"Of the events in British chess history in the four years which followed the tragedy of August, 1914, it is not necessary to write much, for the simple reason that there is not much that could be written. Such a statement, of course, is not limited to this country's chess history."
This is how P. W. Sergeant began his chapter XIX "Interregnum" of his classic A Century of British Chess published in 1934, twenty years after the declaration of war on Germany - which itself was exactly one hundred years ago today.
Other commentators have reflected on the impact of the '14-'18 war on "normal" chess activity at international, national and club level (see note), where it scaled right down for much of the four years. This mini-series of three posts will, however, be about chess on the battlefield and the Home Front. It documents the dreadful irony that a game supposedly devised as a substitute for war should be played in the hell of the trenches and in the grim adjunct of transit camps, hospitals and convalescent centres behind the lines and back home. Chess didn't disappear - it was played somewhere else.
Although a focus on chess in the war can't possibly encompass the enormity of what happened, these posts, with several asides, may show how people coped with the cataclysmic events that engulfed their lives. What follows, in words and pictures, is an album, a collage, of snapshots of chess and of chess players in uniform (with one or two exceptions), during the war years. The items have been culled from various sources; I can't vouch for their authenticity or accuracy of their content; and I have not made any attempt to cross-check them. In this first part we'll look at the wider picture, and then go on later to look at chess on the front line and the rear of the fighting. Chess took no sides in the war (even if chess players, willingly or otherwise, might have) and nor need these blogs - although the material available to your blogger comes faute de mieux mainly from English-speaking sources.
By and large, Ray Keene's many plagiarisms over the past three years have been outrageous, blatant, in-your-face examples like the every-word-is-stolen example we had for you a fortnight ago.
Most of it has been like that and we'll have more plagiarism in that style in columns to come, but today's exhibit is a more complex example, dating from the time when Ray bothered to try and disguise his copying, even if he was too lazy to do it properly.
It dates from that time, even though the notes in question were in the Spectator only last month, in Ray's column for 10 August 2013, titled Miles gloriosus.
Miles died in 2001 but his annotations to the game appear on pages 162-164 of It's Only Me, Geoff Lawton's 2003 Batsford book devoted to Miles' memory.
These are the annotations plagiarised by Keene, in a bits-and-pieces fashion, in his Spectator column last month.
I stumbled on the magnificent Art échecs et mat by Yves Marek a few years back in a Paris bookshop, and mentioned it on the blog at the time.
Imprimerie national Éditions, Paris, 2008
It must be the only book of its kind - solely about chess in art - and it's worth a closer look; which is what this post, and a couple subsequently, are going to do.
One of my favourite old chess books is Luděk Pachman's Decisive Games In Chess History.
Dover, 1975
It's not a masterpiece and nor are the games that it discusses, but that's part of its appeal. All Pachman does is take a historical walk through a lot of matches and tournament, ending with the Spassky-Fischer match - the book was originally published in German in 1972 - and beginning with Baden-Baden 1870, although in his introduction he goes back a little further, to London 1862 and a game between Anderssen and Paulsen.
There is a great difference (writes Pachman in his introduction) between a game played at the beginning of a tournament, when everything is open, and one played in the last two rounds, where a special effort often has to be made to obtain a particular result.
..or, What Made Lowell Cross? another post on the (mis)fortunes of chess in the art world, and a double dose of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), prompted by the current exhibition of his work, The Bride and the Bachelors, at the Barbican (on until the 9th June). The exhibition's title reprises that of Duchamp's game-changing construction aka the Large Glass of 1915-1923, and playfully alludes to the other artists featured in the exhibition: John Cage (composer, d. 1992), Merce Cunningham (choreographer, d. 2009), Robert Rauschenberg (d. 2008) and Jasper Johns (b. 1930, both visual artists).
The exhibition is a chance to see some of both Duchamp's great chess-themed, and his non-chess works. This includes a full-size (it stands 9 feet high) remake of the Large Glass itself, which we discussed in an earlier post.
On the face of it, this is in the "non-chess" category, though as we saw previously it has been argued otherwise. The version at the Barbican, a copy authorised by Duchamp's wife Teeny in 1991-2, doesn't reproduce the hairline fractures suffered by the panels of the original (seen above). Duchamp reckoned the damage to be a fortuitous enhancement, and didn't have it repaired; perhaps he liked the idea that the glass was crazed. Virgo intacta or not, the bride lurks in predatory pomp in the upper section, while the bachelors wet themselves, so to speak, down below. The Barbican has illuminated the cranky drama with judicious spotlighting overhead and an explanatory key on the wall adjacent.
In one section of the exhibition, headed chessically "Exchanges", you can see some Duchampian chess miscellania not often on public view over here, in the main on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art's considerable Duchamp collection. For example, there's a pared-back etching (dating from 1965) preparatory to the well-known quasi-cubist Chess Players painting of 1911.
On the right the stripped-down pair (his brothers) is a study of concentration, and a preliminary for the full composition where the flux of their mental engagement appears as if exposed to view. Copies of the 1965 etching, made from a 1911 drawing, were put to good use by Duchamp to help raise money for the American Chess Federation: an admirable gesture.
From the chesser's angle it is especially interesting to see the contents of the Box of 1932, evidence of the depth of Duchamp's commitment to the game. It is a collection of chess items: draft pages for, and a copy of, Opposition et les cases conjugées sont réconcilées on King and pawn endings produced with Vasily Halberstadt that year; a translation of a page of Nimzowitch's My System on isolated pawns; a position from a Duchamp game to illustrate "floating pawns"; a tournament cross-table from the 10th French Championship at La Baule in 1932 where he finished 4th equal with three others on 7.5/13, and so on; all with their cardboard container from the "Old England" department store in Paris. For another work, the Green Box of 1934, Duchamp also collected a miscellany of notes and drawings to explicate the Large Glass. So perhaps the chess Box is, by analogy, a homage to chess as art, a familiar Duchampian theme.
Maybe the essentiality of K & P endgames appealed to Duchamp: the way in which maximal outcome turns on minimal means, like one of his "ready-mades" - of which there are several in the show. But his Pocket Chess Set (1943) seems hardly to merit a case all of its own (even if you were to rate the incidental chess-pun on "pins") as it is pretty much just what it says on the tin, and lacks the queasy pink rubber glove that transformed the functional into the phantasmal in the version of 1944 (the original of which is said to be "lost").
The gallery note about this part of the exhibition says that "here, chess is a metaphor for exchange, both personal and artistic" and Lowell Cross's Chess Set of 1968 is a case in point. Cage took chess coaching from the Duchamps, and he himself composed the chess pieces played in the aural dimension to this exhibition-with-performance-attached. Lowell Cross's construction generated sounds, and light, as the pieces were "played" (in the picture below by Cage, and Marcel just six months before his death; Teeny looks on) at a "performance" in Toronto 1968. "Oh, yes - there was a tremendous noise" as Duchamp said (quoted by Francis M. Naumann - see Acknowledgements), not noted for his musical ear.
You can see the Lowell Cross Chess Set in the exhibition, sadly without any players. Happily the Barbican has now re-oriented the board to put the white square bottom right following a tip-off from your blogger on day two of the exhibition. Marcel might have been amused, and you might smile knowingly to yourself at this minor piece of hidden history if you visit. I wonder, though, whether the Barbican was right to ignore the additional observation that at Knight-odds the usual convention is to remove the Queen's knight (and not the King's knight). QN was surely the handicap that Duchamp conceded to his weaker opponents, as you can see in the above photo where the QN is off the board while he plays 2.Nf3. Marcel might not have been amused after all, nor Lowell Cross.
One element of the Duchampian mystique is that he gave up art for chess in his last decades, but Naumann casts doubt on this saying that Duchamp "was compelled to defend himself against the allegation that he had given up art in order to play chess, a claim that he either dismissed or vigorously denied..." and footnotes a quote from Marcel in 1963 "It is not true that I retired from painting to concentrate on chess...". The art world posthumously discovered that, indeed, in private he had still been at it, artistically speaking, in his latter years. The artwork that he had secretly created, the Étant donnés, emerged only after his death.
Perhaps the correct construction to put on his words is that he had always concentrated on chess, for which retiring from art (even if he had ever done so) wouldn't have been a necessary precondition. The Barbican note says, "his chess playing seems less a disavowal [of art - MS] and more of an expansion of the traditional conception of making art." If so, then, it seems to me, that famous line of his from 1952, "all chess players are artists", applies not only to you and me metaphorically, but also to himself at that time, literally. In the light of the post-mortem revelations it sounds as if, perhaps with a twinkle in his eye, he was dropping a heavy hint about what he was up to behind the scenes.
For anyone interested in the founding fathers of conceptual art the exhibition is well worth a detour, and while down that way why not pop into the nearby WW Gallery in Hatton Garden and catch up (until 23 March) with fellow Duchamp enthusiast Tom Hackney who we featured last year. He has a couple of chess paintings on show, including this work, in his now familiar style.
Tom Hackney (2012) Chess Painting No 26. Duchamp v Znosko-Borovsky, Nice, 1931
You can follow the game here. The painting, with that exclamation at e7/f8, captures Marcel's domination of the encounter. But it ended in a draw, a fate we have all experienced. Here, too, he might not have been amused.
If you have not seen Tom Hackney's work before here is an explanatory extract from an interview with Aesthetica blog:
"I was also interested in Marcel Duchamp’s abandonment of art for chess – a ‘move’ in itself and something viewed as a direct challenge to the whole enterprise of painting. These elements combined, paradoxically, opened up a space for painting. Both activities (chess & painting) share an oscillation between the arenas of the eye and of the mind. The paintings are based on transcriptions of games played by Duchamp, the path of each move painted in sequence in white or black gesso."
I like "oscillation between the arenas of the eye and of the mind" - it's a theme that plays out in another work in the exhibition (though a step away from Duchamp and chess), this time following a time-honoured tradition-cum-practice of re-producing, and interpreting, the works of great artists who have gone that way before. Here is Tom again (in a personal email) helpfully explaining what he is about:
"As for the colour piece, it's a small work on paper, that takes an existing
colour chart painting by Gerhard Richter 1024 Farben (1974) as its basis. I'm
working with pre-existing forms at the moment, so as to enable my input to be
manifested more in terms of facture. In this case, Richter's original uses 1024 'randomly' generated and placed colours, and I have taken a printed
reproduction of the work and overpainted it in colours to match those of the
original as closely as I can. It's a very simple piece (hopefully not too
simple) and I'm interested in how this method has the effect of looking at the
original image though an irregular 'lens' that emphasises the body of the paint
and how it's been applied. I think it relates to the chess paintings quite well
as it perhaps uses Richter's painting like a gameboard, and plays with the logic
of the original..."
This is his 2013 Colour Chart no 5 (left) alongside the Richter's 1974 work:
You have to make allowances for the poor reproduction of Tom's piece into this blog, which has degraded its colour; also Richter's source work is oil on canvas, 96cms square, while Tom's is acrylic on paper at 20cm by 20cm. But you can still enjoy the subtle shape-shifting deformations on the left, and wonder how much the technical difficulty of the task defeated the intention, so that happy accident finds a place - not surprising if you've got 32 times 32 of them to get through. Standing up close in the gallery much of the overpainting of the underlying small-scale reproduction of 1024 Farben is apparent. Elsewhere it's difficult to tell, the optical distance between model and copy is "ultra thin" (as Duchamp might have said), and there is another game to play: are all the squares really overpainted?
Looking at the two grids you just have to ask: is each of the 1024 squares within each actually a different colour? Can the eye distinguish that many "just noticeable differences"? As between the two works you may, or you may not, prefer Richter's rectilinear rigour to Tom's informal dabbing. You could do a bit of oscillation, and ponder instead why your brain insists on seeking pattern in the randomness. I'm still looking, hoping for a white square bottom right.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Tom Hackney for sharing his thoughts, and for letting us show his pictures (Chess Painting no 26 has sold already). His website is here. For a thorough analysis of chess in Duchamp's art see: Francis M. Naumann (2009). Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess. readymade Press. New York. It was discussed in We Are Not Amused III (linked in the second para. above). Pages 49-88 in Naumann is Bradley Bailey's essay on chess in the Large Glass, and he also writes about it and chess here. Thanks also to Aesthetica blog. Chess in Art Index
If you're going to release a new DVD I supppose it doesn't hurt if you score the best result of your life the same weekend. Last Friday I received a review copy of Simon Williams' Crash Test Chess II: Thinking Outside of the Box and then just a couple of days later the GingerGM knocked over recent World Championship challenger Boris Gelfand at the European Club Cup.
Williams says his DVD covers, "some amazing moves, some interesting moves, some unusual moves ... basically some very funky stuff", but I'll get back to that next week. Today, we'll stick with how he smacked up the Gelfmeister.
Well that wasn't too shabby was it boys and girls? Three questions:-
1.
Is this the best individual result achieved by an English chesser playing Black since Miles beat Karpov?
2.
Is it interesting or amusing that Yankidoodle world number five Hikaru Nakamura bottled Williams' Classical Dutch yesterday and opted for the Exchange French instead?
3.
(Bit of a preamble for this one)
Williams' win over Gelfie was highly reminiscent of his 2003 defeat of Romanian GM Dragos Dumitrache. Actually, move White's queen back to d1 and return Black's bishop to e7 and the position reached at move 11 in Sunday's game would be identical to the earlier one at move 10.
Have a look at that game from Montpellier ten years ago. 28 moves and White doesn't move his queen once.
[Back to a spot of chess today. Normal service will be resumed in due course, no doubt - JMGB]
Montag's hands picked up the Bible. He saw what his hands had done and looked surprised.
'Would you like to own this?'
Faber said, 'I'd give my right arm.'
Montag stood there and waited for the next thing to happen. His hands, by themselves, like two men working together, began to rip the pages from the book. The hands tore the fly-leaf and then the first and then the second page.
'Idiot, what're you doing!' Faber sprang up, as if he had been struck. He fell against Montag. Montag warded him off and let his hands continue.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
I waited more than a quarter of a century to read Fahrenheit 451. I did Lord of the Flies for O level, but I had friends in another class who got Ray Bradbury's novel instead. My teenage self thought it sounded interesting and made a mental note to get hold of a copy when I had a moment ... and I finally bought one a couple of weeks ago.
The day after I finished the book the latest copy of CHESS plopped through my letter box. I opened it up to find Keith Arkell talking about his game with Jack Rudd at the recent Jessie Gilbert celebration tournament in Coulsden. Keith tells of how he'd intended to play 3 Nc3 after 1 Nf3 Nf6, 2 c4 e6, but had accidentally pushed his queen's pawn instead.
My hand just kind of automatically played 3 d4
he says.
Montag doesn't seem to have been a chesser. I wonder if Ray Bradbury is/was. Be their owners GM or amateur hacker, chesser hands seem to do their own thing on a regular basis. It's certainly happened to me several times, most recently at last month's Sunningdale Open when in this position
I tried to play 27 ... Bg4 with the thought in the back of my mind that I'd always be able to defend the bish with ... h7-h5 should the need arise at some point in the future. My hands had other ideas, though, and it was only as one of them was pressing the clock that they let me know that they'd pushed the pawn and left the bishop back on d7.
Not that letting our hands take over once in a while is necessarily a bad thing. Recently our friend Richard James was netchessing and found that his desired 2 d3 against his opponent's French Defence was corrected by his hands to 2 d4. Consequence one: an accidental IFE. Consequence two: a FIDE Master spanked.
Modest Mr J will tell you that a three minute game on the internet doesn't mean that much, but beating a titled player - regardless of the format - is more than your present writer has ever managed. Perhaps I should start things off and then, like Montag, let my hands continue? They seem to want to get involved so maybe I should just let them get on with it.
On Monday I mentioned that I faced e2-e4 in just one of my four games with Black at Twyford. It was a draw against Gorak Rajesh who, after already reaching 152 ECF by the age of ten, will be making quite a name for himself if he's still playing in a couple of years.
Anyhoo, I answered the young fella's king's pawn opening with 1 ... e5. It's not that I've abandoned the French entirely - I had an Interesting French Exchange only a few weeks ago - it's just that I've been trying to expand my horizons a bit recently. Or re-expand, given that I played virtually nothing but open games in response to 1 e4 throughout the 1990s.
I'm hoping that having played 1 ... e5 quite a lot, albeit a decade or two ago, I should be able to get up to scratch with the opening much more quickly than would otherwise have been the case. True or otherwise, as I was pondering the question of how long it takes to learn an opening a passage in the essay on Efim Geller in Genna Sosonko's excellent Russian Silhouettes floated into my mind:-
At the Olympiad in Lucerne in 1982 I talked to him about expanding my opening repertoire. Geller advised me to include the Closed, Chigorin Variation of the Ruy Lopez. I asked him: 'And how much time would be needed to master it?' He thought briefly. 'At your level?' - I used to play regularly at Tilburg and at Wijk aan Zee, the strongest tournaments in the world. 'To compile everything, process, understand and apply it? Well, a year and a half ...'
After a week away to ponder the state of chess journalism, today sees the completion of my review of Chess Pub, the chess theory website. Consider TIFE XIV and Part I the preamble and general overview respectively and this post a more detailed look at the Chess Pub world. Indulge me for a moment, though. I want to begin with a conversation that I witnessed several years ago:-
5 year old boy: Mum, I need some crisps.
Mother: You don’t need some crisps, you want some crisps.
The mum – a friend of mine – then turned to me and explained to me that she was trying to teach her son the difference between needing something and wanting it. “Good luck with that”, I thought but didn’t say, “I’ve got thirty years on the nipper and I still struggle to distinguish one from the other.”
Not much has changed since then. As I write these very words, for example, I’m sitting in Earl Grey and Rose, just over the road from Streatham Hill station, enjoying a cup of tea and eyeing-up the cakes they have on the counter. There’s a layer cake (heavy on the icing), a lemon drizzle and at least three different kinds of cupcake up there. All of them look extremely tasty; all of them I want; none of them can I, in any way, claim will do me much good.
As it happens this is also pretty much how I see Chess Pub - a tasty cake that I want, but don't need. In what follows I'll try to justify that position, for the most part referring to the website's French Defence section for the simple reason that that's the one that I've looked at most closely. Initially I'll look at the Chess Pub archive and updates then move on to consider the question of whether internet based products like this one mean the end of books and DVDs. Hopefully, what I have to say will be relevant to people who are considering subscribing to other areas and not just those who like to play ... e6 in response to 1 e4.
THE ARCHIVE
As I mentioned two weeks ago, Chess Pub first opened its doors more than a decade ago its archive of annotated games has grown into something quite substantial. At the time of writing some 1,338 annotated games are available in The French section alone.
1,000+ games is all very well, but it won’t do you much good if they’re all in lines that don’t interest you. After checking out the French Exchange, the first thing I did was have a look at what material they had on some of the variations that have caught my eye of late.
First I took a look at a sharp line recommended for Black by Simon Williams in the DVD on the French that he released last year (reviewed here).
Winawer Poisoned Pawn: 12 ...d4!?
… Bd7 is probably the traditional mainline, but 12 … d4 seemed the perfect place to begin. It’s one of those lines that can be completely destroyed (or rehabilitated) by a single new move, and since Kamsky played it in a couple of super-GM tournaments at the beginning of last year, it’s become highly fashionable.
You’d have to wonder about the value of a website dedicated to opening theory if it didn’t have much material devoted to this line. In the Chess Pub archive, though, I found 62 games that followed the main lines and no fewer than 14 games in this newer variation, many of which were played recently (6 from 2010 and 5 from 2009).
Next I checked out a basic variation in the Advance - 1 e4 e6, 2 d4 d5, 3 e5 c5, 4 c3 Nc6, 5 Nf3 Qb6, 6 a3 Nh6, 7 b4 cxd4, 8 cxd4 Nf5, 9 Bb2 Bd7 - as seen in Duffer’s Delight III, and found 11 games.
After that, I wondered what I'd find if I decided that as well as the Winawer I wanted to be able to play some safer lines with 3 … Nf6, basing my repertoire, say, on Watson’s recommendations in Play the French 3 (Everyman, 2003). Would Chess Pub help with that?
1 e4 e6, 2 d4 d5, 3 Nc3 Nf6, 4 e5 Nfd7, 5 f4 c5, 6 Nf3 Nc6, 7 Be3 cxd4, 8 Nxd4 Bc5, 9 Qd2 O-O, 10 O-O-O a6 – 28 games (3 from 2010, 3 from 2009 and 13 in total played after PtF was published).
1 e4 e6, 2 d4 d5, 3 Nc3 Nf6, 4 Bg5 dxe4, 5 Nxe4 Be7, 6 Bxf6 Bxf6 – 22 games (0 from 2010, 2 from 2009 and a dozen played post PtF).
Finally, I checked out Moskalenko’s “Black Queen Blues”, 1 e4 e6, 2 d4 d5, 3 Nc3 Bb4, 4 e5 c5, 5 a3 Bxc3+, 6 bxc3 Qa5 !?, as used by Shulman to beat Nakamura at the American Championships last May - 18 games (3 2010, 4 2009)
and the Fort Knox Defence, 1 e4 e6, 2 d4 d5, 3 Nc3/Nd2 dxe4 4 Nxe4 Bd7 – 43 games (no fewer than 10 played by Neil McDonald but none since 2008).
The coverage seems to be pretty broad, then, with the numbers I found indicating a policy of putting the most focus on the most fashionable variations at any given time. Perhaps for that reason there are some lines that didn’t seem to get much attention at all. For example, there are just four games that feature 1 e4 e6, 2 d4 d5, 3 Nd2 c5, 4 exd5 exd5, 5 Ngf3 Nc6,the old-fashioned way for Black to answer the Tarrasch, and a mere three that begin 1 e4 e6, 2 d3 d5, 3 Nd2.
In my experience The King’s Indian Attack is played rather frequently at club level, but, given that its popularity is out of all proportion to its theoretical status, it’s probably no surprise that it doesn’t get much attention on Chess Pub. It’s a shame that there aren’t more of those IQP Tarrasch positions, though. To be fair, it’s hardly all the rage either at higher-levels and many amateur chessers don’t like it because it’s perceived to be a bit dull, so I can see why there aren’t many to be found.
Dull? Dunno. Is it isolated?
These reservations aside, it seems to me that the coverage for most branches of the French Defence is very good. Indeed, I would say that anybody who wants to punt the sharper lines of the sort recommended by Williams on The Killer French should probably consider a Chess Pub subscription to be an essential purchase.
Consider the diagram above that shows the position as Black plays 12 … d4. You get to this by
Williams, for example, looks at 12 h4 as an alternative for White but not 12 Nxc3. It looks funny (“What's this? Hasn't this been refuted long ago?” – John Watson on Chess Pub) but in fact it doesn’t just drop a piece to … Nxe5 and Chess Pub has three games in which it was tried in 2010 including one by Shirov and one by Karjakin. This last one is particularly interesting because it was played against Sutovsky who (a) was rated 2660 at the time, and (b) has worked with Kamsky in the past and may well have helped him prepare the line for his World Championship eliminator match against Topalov. If Karjakin was prepared to employ 12 Nxc3 in such an encounter it’s clearly an idea worthy of attention.
There is also the obvious advantage that Chess Pub includes games played after Williams’ DVD was released. One line given on the Killer French ends in this position,
Winawer Poisoned Pawn Theory White to play
with Black said to have “a very good game.” In the most recent update Watson includes the following game in which a near 2600 GM goes down against a player 200 points below him on the rating list.
Not that I think Chess Pub makes Williams’ DVD redundant. I shall have more to say about the use of the archive as a standalone resource a little later. In the meantime suffice to say that, all things considered, I feel that for the French section at least, the archive alone is worth the price (£12) of a subscription.
THE UPDATES
The updates for each section are simply more of the same. Not that is in any way a bad thing. Typically eight to ten games will be analysed, some with other complete games included in the notes. From time to time older encounters will be looked at – e.g. some of Simon Williams’ recent update on the Classical Dutch for Chess Pub’s ‘Daring Defences’ section – but for the most part the selections are topical. Watson’s January update for the French includes Caruana-Short played at Reggio Emilia just before New Year’s Eve and even Smeets-Ponomariov, who’d met at Wijk aan Zee literally days before the update appeared, makes it in.
Nosher’s game, by the way, appeared shortly after I’d lamented the lack of the IQP Tarrasch games in the Chess Pub Forum. That was, I’m sure, a coincidence, but interaction with subscribers is encouraged, and authors often take a look at certain positions at the direct request of subscribers.
All in all, given that a year’s subscription will bring you 12 x eight (or more) annotated games, i.e. 96 in total, the cost seems pretty reasonable when compared to the price of a chess book or a DVD. All the more so when you consider that you get access to that section’s archive too.
THE END OF BOOKS AND DVDS?
If Chess Pub is so great, you might be wondering, does it mean I don’t have to buy books and/or DVDs anymore? The answer to that, I think, is ‘no’. Learning an opening from scratch using this website alone could be quite tricky for two reasons.
Firstly, there’s just so much material available it’s not necessarily going to be easy to navigate your way through it unless you already have some idea of what you’re looking for it. Also, when you search for games that begin from a particular position you can be sure that the computer will spit plenty out, but they won’t necessarily have appeared in the updates in the order that they were played. While this isn’t necessarily disastrous, it takes some work to check that the comments to any given game haven’t been superseded by something that came along later.
Secondly, some basic knowledge is taken for granted by the section authors. This position,
Slav Theory Black to play
comes from one of the Slav main lines. In all the games in the Chess Pub database, Black continues with … 0-0. If you are new to this line, though, you're first thought might be to wonder why you can’t grab a pawn by taking on c3 and then on e4. The answer is that ever since Kasparov-Bareev, Tilburg 1991 it’s been thought keeping Black’s king in the centre with Ba3 gives White more than enough compensation.
Even if it rarely appears in GM encounters these days, understanding – or at least knowing of – this pawn sac is really rather necessary to justify both sides’ play in this line, but Chess Pub won’t tell you about it. Neither, incidentally, does it mention the fact that, club players often play … 0-0 before … Nbd7 to avoid those forced drawing lines that result from Qb3 and Qxb7 a few moves before the diagram position.
For these reasons, then, I think Chess Pub will work best as a supplement to existing sources rather than a complete replacement for them.
PROBLEMS?
Is there a downside to Chess Pub? I have a few minor quibbles, but that is all.
Firstly, although you can view/play through the games and analysis online, you lose access to this facility when your subscription expires. You’ll probably get most out of Chess Pub if you have a database to store and sort the games, but, that said, I know my fellow blogger EJH manages to be a happy subscriber without (yet) handing over any Euros to Fred Friedel.
Secondly, in the past there has been the occasional issue of updates for some sections being delivered several months late. Clearly for a website that is supposed to be a topical resource, this would a significant problem. Happily, at the moment all sections seem to be on schedule with many updates being delivered in the early days of the month.
Finally, when exploring the archive for games played in the Dutch Defence, I noticed quite a few that were not actually annotated. These seem to stem from the time when Jon Tisdall was in charge of that section. There’s literally not a single note or variation given, just a few lines of introduction at the beginning.
I don’t know how many of the 16,000 games in the database as a whole are like this. It’s probably not that many; the real issue is that the quality your subscription will vary according who the author of the section is.
Subscribers interested in the French Defence have been lucky to have Neil McDonald and now John Watson as their guides. Similarly, if, say, I was interested in the Dragon, I’d want Chris Ward and Corporal Jones to be around to explain it to me. For the other sections, though, I don’t know enough about the individual authors to be able to make a judgement as to how good their work for Chess Pub is likely to be.
All in all, I find Chess Pub to be a very good, value-for-money resource for anybody interested in keeping up with the developments in opening theory in their favourite lines. The only thing you can say against it is that you almost certainly don’t really need it.
Everybody knows that, save for those higher up the ladder, improvements in results are much more likely to be achieved by building up our middlegame and endgame skills: enhancing our tactical ability, gaining an understanding of a broader range of positional themes, learning how to mate with bishop and knight against king and so forth. These are the things that will really help.
Books on the opening might be the most popular amongst us amateurs, but they don’t necessarily do us much good do they? In my own games I tend to play folk up in the 150 to 170 ECF Grade range (around 1850 to 2000 elo range) and sometimes up to around 180/190 (2100+). Only rarely do I face what the books say are the most testing lines.
Why bother learning the theory if you never get a chance to play it? Well, it’s not for everybody, but a lot of people – myself included – find keeping abreast of theoretical developments interesting in and of itself. There’s also the obvious point that playing through master games in your favourite lines is likely to help your understanding of kind of structures and themes that arise in those openings.
Ultimately, while we might not need all that stuff on the opening that we buy, if we’re going to shell out money anyway we might as well get something good. Chess Pub is that alright. It’s not necessary, but I do want it. In fact, I’ve just gone ahead and bought myself a one-year subscription to the French section and now, review written, I think I’ll have that cake too. Lemon Drizzle will do nicely.
In which, initial appearances to the contrary not withstanding, the author ponders the state of chess journalism. Reference is made to current intrigues in the French chess world and the conclusion drawn that a similar incident in the 1970s may very well have been ignored by the British chess press. A mysterious feature of the 1978 Olympiad in Buenos Aires is examined (as is the even more curious absence of any mention of it in the British Chess Magazine’s coverage of the tournament) before suggestions are offered as to how the contemporary print media might save itself from an otherwise certain doom.
Karpov-Korchnoi, Game 32 Baguio 1978
... in the main lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Buenos Aires in November 1978 Korchnoi was to accuse me directly of having “sold” 6. … c5 to the Russians
Ray Keene, Massacre in Merano (Batsford, 1981)
It was all kicking-off across La Manche last week. There was naughtiness at the Olympiad in Elista apparently – or, then again, maybe there wasn't. La farce Olympienne Seani (our invisible Blogger) is calling it. For those of you who missed all the va va voom, here’s the story (so far)1:-
21st January: The French Chess Federation release a statement saying that it has begun “disciplinary action” against Sebastien Feller, Arnaud Hauchard and Cyril Marzolo relating to suspicions arising from the Khanty-Mansyik Olympiad last autumn. 24th January: Sebastian Feller denies the accusations and gets himself a lawyer, suggesting en passant that he’s been targeted for being pro-Kirsan. 24th January: The French Federation’s own Brief tells Europe Echecs that the action was “justified” given the evidence available and that Monsieur Feller’s denials were “pathetic”. 27th January: The other four members of the French Olympic team express themselves shocked at the allegations and supportive of the Federations decision to investigate.
Since the opposing camps are wheeling out the legals I think I'll say no more other than to observe that (a) there's obviously a whole lot more of the story still to emerge; and (b) until such time as Feller and the others have formally been found guilty it is only right to presume them to be innocent.
Anybody remember this?
Anyhoo, establishing what did or didn’t happen isn't as interesting to me right now as the fact that all this is being played out in public. Whether or not you consider this to be a 'Good Thing' (for the record, I feel that it is in principle, but I also find the timing/content of the French Federation’s announcements to be a little curious and perhaps even bodged to some extent), what’s undeniable is that this is different to how things used to be.
I wonder if an analogous incident thirty or forty years ago would even have been mentioned in the British chess press. There was no internet back then, of course, so it's entirely possible that Average Joe Chesser wouldn't have got to hear about it at all. Well, not for a year or two anyway.
If most aspects of the game in the 1970s were pretty fabulous, one exception was that chess journalism was often pretty dreadful. Re-reading the old magazines in the light of what we know now, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that some 1970s chess journos, the British Chess Magazine folk in particular, would rather have eaten a chessboard than report anything even remotely controversial that had happened on or near one.
The Buenos Aires Olympiad of 1978 makes a good case study of how the BCM went about their business back in the day: there was a faithful reporting of the England team's results, but no mention of a team member publicly falling-out with the World Championship challenger (his very recent employer), no word about a rift that had emerged between him and an England team-mate and only the merest hint that while all this was going on this fellow was massively under-performing at the board.
No, anybody relying on of the BCM's coverage of the 1978 Olympiad alone would never had known about the torrid time that our out-of-form chesser - none other than Raymond Dennis Keene - had in Buenos Aires. Re-examining the situation in the light of what subsequently became public knowledge, firstly events that preceded the Olympiad and then what happened in Buenos Aires itself, we will see just how far the BCM had to turn their necks to be able to look the other way.
Keene and fellow English Grandmaster Michael Stean had been working as Korchnoi's seconds during the World Championship match against Karpov that took place in The Philippines from July to October 1978. Stean stayed with Viktor until the re-match in Merano in 1981 but Keene never worked with either of them ever again. Korchnoi came to see Keene as a "traitor". Since he had defected from the Soviet Union just a couple of years beforehand, and had plenty of mud thrown at him by his former comrades in consequence, the choice of that particular word is rather significant and makes clear the depths of his antipathy towards his former employee.
The estrangement resulted from Korchnoi's feeling that Keene had been working against his interests in Baguio. Specifically, he believed that Keene had told Karpov's team the opening that he intended to play in the crucial 32nd game at Baguio (played with the score at 5-5 in a match that would be go to the first man to score six wins) and the fact that while supposedly working for Korchnoi, Keene had also been busy writing a book2 despite having signed a contract that specifically prohibited him from engaging in such activity3.
The Baguio dispute didn't just mean the end of two working relationships for Keene, it also meant the end of his personal relationship with Mike Stean. The two men had known each other since their junior days, had studied at Cambridge together and had worked as Korchnoi's seconds during the most recent World Championship Candidates' Championship cycle. In an interview published - astonishingly - in The Sun Keene had explained that he and Stean always agreed draws when paired together in tournaments because "friendship is too important"4. After Baguio, however, the pair barely exchanged another word for decades5.
"There is no doubt that all the work Ray was doing in the Philippines detracted from his performance as a second. The terrible thing was that Viktor had always been betrayed and let down. That was why he defected. He needed people around him he could trust. I could not forgive what Ray did …."
Had the Baguio match been limited to traditional 24 games the Olympiad would very possibly have been quite a different experience for Keene and the English team. With 24 games there'd have been no suspicions around 6 ... c5 and the match would have ended on the 19th of September. Instead it didn't finish until the 17th of October, barely a week before the Olympiad began.
If the World Championship match had been the traditional length, then, there'd have been a cooling-off period and a chance for the tensions between Korchnoi, Keene and Stean to have eased a little. Instead the three men had to go directly6 from Baguio to Buenos Aires without a break, with none of their differences resolved and with emotions running high.
With the backdrop to the Olympiad established, we can now turn to Buenos Aires and the total (k)nightmare that Keene had there. He would write later7 that he experienced an eight-month chess depression after it was over, such was the impact that it had on him. Was it really that bad? Indeed it was: an awful tournament and the complete opposite of Keene's previously glittering Olympiad career.
Keene made his Olympiad debut at Havana in 1966 when aged just 18, and quickly became a key figure in the England squad. He played at least ten games at each event prior to 1978 and averaged nearly fifteen. At Buenos Aires, though, he played just four times.
It wasn't just that Keene was mysteriously absent from the board; when he did play his results were, by any standard, appalling. No wins, two defeats and two draws was his meagre haul - and that from a man who until that point had a superb record playing for England. Consider his achievements up to that point:-
GM norms at the two previous Olympiads (Nice '74; Haifa '76);
an IM norm at Siegen '70;
playing through three separate events unbeaten (Lugano '68; Siegen '70; Haifa '76);
losing just five games out of 88 played;
a 'worst' Olympic score of +5 =13 -2 (registered playing top board at Skopje in 1972).
In football terms - not entirely inappropriate given that the Buenos Aires Olympiad took place just a few short months after the same city hosted football's World Cup Final - Keene, once a Bobby Charlton, had turned into Emile Heskey; he'd gone from a man who scored at will to one who couldn't hit a cow's arse with a banjo.
It isn't easy to live up to an illustrious past, but Keene's record at Buenos Aires wasn't just rank compared to his previous Olympiads. In 1978 he was the worst performing member of the squad and playing badly too. In his game against Lein in the sixth round, for example, he simply left a rook en prise. The move Keene found, 32 ... Qg4, is a very good candidate for the worst that he ever played.
32 ... Qg4, the blunder of a lifetime?
Lein - Keene, Buenos Aires Olympiad 1978
So Ray Keene had a shocker at the Buenos Aires Olympiad, but it cannot be said that he was the only one. In writing the BCM report, Kevin O'Connell turned in a performance that was equally abysmal. No doubt he wasn't acting alone - I'm sure BCM general policy had some influence on what eventually appeared in the magazine - but I tend to favour the view that a man should be held responsible for anything that appears in print under his name and O'Connell was also the BCM's Assistant Editor at the time so can't get away from his part in editorial decision making anyway. With that caveat in place, then, let us open the February 1979 edition of the BCM (no. 2, vol. 99) and see how the BCM and Kevin O'Connell completely ignored the story at the centre of England's Olympiad fortunes that year.
"Both Stean and Keene were exhausted after the goings on in Baguio but the strain showed more on the latter ...."
BCM: February 1979, p. 55
That's your lot. Those twenty words are all you get from O'Connell on the incredible turn around in Ray Keene's Olympiad fortunes and the only hint that the aftermath of Baguio might have influenced England's result in Baguio. The "goings on" are never mentioned again, let alone explained.
O'Connell gives the results of Keene's games - defeat against Lein (USA) in round 6; defeat against Kuligowski (Poland) in round 7; draw with Day (Canada) in round 9; draw with Jakobsen (Denmark) in round 11 - but makes no attempt to give his performance any context. There is neither reference to Keene's previously excellent Olympiad record nor comparison to his team-mates' much better results this time.
O'Connell does not appear to notice that Keene turned up at the Olympiad two rounds after Stean and Korchnoi (or at least does not find it worthy of comment); he does not find it odd that tiredness causes Keene's poor play but does not prevent Stean from scoring +3 =7 -0 (on a higher board); he doesn't ask if a World Championship match would usually be expected to leave a second more worn down than the Challenger himself; does not ponder how Korchnoi managed to win seven games, draw four and lose none on his way to the Gold Medal for best performance on Board 1.
No, the BCM's coverage of the 1978 Olympiad doesn't ask any of these questions. If curiosity killed the cat, O'Connell was clearly in no bodily danger. The BCM's man on the spot just remained curled-up by the radiator, rousing himself only for the occasional lap at his saucer of milk.
Am I expecting too much? Should O'Connell and the BCM have known about the conflict that Keene faced? If so, should they have reported it? "Almost certainly" and "most definitely" are my answers to those questions.
For a start, by Keene's own account (see the head of today's blog), Korchnoi publicly accused him of secretly working for Karpov - and did so in the lobby of the hotel that housed the majority of Olympiad's participants. Did nobody witness this exchange? Even if they didn't, it seems unlikely that Korchnoi would have kept his gob shut for the entire fortnight, or Stean for that matter. Again, even if they had, did nobody notice that relations between Keene and Stean were suddenly frosty? Was there no atmosphere in the English camp?
If anybody who was actually there should ever get to read this, I'd be very interested to hear some eyewitness accounts. As somebody who wasn't present (I was 10 and sat at home enjoying the first appearances of Grange Hill on my TV screen) it seems to me rather more likely that Buenos Aires was full of talk about what had (supposedly) happened at Baguio than that the representatives of the world's chess-playing nations were walking around blissfully ignorant of such things.
However, let us be generous and assume that it wasn't as I imagine, or if it was that O'Connell wasn't there (i.e. that the Kevin O'Connell who was elected to FIDE's Commission for Publications and Information and the Commission for Assistance to Chess-Developing Countries on 10th November 1978 was either not the K.J. O'Connell who was writing for the BCM or was elected in his absence). Let us further assume that circumstances conspired against anybody at the BCM from approaching anybody with first-hand knowledge of the Olympiad that they could pass on to their readership. Even in that case, it seems incredible that neither O'Connell nor anybody else noticed Keene's uncharacteristically poor play.
What seems extremely possible is that O'Connell knew very well what was going on, but either he or the BCM thought it should not be reported. Did he/they consider it a private matter and not the business of anybody except Keene, Stean and Korchnoi themselves? An arrogant point of view, if so.
The fortunes of a national team were and are a legitimate interest to that country's chessers. Anything that affects their performance in a major tournament, therefore, becomes a topic that can and should be covered.
Keene scored poorly and hardly played. This clearly had an impact on the English team as a whole. O'Connell, limits himself to merely outlining the 'facts' though: he tells of England scoring four wins, a draw against the Soviet Union, and then of Keene arriving and England immediately losing to the USA. The next round he describes a "disappointing result", the following one "another disappointing day". England's challenge falls away, but O'Connell has nothing more to say. Well, almost nothing.
"The first of the new month brought a change in England's fortunes. It is unclear whether this first loss should be blamed on the arrival of November or the arrival of Keene!"
K.J. O'Connell, BCM February 1979 p. 55
At this distance it's hard to tell what O'Connell meant by that remark. Just a joke perhaps, or maybe the merest hint that he allowed himself that the England camp was unsettled by what was going on around Keene? Who knows?
What is clear, however you look at this, is that O'Connell and the BCM failed - and failed in much the same way as Andy Coulson did regarding the News of the World's phone-hacking scandal. Either he knew - in which case he had a duty to tell. If he didn't know? Well, let's just say a competent journalist/editor would have known.
Andy Coulson: didn't do anything wrong which is why he resigned from two jobs
Am I being unfair to O'Connell and the BCM? I don't think that I am. This very weekend the Guardian published a column8 - apparently written anonymously by a professional footballer - discussing the disdain that those within the game have for the TV pundits. Why? Because their stock-in-trade is "the trivialisation of what [footballers] do"; because their analysis is "lazy" and "takes you, the viewer, for a fool." The report that O'Connell wrote, and that the BCM published, is no different and the reason why it, and that whole 'style' of 'journalism', should be condemned: it insults the reader.
It's not that I think that they should have convicted Keene (it seems quite plausible that at the time the BCM wouldn't have known for sure that Keene had broken his contract with Korchnoi - that was only established later with Stean's mother's letter to CHESS monthly - and even today I'm not aware of any specific evidence to support Korchnoi's suspcions around the 32nd game). It's not that I think that they should have concluded that it was absolutely certain that Keene's poor form was the result of his acrimonious conflict with Korchnoi and Stean (association in time is not necessarily proof of a causal relationship, after all). It's not that I think that they should have placed the entire blame for England's 12th-14th place finish on Keene's shoulders.
It's not that I expect any answers in particular, it's that I want the legitimate and obvious questions to be asked. I want the whole story, not just the bit of it that some pitiful excuse for a journo thinks I should be given. Let us not forget that by not asking them, the BCM managed to fail to address the issue of whether the World Championship match was won through subterfuge9 - which is something the average chess fan might just have a faint interest in I would have thought - although it did find room for half-a-page on the difficulties that some participants had in finding themselves a hotel room.
The future of chess journalism?
Contemporary print media publications are currently under huge pressure from the internet and this is true in the chess world just as much as it is everywhere else. More so maybe. Curiously, as incomprehensible in its incompleteness as it was, the BCM's coverage of the 1978 Olympiad gives us a clue as to how the industry might save itself.
It seems that the BCM was in a bit of a pickle in 1979. Throughout O'Connell's article somebody, presumably the editor, had sprinkled a series of begging messages aimed at the readership:
"RENEW YOUR SUB EARLY!" (p. 52); "BOOK A SUB ... or two!" (p. 58 ); "We're still looking for that ONE elusive reader :each ..." (p. 61).
That takes quite a bit of front, don't you think? Decide to publish an article that completely fails to tell your readers the full story and then use it as an opportunity to ask them them to pay you more to be able to receive the same privilege again at some point in the future!
As bad as it seems to have been for them back then, can you imagine how it would have been had the internet been around? The BCM might not have had anything to say about the Keene-Stean-Korchnoi business, but it would have been all over the web - much as the French Olympiad intrigue is today. It's hard to imagine that any publication would have been able to get away with not covering an incident/issue that was of obvious interest to a large proportion of their customers. If they tried, at least the modern-day reader would know that the writers and editors were withholding information from them.
Although these are challenging times for some, readers are fortunate to be living in a time when those who produce paper and ink based magazines have to up their game. The old BCM way of going about things simply won't do any more. 'Facts' you can get on the internet for free, and much quicker than a printed magazine or newspaper could ever manage. To survive, magazines will have to provide something that the internet doesn't. Results, the moves of games, even who is suing whom - all of these can be found on chess websites. What magazines can offer is something often lacking on the internet - interpretation, meaning and, ultimately, explanation.
Quality magazines will survive, but I'm quite sure that whether it turns out that we dig its grave in the short-, medium- or long-term, old-school chess journalism is inevitably doomed. Good riddance to it, it won't be missed. Chess is a great game. Those who want to read about it deserve not to be treated as fools.
Many thanks to Seani for his assistance in the preparation of this post.
Footnotes:-
1. I am grateful to Sean Hewitt and other members of the EC Forum for bringing the details of the case to my attention.
2. Ray Keene, Karpov - Korchnoi 1978: The Inside Story of the Match, Batsford 1978
3. "The second will not write, compile, or help to write or compile any book during the course of the match" - Korchnoi: Chess is My Life, Edition Olms 2005.
4. "Chess Mates Bash Boris" The Sun, 21/12/1977
5. There appears to have been some form of thawing of relations more recently: I spotted Stean in the audience at the 2009 Staunton Memorial tournament, for example, though whether or not he spoke to Keene while there I have no clue. Korchnoi himself, of course, was playing in the event.
6. Well, as directly as international travel in the 1970s allowed anyway. According to the BCM, Stean arrived in Argentina via Hong Kong, America and Guatemala.
7. Chandler & Keene: The English Chess Explosion from Miles to Short, Batsford 1981
8. With thanks to EJH for the tip.
9. About the FIDE Congress, 9th November 1978 sitting, O'Connell wrote, "This day also saw the first discussions on Korchnoi's protest about the World Championship match and the 32nd game in particular. This question is now sub judice in the Dutch courts where Korchnoi is suing FIDE and Karpov". That's as close as he got to the subject.
Last week [TIFE XIV] I mentioned that I've been taking a peek at Chess Pub of late. Consider that post an overture to the review that now follows: this week I'll give an overview of Tony Kosten's website and next time I'll look at what's on offer in a little more detail.
Chess Pub has been in business for over ten years now so there's a more than reasonable chance that you're already familiar with it. For those that aren't, it's a website dedicated to opening theory. There are twelve sections to the site, each focusing on a different group of openings and all of them updated monthly. Updates typically consist of around eight to ten annotated games and subscribers get access not only to these games - which may be viewed online or downloaded - but also, just as important, they are able to download the existing archive of games for that section.
The Chess Pub world
1. e4 e5Ruy Lopez and all the non-Spanish systems French Dragonsincluding Accelerated Dragons Open Sicilianseverything else that begins 1. e4, 2. Nf3, 3. d4 Anti-Sicilians2. c3, 3. Bb5, Closed, GPA, Morra etc 1. e4 otherCaro-Kann, Pirc, Alekhine, Scandinavian etc 1. d4 d5Queen's Gambits (Orthodox, Slav, Semi-Slav) and Catalan d-pawn specialsTrompovsky, Torre, Colle, London etc etc etc King's Indian Nimzo and Benoniincluding Queen's Indian and Bogo-Indian Daring DefencesGrunfeld, Dutch, Benko Gambit, Budapest Gambit etc Flank OpeningsEnglish, Reti etc
£12 will give you access to one of these sections for a year; £24 gets you three; six cost £39 and you can have the whole lot for £59 (prices in euros and American dollars are also listed on the website). The pricing structure means there's a lot of flexibility in how you can use Chess Pub. For example, you can focus on your favourite opening and subscribe just the one area or perhaps, if you respond to 1. e4 with some variation of the Sicilian, you could invest in Open Sicilians and Anti-Sicilians and still have room for your defence to queen's pawn openings. Alternatively, if you play 1. d4 you might want to go for the six-section option and get 1. d4 d5; King's Indian; Daring Defences; Nimzo & Benoni; one section for when you play Black against king's side openings and Flank Openings too, just to round things out.
Although Chess Pub has divided up the material pretty well you can find a few anomalies here and there. For example, there's no dedicated section for Najdorf fanatics - which seems slightly strange given the popularity of that opening - and if you want to follow developments in the Nimzo-Indian you may also find yourself having/wanting to subscribe to 1. d4 d5 for games that begin 1. d4 Nf6, 2. c4 e6, 3. g3. Mind you, put the Catalan in with the Nimzos and then the Queen's Gambit folk will be the ones looking for a second section for the games that start 1. d4 d5, 2. c4 e6, 3. Nf3 Nf6, 4. g3. It just goes to show, I suppose, that you can't please all of the people all of the time.
So if, like me, you play The French Defence against 1. e4, or if you answer 1. d4 with the King's Indian, then deciding whether or not to subscribe is probably more straightforward than for those who prefer other openings. I can imagine Caro-Kann or Grunfeld enthusiasts casting envious eyes at us Frenchies and/or KIDers and wondering why we get a section all to ourselves and they don't. That said, I'm not sure whether wanting an Alekhine Defence game and getting one in the Scandinavian is really that much different to seeing games that start 1. e4 e6, 2. d4 d5, 3. Nc3 Nf6 when you want to learn about the Winawer with 3. ... Bb4.
News breaks that Chess Pub has no section dedicated to 1. e4 c6
Whether it's worth paying for any particular section is going to be very much an individual choice, and the answer each of us comes up with will probably depend, to a great extent, on specific openings that most interest us. My decision, for what it's worth, is to subscribe to the French but leave out the coverage of the Dutch in Daring Defences for now.Not that the Chess Pub Dutch coverage is poor by any means.
Last month The Ginger GM Simon Williams took over Daring Defences for one off update devoted entirely to the Classical Dutch. One game that he analysed was Sen-Williams, Uxbridge 2010, the game from which the position at the head of today's blog was taken.
After looking at Shirov-Bareev from the Manila Intezonal of 1990 [The Interesting Sacrificed Exchange], I developed a speed assessment system for the kind of exchange sacrifice that Williams comes up with - there is always compensation if you give up a rook for a fianchettoed bishop (especially so if, as here, you get a nice square for your knight into the bargain). Fortunately, Williams' analysis of his game with Sen is somewhat more sophisticated.
Aside from that special update, the Chess Pub archives include a fair few interesting and theoretically important games in the opening. Considering only Williams' own games in the Classical Dutch, for example, we can find Gallagher-Williams, 2001; Agrest-Williams, 2004; Ward-Williams, 2004; Markus-Williams, 2005; Bruno-Williams, 2005; Belov-Williams, 2006; Shirov-Williams, 2006; Gormally-Williams, 2006 - to name but eight amongst many others. Thinking of the Leningrad branch of the opening, the coverage includes Nakamura's games against Anand and Kramnik at Wijk last year as you would expect and I'd be very surprised if his draw with Aronian from just a few days ago doesn't appear in the next update.
Chess Pub works very well as a resource to complement Williams' The Killer Dutch DVD or Neil McDonald's Starting Out: The Dutch, then. So why isn't it something I want to invest in? There are essentially three reasons:-
1. If you're overly worried about the theoretical status of the Dutch, particularly the Classical Dutch, you probably shouldn't be playing it in the first place.
2. 1. ... f5 not being the most popular response to 1. d4 at GM the highest levels, It's not likely that a huge number of games wth ECO codes A80 to A99 are going to appear on Chess Pub in the next year - and those that do are most likely to be Leningrads.
3. In any event, my experience is that my opponents are more likely to play 1. d4 2. other or 1. d4, 2. c4 and then not follow-up with g3 and Bg2 than they are to go for the main lines like Sen-Williams. It would not be logical to subscribe to Daring Defences alone, then. If I'm going to do that I should probably also invest in d-pawn Specials too - and on principle I'd really rather not do that.
Talking of those various d-pawn openings, here's one example you can find in the Chess Pub archive: David Moskovic having his arse handed to him by one of the Houskas - Miroslav, I believe - at a tournament back in 1999.
How exactly to describe what happened to Black here? I think I'd go for 'bitch slapped', although 'utterly spanked' seems just as fitting. I leave the choice to you - and to young Mosko who might well be along shortly to tell us that he was, in fact, a little better until just before the end (and I suppose he'll have a point, seeing as Black must be at least =+ after 3. ... dxe4 and there were so very few moves thereafter).
Anyhoo, let this be a warning to those of us that don't think much of that 1. d4 2. other stuff: they might be iffy from a theoretical perspective, but they can be dangerous in practice.
Ricky Hatton: "slightly better" against Manny Pacquiao
So when considering a subscription to Chess Pub, the first choice you have to make is always going to be whether the way the site organises the material works for you. Often it will, but for some folk it might not - although even those whose favourite openings share sections with lines that are not of immediate interest might want to consider the question of whether access to the existing archive would of itself be worth the price of admission. I would say that even if it isn't anything like as substantial as, say, the French section, there are enough Dutch Opening games in the Daring Defences archive to be worth £12 of your money.
Ultimately, then, while it's undeniably true that some folk are more at risk of being disappointed by a subscription to Chess Pub than others, it's definitely a resource that's worth considering if you want to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in your favourite lines. What's more, depending on your circumstances, my feeling is that it may still be a reasonable purchase even if you feel you might end up seeing some games that don't particularly interest you.
