A Bad Move II

We left each other on Monday - and thanks for all the contributions to the comments box by the way - with me about to play the more than somewhat rank ... Qxd5.

As Will pointed out, exchanging queens just gives White a big pawn on d5 and forces the knight to a horrible square. It's not too hard to see that is it? So how did I come up with something so self-evidently bad?

Well I'd wanted to get my e-pawn going and since the immediate ...e5-e4 drops the bishop on f5 I thought

1. ... Qxd5, 2. cxd5 Na5, 3. Nd2 - to stop the knight bouncing of the rim to c4 - ... e4



would be just the ticket.

Naturally, when the game arrived here I saw at once that I still couldn't push my pawn because White would respond 4. Bb4 defending my target on c3 and hitting the wayward knight.

Even if White didn't have this resource my intended

4. Nxe4 (?) Bxe4, 5. Bxe4 Bxc3

would be very bad anyway.



When pondering the queen exchange I stopped analysing at this point thinking I'd be gaining a tempo on the rook. I was quite oblivious to the fact that White can hit the bishop straight back with 21. Re3 which leaves me in trouble since, aside from the fact that I've given up the bishop pair on an open board, my knight is still hanging around on the edge doing nothing but be vulnerable to attack.

Of course if White didn't have 4. Bb4 or this he could always play 4. Bxe4 which is much better than taking with the knight since after 4. ... Bxe4, 5. Nxe4 c3 would be defended and I'm just a pawn down.

My friend and fellow blogger Morgan Daniels
looks on as I play queen takes queen

So ... Qxd5 was based on a calculated sequence that could be improved by not one but two alternatives for my opponent on the third move and wouldn't even have worked if I'd got what I thought I wanted.

Exchanging queens was a horrendous tactical error then? Well perhaps but in a broader sense I think there's something much more fundamental to consider - the question of what I was doing analysing ... Qxd5 in the first place. I'll be coming back to that next week.

Miss Easy Tactics! with Justin XII

[Our pedagogical series in which we look at a portion of a game I played the previous week in which some obvious tactic is overlooked. Readers are invited to practice their skill by seeing if they can spot what was missed.]


Horton-Ruiz Diez, Casino Jaque v Ibercaja B, Aragón Team Championship 2009, position after Black's 41...Qa4-b3.

Play now proceeded 42.Qd7 Qc3 43.Qd4 Qa3 44.Qd7 Rc5 45.Qd8+ Kh7 46.Qd2 Qb2 47.Kg2 Qb7+ 48.Kh2 Qc6 49.Qd3+ g6 and White later lost - though if he'd sat tight with the queen on d2 he might very well not have. But in the above sequence, what did both players miss?

(The complete game is given below.)

[Miss Easy Tactics! index]

A Bad Move

Black to play

Last week I mentioned that I'd fluked a win with Black after having a highly dodgy position earlier in the game.

I'd been very comfortable coming out of the opening but went badly astray in the early middlegame. In fact it was in the position above that I first started to go wrong.

The move I actually made - it's not a case of complete fuckwittery like this one, more a question of lack of understanding - will appear in the comments box later on today. In the meantime you may wish to think about ...

• What you think the bad move was


• What you would play here


• How you would assess this position

As ever, all contributions gratefully received.

Probably Got Nothing To Do With Chess V

An arsonist has struck a top-secret research facility at a key US naval base. But it's not just a random terrorist attack. These people were after something specific. When Special Agent Patrick Bowers is called in to investigate, he is drawn into a deadly web of intrigue and deception.

Or so it says here.

Bad book covers VI

Forcing Chess Moves, Hertan, New In Chess 2008.

[thanks to PG]

[Bad book covers index]

People also play good moves now and then

Mamedyarov-Kurnosov, Moscow 2009

21...Qd2!! 0-1

Following the Mamedyarov-Kurnosov "cheating" controversy - in so far as there was anything to follow, in the absence of anything that resembled evidence - I found myself having some sympathy for poor old Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, who seems to have made a bit of a fool of himself.

It's very easy, in the current climate, to get suspicious of an opponent. Moreover I can imagine how it must play havoc with a grandmaster's mind, to try and play one's best against an opponent when one's ability to think and concentrate is being overwhelmed, not only by the feeling that one is being cheated, but the certainty that, as a result, today's efforts will be futile. And once your head's been got at, you've next to no chance anyway: and whatever you do next isn't likely to be all that rational.

Still, why sympathise with a man who seems on this occasion to have got it badly wrong? Perhaps because everybody needs a friend when they get it wrong, and perhaps because everybody gets it wrong sometimes. I remember getting it wrong myself. Not over-the-board - the level at which I play is yet to face that particular agony to any degree, although our time will surely come - but in email seven years ago, in a competition where computer use was not permitted and where (as far as I could tell, from previous games I had played) they normally were not used.

Not dissimilarly to Mamedyarov's situation, I was on the White side of a theoretically-approved line - and within the space of a few moves found myself in a lost position after a couple of surprising tactical blows culminating with a queen going from one en prise square to another.

The game went as follows:

1.d4 d5 2.c4 dxc4 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 c6 5.a4 Bg4 6.Ne5 Bh5 7.f3 Nfd7 8.Nxc4 e5 9.g3 Qe7 10.Bh3 Bg6 (the aforementioned theoretically-approved line, this is supposed to be very dicey for Black) 11.O-O f6 (the book has 11..exd4 but I couldn't see how delaying it was any improvement...) 12.b3 exd4 13.Ba3 (because I can use the time to put a bishop where it hurts) 13...Nc5 14.Qxd4 Nba6 15.e4 Nxb3 (I probably missed that one, but still, no problem) 16.Qe3


after which, although a little uneasy after Black's last few unexpected moves, I remained confident: I expected the Black queen to move and then to have a breakthrough in the centre, presumably with e5.

In retrospect, that was the beauty of pre-computer correspondence chess: despite all that thinking time, despite being able to move the pieces, you could still think you were winning and yet find yourself immediately lost the next move you received. Because when I next received a move it was the highly surprising 16...Qc5!!


which brought about my resignation without further play. Perhaps a little prematurely, but I'd attribute it to shock as much as to the realisation that I was a pawn down for nothing.

Shock and more than shock. Because I didn't believe it. Players at that level surely don't play moves like that: computers do. People don't expose the queen to attack and then play it part-way down the very diagonal along which they are being attacked. Ordinary players don't always play ordinary moves. Sometimes they play good moves, sometimes they even make sacrifices and sometimes they even sacrifice the queen. But even in email chess, they don't usually play like that. I sent a complaint straight off to the controller and consulted with my friends who had computers (I, at the time, did not) to ask whether they thought it suspicious. The controller told me there was no evidence and no case to answer. I wasn't at all pleased with their reply and said so. And, in saying so, indeed in having said anything at all, I reckon I made a fool of myself.

Because looking at it again years later - with a computer - I can't see what I was complaining about. Yes, of course, the last move is a belter - though it possibly didn't need to be seen in advance, before 15...Nxb3, as I had thought, given that 16...Qf7 also seems to survive. So it's not at all hard to see, not now, how Black might, say, have had one move planned but had a last look round for something else and found this wonderful alternative.

Maybe they didn't even have anything good planned. Maybe they'd just meant to put the b3 knight back on c5, which leaves White with enormous, winning compensation for the pawn - but until the last minute they hadn't realised they could do better, they hadn't realised they were actually close to winning. This hadn't even occurred to me until now, until I looked at the game again to write today's piece. I was so sure that I'd been done, so sure that I'd been turned over, that I'd assumed Black had had it under control all the time. But suppose he hadn't? Suppose he'd thought he was close to losing and that only a bad mistake by White could get him out of it?

In fact, if he'd used a computer it's most unlikely he'd have got into the position that he did, because the computer would have told him how bad it was! Rybka, for instance, rates White's position as 1.00 or better from before move ten (and while I know that this was seven years ago and things have moved on, I doubt it would have been enormously different then). Indeed, it's only at my plausible but disastrous fifteenth move that the tables were turned.


I thought 15.e4?? would allow me to break though to Black's king while protecting the queen from an exchange - but it turned out that I didn't have time for either and didn't need to find it. Rybka assures me that 15.Rad1! (not the only move, as it goes) would suffice after which Black tries - and he has nothing better - to exchange off some heavy pieces with 15...Rd8 it comes to grief after 16.Qxd8+ Qxd8 17.Rxd8+ Kxd8 18.Rd1+ Ke6 19.b4


and now after the knight moves the rook will come to d7 and it'll soon be over. Which isn't obvious from half-a-dozen moves back - but even won positions aren't always obviously won. Chess isn't supposed to be obvious.

Still, it's mostly obvious to me that I got it wrong in 2002 as it seems pretty obvious that Shakhriyar Mamedyarov got it wrong in 2009. Both of us rushed to judgement: whereas had I taken my time and thought about it, as I so often do not after a chess game, I might have reflected that there was more evidence that a computer had not been used than there was evidence than it had.

Stil. Maybe he did use a computer. Maybe he didn't use one until the last minute because by that stage he thought he was lost without one. Maybe I can't know that for sure either. We can none of us know it for sure any more. I suspect, in fact, that the real damage done to chess by computer-cheating will be that: the mental damage, the destruction of trust. And perhaps the loss of joy in beautiful moves: because we replace the reaction how did you think of that? with its opposite, who thought of it for you?

Psycho Cowboys R Us

It is not often that I can say that I've trumped my friend and fellow blogger EJH's chess achievements but last Tuesday I managed to win with the black pieces. I can't claim I wasn't very fortunate, to be precise I can't claim I wasn't dead lost for long periods during the middle game, but nevertheless I ended up mating him with Queen and King against King in the blitz finish and victory was mine.

The game began with 1. c4 but pretty soon transposed into a Classical Dutch - which should please recent visitor to our comments box Psycho Cowboy.

After eight moves we'd reached a position ...



... that was quite familiar to me as I've also had this ...



... and this ...



... in the past twelve months.

My opponents were spread across the whole spectrum of playing strength (130s, 110s, 170s respectively) but curiously they all responded with bxc3. Well it's curious to me because I'm pretty sure that I'd prefer keeping the pawns in order with Qxc3 here.

I'm no expert on these lines but I very much doubt that there are any grounds to say one move is objectively better than another. It seems to me that the choice here is entirely a matter of taste and personal style.

So, valued readers of the S&BCC blog, I'm interested to know whether you would prefer to recapture with the pawn or the queen and why? In short, would you prefer this ...



... or this ...

All answers gratefully received.

Black and white

The current issue of the London Review of Books does me the honour of printing a letter, written to correct, very mildly, a passage on a piece about poker written by Paul Myerscough. Writing of a court case in which a club owner was prosecuted for hosting games of poker, Mr Myerscough said:

Poker, he [the club owner - ejh] argued, was not a game of chance, but a game of skill, and shouldn't therefore be covered by the Gaming Act. The case was hopeless, and not just because the only people who knew anything about the game were either in the gallery or in the dock (at one point on the third and final day of evidence, the judge interrupted to ask for clarification of one of the most basic rules of the game). Under the 1968 act – and even less ambiguously under the Gambling Act of 2005 – games of chance are defined as also including those which combine skill and chance. Given that even a game like chess, which most people regard as a game of pure skill, involves an element of chance – the players draw for the white pieces, an enormous advantage between two players of similar ability – it isn't clear that the law's definition of a game of chance defines anything at all.

The discussion of chess didn't seem to me to be right (although the point about poker not being a game of chance manifestly is) so I wrote in to correct it, observing that players don't actually draw in the sense that Mr Myerscough appeared to mean, and that the term enormous may be something of an overestimation.

It was perhaps a little too long, and was edited a little. Regrettably, the editing has made me seem to say something that is not only incorrect, but which I didn't actually say in the original email. Apparently, I say:

There is often a draw at the start of a tournament to determine who will have white in the opening game (and black in the second and so on) but since the players are expected to play an equal number of games, any advantage is negated.

But of course, that isn't right: that's not how the draw in a tournament works, and nor would the players expect to play an even number of games with Black and White. Very much the opposite.

What I originally wrote was this:

there often is a draw at the start of a match of tournament. In the case of a match, it will determine who has White in the opening game (and Black in the second and so on) but we would expect an equal number of games to be played, thus negating any advantage. In the case of a tournament (where each player has a number and the first round will be 1v12, 2v11 and so on) players draw for their number and because there are usually an even number of players, half of them will have an "extra" White and half an extra Black

I guess you can see why they edited it. But they confused, as I did not, a match with a tournament, or rather they elided them. But if we're discussing the relative advantage of an extra White or Black, the difference is an important one.

That's not the only oddity in the letter. I went on:

...according to Jonathan Rowson in Chess for Zebras, white scores about 56 per cent at all levels of competitive chess, from world-class down to the lowest level of club player. Is that an 'enormous' advantage? Certainly black wins plenty of games and some players – I'm one of them – have a preference for black.

Well, so I say. As it happens, so far this year I've played three games with the white pieces, all of which I've won. I've played four with the black pieces and I am yet to score as much as half a point.

Sir Andrew Preview Plays Chess

A couple of weeks ago I played for the other club in what resulted in the kind of mismatch you wouldn't have thought possible in a league chess match. I'm pretty sure that our bottom board would have beaten their top board with ease and had Other Club C stayed at home and Other Club D travelled instead I'm fairly sure we would still have won without dropping a point.

Total whitewashes are pretty rare in themselves but it wasn't so much the fact that we won 6-0 that stands out for me, it was more the manner of our victory. Our captain won inside fifteen minutes - the resignation was by no means premature given that he was already a queen and rook up - and when I delivered mate an hour and a half or so later there was only one game remaining. The home team's top board was battling on gamely a rook and several pawns down but eventually threw in the towel when he was faced with either mate or losing his other rook.

It was not too surprising to discover after the match had ended that none of their guys had much experience playing chess under tournament condiditions. Our team was made up only with middling club players, and I was on board three rather than my usual four or five, but it was very much bows and arrows against lightning nevertheless. This sort of thing is never that much fun for anybody of course but the home side seemed to enjoy playing serious chess and we had the unexpected bonus of an early start to our journey home.

My own game, I have to say, was a rather unusual experience.

By the time we were notching up our first point I'd got my pieces into this formation.



White had played,

1. d4
2. e3
3. Nc3
4. Be2
5. Bf3
6. a4

and hereabouts Morecambe and Wise's famous routine with Andre Previn floated into my mind. White's play reminded me very much of Eric's attempt to become a concert pianist. Individually the notes were fine but as a whole they lacked harmony and they sounded (or looked in this case) somewhat odd.

White continued

7. b3
8. Ba3

which brought us to this position



At this point it occurred to me that considering his inexperience White was actually playing pretty well indeed. He'd brought his bishop to the h1-a8 diagonal putting pressure on my centre and preventing me from placing my own bishop on b7; he'd delayed the development of his king's knight thus retaining the option of putting pressure on my weak e6 point with Ng1-h3-f4 and now he was forcing the exchange of my dark squared bishop leaving me with weak squares in the centre.

Despite their unconventional appearance my opponent was playing all the right moves - though not necessarily in the right order.

Club News, Update!

Rather a scarcity of club news today; in fact, the only news there is is from the London League.

Firstly, the first team, who beat Metropolitan 1 on Thursday 6½ to 4½ with my game adjourned. This leaves the League Table looking rather exciting. That is, if you find battles for second place exciting, since no-one looks like they'll beat Wood Green this season. But at least four teams including ourselves are in contention for the runner up spot...
 
Meanwhile a week earlier on February 12th Streatham Thirds got a very creditable 4-4 draw against DHSS on February 12th. The result leaves the team around mid-table with four matches to play.

Finally, in non-club news the issue of cheating has reared its ugly head once again:

At the Aeroflot Open, top seeded player Shakhryiar Mamedyarov [on] Sunday accused his opponent Igor Kurnosov of cheating, and after talking to the organizers, Mamedyarov has now withdrawn from the tournament.

There's a lot of debate and who's right and who's wrong, what one should and shouldn't do with one's suspicions, and so on. But the big issue to me is: how are large open tournaments going to cope with this kind of thing, if as seems plausible cheating becomes increasingly common and hard to detect? The Linares of this world should have no problem protecting themselves (a handful of players, complete control over venues and security) but tournaments the next tier down? I'm not so sure...

Probably Got Nothing To Do With Chess IV

This "Game" that you are part of (whether you like it or not) is being played out today. The stakes are very,very,high. It would be in your interest and your families interest to find out the "Truth".

Or so it says here.

There are more questions than answers II

Here are five more chess-related quotations taken from non-chess centric sources. (Remember the last time we played this game? No, didn't think you would.) Once again you are encouraged to identify the author of each. Some clues: a) is a former Poet Laureate; b)'s best friends get to call him TC; c) was one of Timothy Leary's early psilocybin guinea pigs; d) has a manifesto to his name; and e) has appeared on this blog within the past two weeks.

Have fun. Or take a stroll outside, the sun's lovely.

a) 'I've tended to like figures who were rebellious and extremely competent and sometimes rather arrogant. At the time that Bobby Fischer was having a prominent chess match with Boris Spassky, I was one of the people who rather liked Fischer's impossible attitude toward the rest of the world and his ability to get away with it (up to a point) because he was so good at what he did, so gifted.'

b) 'When they had played a while, the King made a false move; on which the Jarl took a knight from him; but the King set the piece on the board again, and told the Jarl to make another move. But the Jarl flew angry, tumbled the chess-board over, rose, and went away. The King said, "Run thy ways, Ulf the Fearful." The Jarl turned round at the door and said, "Thou wouldst have run farther at Helge river hadst thou been left to battle there. Thou didst not call me Ulf the Fearful when I hastened to thy help while the Swedes were beating thee like a dog." The Jarl then went out, and went to bed.'

c) 'Chess is a game too noble to be left to the chess-players.'

d) 'A simple game of chess which doesn't interest me in the least -- man, whoever he may be, being for me a mediocre opponent. What I cannot bear are those wretched discussions relative to such and such a move, since winning or losing is not in question. And if the game is not worth the candle, if objective reason does a frightful job -- as indeed it does -- of serving him who calls upon it, is it not fitting and proper to avoid all contact with these categories?'

e) 'I understood and yet for a moment was perplexed. After all, it's not always that easy to just slip into a strange name, like a costume. Thousands upon thousands of them are ready at hand; the thought, however trivial, paralyses one's choice, which is even further paralyzed by the feeling, albeit entirely hidden and barely conscious, of how imponderable the choice is and how grave the consequences are. Like a chess player who, having found himself in a dilemma, most wants to leave everything as it had been but feels his hand forced to make a move, I said, "Braunschweiger." I knew neither any person by that name nor the city whence it came.'

The Grass Arena VI

Cheerio

"Then the Fox came in - doing nine months - and things brightened up in the rag shop. First thing he done was to fix with the screw for me to sit opposite him at his table. Next we straightened the doctor's orderly with tobacco, so I got a jar of malt every week and a pint of milk every day. I was getting as strong as a lion. We were fucking about on the table all day, having a laugh and telling jokes. The times started to fly. I had about a month to do when the Fox said to me one morning, just after we'd got in the shop, 'Listen, if I told you about a game that if you were waiting for seven o'clock on a Sunday night for the pubs to open, and you was playing this game, you'd forget the pubs wasn't open and not worry about the time, what would you say?'

'I'd say there ain't no such game.'

'There is Johnny. It's not really a game though - more like olden day warfare. It's called chess. And I'll teach you the moves if you want to learn.'"

John Healy, The Grass Arena

Today's post dedicated to Allen "It's not a proper knighthood" Stanford who may yet have a good deal of time available to contemplate a chess conversion ala Healy.

It's not entirely clear to me why our American cousins consider an alleged $8 billion fraud to be more worthy of prosecution than the attempt to destroy cricket as we know it but still, it's better than nothing isn't it?





PS:
Filthy Onlooker

The other Master Game

During England's second innings in Antigua yesterday I was following the Guardian's over-by-over coverage when, shortly before the declaration, I read the following entry:

This story from Jeremy James may even be true, who knows: "Many years ago when the world was young and all our futures were before us (mine jolly nearly wasn't) a sadistic TV boss sent me off to get an interview with the West Indies team. 'And I want to see Wes Hall bowling to you.'

Cor. Wes was very decent about it, or so I thought until I saw him disappearing over the horizon. I didn't even have time to back into the side netting before my stumps were splattered - by an orange. Is this the origin of the word 'jaffa'?"

Jeremy James. I know that name. "Sadistic TV boss". Jeremy James and TV. Surely that has to be the Jeremy James who presented The Master Game.

I sent my own email to The Guardian:

Reading the comment from Jeremy James, mentioning "a sadistic TV boss", I wondered - is your correspondent the Jeremy James, who presented The Master Game when I was a young chessplayer? If he is, he should know that a lot of people remember his show with great affection.

A few overs before the tea interval I had my answer: it was the Jeremy James who presented that great show.

Ay, guilty, I was that.

He added, perhaps a little obscurely:

Mixed chess is almost as lethal as mixed hockey. Forget those dreamy erotic scenes of a King tracing a woman's lovely naked curves; think being hit very hard over the head with it. Much, much more dangerous than an orange.

Ah, maybe. Anyway, his reply was accompanied by a rant the Guardian had received from one Jeremy Douglas:

Yes yes the Master Game. That was absolutely superb, back in the days when the BBC knew how to televise chess. But this arcane knowledge had been utterly lost by the time of the Kasparov-Short match. The key insight was to show the game AFTER it happened, rather than live as was inexplicably the case during the World Championship match. They also got the players to do a "stream of consciousness" commentary to give the impression of a live game and show you why they made the moves they did. It was straightforward and excellent.

I have no idea why the BBC and Channel 4 both messed up their chess coverage to quite the extent they did. The only thing worse than Carol Vordermann on Channel 4 was the Newsnight - yes, Newsnight team trying to cover the match on the BBC. I guess they thought "Oh these people seem quite intelligent, and you have to be intelligent to play chess, so these intelligent people would be good at covering chess even though they don't necessarily know the rules"... wrong wrong wrong... aargh... it pains me to remember it...

Up to a point, Jeremy. But isn't that rather unkind to William Hartston?

Guess the dedication

Which chessplayer ended their dedication of a chess book with the following phrase?

....particularly Alexander Michael, with the assurance that I shall never play him so much as one game of chess.

(A bonus point for naming the book.)

To trick or not to trick

Here's a nice little trick - if you think it's worth your while.

1. d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 e6 5.e3 Nbd7 6.Bd3 dxc4 7.Bxc4 b5 8.Bd3 Bb7


8...Bb7 (which Steffen Pedersen calls the Wade Variation) is probably the main move, though Anand played the riskier 8...a6 against Kramnik and other top players sometimes prefer it. (8...Bd6 and 8...b4 are also playable though much less often seen.)

Anyway, after 8...Bb7 play habitually proceeds 9.O-O a6 - mark that sequence well, you need to remember this - 10.e4 c5


and now because 11.e5 isn't going to work after 11...cxd4 12.exf6 dxc3 White normally plays 11.d5, known as the Reynolds Variation, in which many grandmaster games have been played and which is currently seen as all right for Black. (Provided that is, a number of pitfalls are avoided, starting by not capturing on d5, which error was committed against me one weekend in the 4NCL.)

All right, but what if we play 9.e4 instead of castling? This is the trick. If Black, knowing that the idea is to move the bishop first and then the a-pawn (and possibly not knowing much more theory than that) plays naively 9...a6 then White has 10.e5!


Now Black is suddenly in huge trouble. If this is not immediately apparent, the point is that after the natural 10...Nd5 and the subsequent exchange on d5 Black either doesn't have the freeing ...c5 any more, because after 11...cxd5 there's no c-pawn, or, after 11....exd5, is going to lose very quickly to something involving e6 with the Black king trapped in the centre. Pedersen calls the position after 11...cxd5 "very good for White" while Vera (Gambit, 2007) calls it "clearly unfavourable for Black". Black gets a dead bishop: White gets a big space advantage and an attack on the king.

So why is 9.e4 more rare than 9.O-O? Largely because if Black knows what they're doing (or thinks about it instead of playing the automatic move) there is 9...b4!

9...b4 is, by the way, playable in the main line with 9.O-O, but not so good because there, the central e4 square is available for the knight: now it's not, and as we know that 10.e5 doesn't work when the pawn's already on b4, White must play 10.Na4 after which the knight can now come to d5 and we have 10...c5 11.e5 Nd5.


This position is no disaster for White - many fine attacking games have been won from here - but we can see that Black has successfully got in both Nd5 and c5, the moves he wanted to play. In general it's not so testing as the line with 9.O-O and for that reason is less popular with grandmasters. (Come to that, the whole 5.e3 line may be less testing than 5.Bg5, though that's a very complicated story.)

However, my experience has been as follows. I've tried the trick 9.e4 four times (I think) all against players rated a little lower than I. Every time, they've followed up with 9...a6?, allowing me to play 10.e5. Now as it happens I've not won all these games - I actually think I may only have won one of them - but nevertheless, a plus-over-minus position is not to be sniffed at after fewer than a dozen moves if somebody's going to hand it to you. The problem with it is - in order to try the trick, you have to play the second-best line. If they know what they're doing, you've deliberately put yourself in an inferior line. But on the other hand, everybody does seem to fall for it.

So what do you do? How far are you prepared to base your openings on what you hope your opponent doesn't know? Or put it another way - how far are you prepared to play for tricks?

Study the endgame

"Why Study the Endgame?" asked fellow-blogger Jonathan B last year. Especially "when there's so much of it," and "you never get one."

Good questions, but I'm guessing that his recent draw with me - when a pawn up in an endgame, with a much better bishop than my offside knight - in our rapidplay tournament may have convinced him that some study may just be worth it.

And lo, Jack Rudd's just posted an endgame test for us all to try out. It's white to move and, says Jack, the "time has come, ladies and gentlemen, for you to use the Comments Box to its full potential: evaluate the position, giving analysis as appropriate."

Ladies? And for that matter, Gentlemen? Never mind. Jack - already an IM and still improving - adds: "in a later post, I shall be giving the game, its significance, and my own take on what I think of this position. But for now, it's in your hands." That's certainly something to look forward to, so do head over and give your opinion. My breathtaking insights are already posted.

Probably Got Nothing To Do With Chess III

Can the future ever erase the past? Rose has a Cross mother and a nought father in a society where the pale-skinned noughts are treated as inferiors and those with dual heritage face a life-long battle against deep-rooted prejudices.

Or so it says here.

Chess in Art postscript : Evans' Gambit

Guest post by Martin Smith

You'll remember, for who could forget, the massed ranks of "The Chess Players" that signed off ejh's Chess in Art series (Chess in Art XX). Of the thirty or so players, kibitzers, and random revellers that Justin assembled for us in his farewell gallery of six pictures, two stand out. They appear in Merlyn Evans' febrile, searing image


Encouraged by its date of 1951 I inflicted the hyper-hyphenated description "angst-ridden-cold-war cadavers" on his tortured protagonists (see Chess in Art Collected), because it looks, doesn't it, so much a picture of its time: that anxiety-plagued post-war era. They wrangle at the board as if the world could end any moment in a nuclear cloud of mutual assured destruction; and their game with it. They, and humankind, are in the ultimate time trouble: zeitnot was the zeitgeist.

Except that it isn't, or rather, wasn’t. What you have before you is the artist's later version (with some small details missing), as a print, of a painting created over ten years earlier in 1940. The image was therefore not inspired by the Cold War, which hadn’t yet been invented. What a difference a date makes.

Some fortuitous research has unearthed that Evans' inspiration (though that makes it sound more uplifting than one would wish) for his original picture was the notorious 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact by which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to lay off each other so as to gobble up such small fry of Europe as took their respective fancies – mutually assured annexation, in fact. Evans, a man of the left carrying no party card, railed against this apparent betrayal of the little guys in his violent pictorial denunciation.

In reality it is impossible to read these historical specifics from the picture, and Evans doesn't attempt a caricature of the dramatis personae; though there are obscure clues in the 1940 version, such as HEGEL on the book in the bottom right hand corner (he was, allegedly, the philosopher of totalitarianism). No; these contorted chess players have a more general resonance, though not, I think, as a representation of evil (as suggested by David Fraser Jenkins in 1985, in the Tate exhibition catalogue of Evans' political paintings) for that would be reading too much in retrospect. Rather, armed with the date of the original, we see Evans' flayed and flailing figures (rendered in a now-dated manner of sinewy surrealism) in an orgy of exultation as they grab the spoils of their conspiracy. It is an enduring indictment of cynical superpower self-interest: chess as Realpolitik; not, Mr Jenkins, as Satanic ritual.

Evans’ socialism grew from his childhood in the slums of Glasgow, leavened perhaps from lodging, when a student at the Royal College of Art, for a few years in the 1930s among the comfortable middle class Victorian terraces of Streatham (which tasty titbit of local history endears him forever to this contributor to the Streatham and Brixton Chess Club blog). He was a student, teacher and practitioner of his art, and would maybe have known, therefore, about a worthy antecedent of his image. As ejh pointed out to me, there is a more than passing resemblance to Gillray’s 1805 lampoon The Plum Pudding In Danger...


...in which William Pitt and Napoleon carve up the sea and land as their choice slices of the global sphere of interest; plum pickings all-round. Now this is caricature, good and proper, and no mistaking the target; and as a comic device Boney's manic eye still stares with Messianic vision, but these days from Steve Bell's Tony Blair [who also parodied Gillay - ejh].

Plum confections were served up again in 1872 by Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel (Chess in Art XVIII), this time as cake...


...though in the looking glass world Alice had to "hand it round first, and cut it afterwards". More caricatures, Disraeli and Gladstone this time, but the same motif as in Gillray and Evans: two rivals divvying up the scoff, which is just meat and drink to the political artist.

Reference:

The Political Paintings of Merlyn Evans 1930-1950. The Tate Gallery, 1985.

[Chess in Art index]

Worst Move On The Board VII

T. Chivers - M. Daniels, Internet Blitz 2009.

In the above position our leader and blog founder has just played 37.Kc5-d6. Black's reply was the worst move on the board: what was it?