nowadays, whether thanks to its lively coverage of chess news, involved and punctual tournament reporting, honest reviews, or most famously, its videos. One thing you might not know about the website, though, is that if you scroll to the bottom of its front page, each day you'll find a new and intriguing puzzle to chew on. Typically these puzzles are pretty tough, and sometimes they're not really traditional chess puzzles at all, requiring instead decisions of judgment rather than of calculation. This one from the end of April particularly caught my eye in this respect - and since I provide the solution beneath the puzzle, don't scroll down too quick if you want to try to 'solve' it yourself now:

White to play,
and . . . ?

The solution is - of course - 1.g4, and the details can be found here. "Of course"? Of course. Black has weakened his kingside with ...h6, can only open the centre slowly, rather than explosively, and white has retained the option of castling queenside. Clearly, then, white is poised for a quick attack on the black king, and black is hardly in a position to strike back. 1.g4 is the thematic, ordinary move, I decided after looking at this puzzle for a couple of minutes, wondering if I'd missed something rather more brilliant.

Except the funny thing is, in the solution the next day 1.g4 was given an '!!'. Presumably the explanation is that the notes to the remainder of the game were taken from 1974 - when the game was played - and such a move was rather less normal then than it is now. (It is also unusual to be able to pull-off that kind of thing in the Queen's Gambit Declined - clearly how the game must have begun - although hardly unheard of.) Nowadays, we see this kind of thing all over the place, and in variations like the Keres Attack in the Sicilian or the g4-Gambit in the Slav, we even see it punted when black hasn't made the weakening ...h6.

All of which got me wondering, what do we want from a puzzle? An easy tactical test? A strategic decision? A tactical labyrinth to grope through? A thematic shot? Something entirely different? Well, whatever you want, you can find our new Sunday Puzzle series here, and the index of our older chess puzzles here. Whatever you prefer, enjoy solving - whether over at ChessVibes or here on our blog.

Not a Sunday Puzzle

On Friday Tom was talking about adverts on chess websites.

The perfect time, then, to drop our current regular Sunday puzzle feature and go back to our old favourite the Sunday video clip.



Chess and advertising is not unknown to the S&BCC blog. If you check out our Video Index you'll find commercials made by Kasparov (three of them) and Korchnoi. We've even got Jay-Z claiming interest in chess in return for a wodge of cash from some bunch of corporate suits or other. Korchnoi's rather bizarre milk ad is my favourite although I quite like this Topalov one too.

Sunday Puzzle

Excelling at Chess Predictions

A different kind of puzzle this week.

Who, in 2001, wrote:-

"Anand, by the way, did not have a strong tournament, and it is quite well known that he is not a very patient person. In his youth he played very quickly, living only on his enormous talent. He never became the great player he could have been, and I predict he will not be"

Sunday puzzle

White to play and mate in two moves.

(Langstaff, 1922)

Sunday puzzle

White to play and draw.

(Reti)