If you tolerate this, your chessboard will be next

What price now for a shallow piece of dignity?

- Manic Street Preachers, A Design For Life

Manic Street Preachers have a single out tomorrow, which may or may not, depending on your reading and your taste, remind you of what Orwell wrote about songs worth singing.

To mark this event they have issued the song with a video, which will be the subject of today's lecture, given that the subject of the video is chess. The video stars Anna Friel and Michael Sheen, about whom Nicky Wire enthused to the NME:

It looks like Michael Sheen is gonna be in the video, which we're really thrilled about...we've tried to recreate the classic Seventies chess match between Kasparov and Fischer. That's the kind of vibe behind it. It's real Seventies Russia.

Uh-huh. Well, as they say, where to start with that? That was in the NME on on 28 July, and the same day - I'll have a little guess that it was later the same day - the story was being presented slightly differently elsewhere.

The concept for the video will involve creating a chess fan's dream match between Kasparov and Bobby Fischer who never met or played each other in real life.

I do like that "never met or played each other in real life" - only the "we would like to make clear" is missing - though it doesn't say whether the site, or the band, were responsible for the clarification. One guesses it may have been the Manics' press people, conceivably after somebody put some awkward points to them about the "classic match" which Wire was hallucinating.

But wait: what's this?

Port Talbot-born star Michael Sheen is being lined up to portray Russian chess genius Boris Spassky in a new video for The (sic) Manic Street Preachers.

Confused? You will be

Was Wire changing his mind, or were people changing their minds about what he could possibly have meant? Never mind, by the time it came to record the video, all had become clear. Sort of. In the making-of-the-video-video, Michael Sheen tells us: "my character's sort of based on Kasparov".

He's still under the impression that Kasparov was a Seventies player, which is only true in the sense that David Bowie is associated with the Sixties, but that's not important: he'd done the research he needed to, and he does his Welsh Kasparov rather well, big shoulders, lots of presence. As Brian Clough once put it: he's a good lad, he works hard.

Not everybody's research seems to have been quite so thorough, judging by the Russian flag which mysteriously appears at 0.12 in the making-of video. Mercifully, they replaced it with the flag of the Soviet Union in the actual video, keen as they were to get the details right.

Keen as they were to get some of the details right. But not the chess. Of course.

In the song video (sorry, we haven't got an embedded version) the position on the demonstration board is very clear, very early on.


Whoever has the move is going to win this one, that's also clear - and as we look at the players, it's Sheen, with the black pieces, who is to move. He plays his move and Friel replies immediately, pressing her clock with the black pawn that she's just captured. (A nice touch, I thought, seeing as that's something we often do.)

Nicky Wire, playing the demonstration board operator - the other band members are playing what James Dean Bradfield refers to as "judges" - updates the position on the demonstration board. Shortly after that, Sheen and Friel abandon the game in order to climb all over one another.

But, if we can haul ourselves away from this rather unorthodox draw agreement for a moment, what's actually happened on the board? Wire - who, amusingly, comments in the making-of video that

we're surrounded by great actors, so we haven't got to do much

doesn't, perhaps, do quite enough.

He takes the black pawn on c5 with the white bishop on d4.


That's the pawn Friel captured: that's her move all right. But hang on - they both played a move. So what was Sheen's move then? Where is it? He played a move, Friel replied - but only the reply appeared on the demonstration board. Wire's seen two moves - but only shown us one. So where's Sheen's move? What did he do? Play an air shot?

You can, in fact, see quite easily what's happened, if you look at the board when Sheen, having stalked his way around the room, comes back to it and sits down. You don't really have to be a chessplayer to see it. What you have to do is notice that for several seconds, from about 0.55 onward, there are two white pawns together on the far side of the board, Friel's left, Sheen's right. (You can also see this, briefly, on the TV camera at the start of the video, just before Sheen pushes it around.)

But in the demonstration board position, there's only one white pawn over there. Now, you could have too many pieces on a demonstration board, if it hadn't caught up with play. What you can't have, is too few.

Looking harder, we can make out what's actually happened. Although their hands are out of shot by the time the moves are exchanged, we can see beforehand that Sheen has a pawn on b6. So he captures a white pawn on c5, and Friel recaptures, which means that the position on the board must have been this:


or, if you prefer, this.


So what you have is Sheen's move having been played, and visible, on the demonstration board, for at least a minute or so before Sheen has actually played it. Which is a bit like a goal being recorded on a scoreboard before the player's actually scored. Or more accurately, before he's actually shot. Or more accurately still, before he's even got the ball.

Or it's like showing an action replay before the event takes place. Or what you will. The point is, you can't do it. It's wrong. It's stupid.

What's the difference between Bobby Fischer and Michael Sheen? Sheen has played Garry Kasparov

Obviously, I don't know exactly how this has come to pass. Whether it's simply an error or more a matter of design (ho ho) or whether they just didn't realise that you couldn't have a move on a demonstration board before somebody had actually played it - but why would you think that? Or whether they just decided it was simpler to stage and shoot if you did it that way, and it didn't matter, because nobody would notice. Or if they did notice, nobody would care. Or if they did care, then so what, because they don't matter anyway.

Perhaps it doesn't, in the sense that it wouldn't matter if I had referred to Martin Sheen throughout this piece, or called the Manics Scottish, or mixed up Orwell with WH Auden. One might, I suppose, do any of those things - though not, I hope, through not caring whether what was written was right or wrong. And if they were the central subject of the piece the error would look pretty foolish. But chess is the central subject of this video - isn't it?

All we're asking is that the director try and get it right...

So why not get it right? Or put another way - why shell out loads of money for expensive actors like Friel and Sheen if you don't want to get simple details right? Or another - why choose chess as a subject if you don't want to bother trying to get it right?

[Wire photo: Last FM]

[Thanks to Sean]

[Manics' video originally spotted at Spraggett On Chess]

My queen was resting on the rank of my queen's knight

[This is the first of two postings this weekend on related themes.]

Dear Mr Rayner

I write for a chess blog, and have been taking an interest in the short film which you scripted, Playing Against The Clock, directed by Paul Olding for Bongo Reef.

I wondered - what were you intending to convey with the phrase "my queen was resting on the rank of my king's knight"?

All the best

ejh

Walthamstow International Film Festival ends this weekend. It's running at Beyca, 83 Grove Road London E17. Nearest Tube Walthamstow Central or there's a variety of buses. It might be of interest to those of our readers who live in and around London: there are ninety short films to see, running on a continuous loop. Two of these films have chess as a theme.

One is Playing Against The Clock, made by Bongo Reef Pictures and directed by Paul Olding, in which a couple discuss chess in the back of a taxi on the way to hospital. It's part of a longer film called Taxi, a quadrilogy of which Playing Against The Clock is the first part.

The script for Playing Against The Clock was written by Howard Rayner, whose precise acquaintance with the game I do not know, but it does not appear to be extensive.

Glad you liked the film!

Connie and Marty (the couple in the film) are based on some friends of mine who suddenly developed problems with their TV reception and took up playing chess every night. Connie's read all the books and wants to finish the game early. She's trying to achieve a swift check mate. Of course anyone with half a brain could see her ploy – which Marty does – his advice to be more sophisticated in her strategies results in an unforeseen consequence when she comes to the conclusion he's too insensitive for her - and she knows he will not see her move to divorce him coming.

All the best

Howard Rayner

You could just about get away with "I spotted your ploy" and even, assuming we are talking about two beginners, "the classic four-move checkmate", but what in the name of God is "my queen was resting on the rank of my king's knight" supposed to mean?

It means that somebody has been writing about chess who knows nothing about chess and has decided to bullshit their way through. Given that the film appears to have been shown in various festivals - and won prizes - without anybody noticing or caring, I suppose they might as well.

Dear Howard

Thanks for this.

I think I gather the symbolism. But in terms of a conversation about chess, what is it supposed to mean?

Cheers

ejh

The other is Checkmate, directed by Navarro Aydemir, first shown as part of the Little Eye Show at the Curzon in Soho and originally made as a graduation project for university. The chess is a bit better here - the director has described himself to me as a beginner but be that as it may, he's made the effort to try and present the game properly.

Unfortunately the continuity has gone a bit haywire, such that, for instance, a pawn that's on d6 early on in the game is moved on to that square a couple of minutes later. And that in general, a game that is quite well advanced when we first see it, appears shortly to turn into a game that has barely started.

Come to that, the checkmate-out-of-nowhere that finishes the game seems to me to be too much of a cliché. Still, there's a difference between trying to get it right, and thinking that it doesn't matter whether you do or not. It's not the worst I've ever seen.

Nor, indeed, is Playing Against The Clock, though it does its best in that regard. I've seen worse - actually, I've seen rather worse while preparing this article, and you, now, can do the same. Vimeo, the video-sharing site on which both these films are hosted, is among the sponsors of the Festival, and shortly having watched Mr Aydemir's short on that site, I thought I'd look around to see if I could find other chess films for purposes of comparison.

Unfortunately, I could. I entered Checkmate as a search term and to my surprise I found stacks - stacks of short films all with that same title. So many that for a while, I gave this post the provisional title I Know, Let's Call it "Checkmate"! I also considered Seventeen Short Films About Checkmate. It could have been more, had I not left some out: with or without the omissions, I could also have called it Some Of The Worst Films I've Ever Seen.

It would be cruel to say so, though, albeit chess is a cruel game. Because some of these films are made by schoolkids. And even if this

is pretty horrid - please don't use up sixteen minutes of your day watching it all the way through - is its presentation of chess really significantly worse than what we saw in Playing Against The Clock?

I don't know that it is. It's not even significantly worse than this.

Two friends burgle a house, one of them hoping to raise funds to put himself through MIT. They get caught by the owner, since despite the fact that one of them is obviously extraordinarily clever, they haven't made sure the owner's out before breaking in.

He threatens to kill them - but offers them a challenge for their lives! So the MIT-wannabe plays him a game of chess and blow me if he doesn't win, surprising his opponent with a checkmate out of nowhere. Then, after they are let go, they both end up at MIT. Having mysteriously been sent envelopes of cash by they know not whom. Oh, and the owner turns out to teach at MIT too.

It's as bad as that. Don't watch this one either.

Or this one.

It seems to be a college project, as are not a few of the featured films, this one being a student at Emily Carr University of Art And Design in Vancouver, where the director, if that's not putting it too highly, describes herself as "a yeti hat wearing basterd cat who loves art".

I do not doubt it, though from the evidence of our film she is not much loved by art in return. The chess in this one features a mate on f7 which the White player, a distinctly unattractive adolescent, somewhat surprisingly stumbles across, before going off with the girl playing Black. Perhaps it was a challenge, as with the previous film, but this time, in winning the game, he won her hand in marriage. Who can say.

If I am starting to sound a little misanthropic, all I can say is that I had to watch all these films all the way through at least once and sometimes more. One cannot reasonably expect one's personality to emerge undamaged from such an ordeal.

This

is another one from the "chess in a mental ward" school. It's by David Izatt, to whom I considered writing with the questions "did you direct this?" and "why?".

One of the actors actually appears to be getting regular work including a feature called The Pawn. "He struggles to piece together the missing hours of his life" - tell me about it, I spent ages researching this piece - "and only by putting the pieces together can we discover the shocking truth". But isn't that a jigsaw metaphor?

This

claims to have been "inspired" by Stefan Zweig's The Royal Game, prompting the thought that "uninspired" might have been closer to the truth, while yet some distance from it still. The central character develops a nosebleed at the end, apparently from mental anguish, which may be caused by the realisation that the board has been the wrong way round all through the film.

There's not much one can say about the next one

other than just because it's pastiche doesn't mean it's any good. It's "a mate's Uni project", says the editor, who adds "let me know what you think". Better not.

It's not all kids: this one

is from a Filmmaking for Adults class at the New Jersey Film School, inclining me to forgive its theme of the-player-who-thinks-he's-good-being-checkmated, which checkmate, as ever, comes out of nowhere. Certainly as a crime against chess it's not to be compared with the following effort

which is also a college project, the college in question being the University of Central Florida. The director tells us:

I'm...making this project for my Foundations of Productions class. The game of chess represents Alexa's life. As she plays against "Death," every move has meaning.

Quite so: the move queen takes bishop, for instance, has the meaning "this guy is making a film about chess without having a clue how it's played", given that the king is in check while this capture is going on.

It's a nice touch, though, to have somebody play chess with Death. Only be sure always to call it, please, hommage.

Is it all getting a bit too much? Right, let's have a break. Let's watch some cartoons.

This Korean animation

is charming enough as long as you don't wonder how the castled king gets back to its home square, behind an unmoved pawn that had already moved - or wonder what colour the right-hand corner square seems to be, and why the left-hand corner square is the same.

Never mind. Animation doesn't observe the requirements of reality, that's what's so much fun about it. The laws of chess, likewise, are temporarily suspended. (Then again, in cinema the laws of chess are normally suspended.)

Not much happens in this one

though it does feature a rather dinky chess set. The director is a Junior Electronic Media Production major at Kent State University, where "shooting" usually means something else. So sometimes the absence of drama is a good thing.

At least, it does no harm. Nor does this

but the next one is much more fun: Vivaldi, Morricone, and a joke borrowed from Spielberg and Harrison Ford.

A good joke, though. But what language is it in? I asked the director:

The dialogue was basically nonsensical English phrases that a friend and I typed into a translation website converted into Dutch. We don't speak Dutch so our pronunciation was to say the least, terrible.

We then sped up the voices to make it sound like crazy Dutch children on crack.

That's what I like about cartoons. They're basically for kids. So are clowns:

I rather enjoyed that, although of course you know long before the end that the smart guy is going to be checkmated. Out of nowhere, of course.

Remember the four-move checkmate from Playing Against The Clock? I suspect that what it means - if it actually does mean something, unlike "resting on the rank of my queen's knight" - is Scholar's Mate (I'll spare you a link, shall I?) which comes up in the next film.

Unlike most of its predecessors, this one is worth watching, if only because the lead, Jay Kubalek, appears to know something about acting, and it's a surprise to see he has no credits other than this.

I've never heard of correspondence chess being played by taking photos of the board, but unlike most deviations from reality when chess is depicted on-screen, which speak of lack of knowledge and an unwillingness to address it, this one strikes me as imaginative. A shame about the Scholar's Mate, though.

Perhaps the best thing to do, if you're a film-maker and want to make something about chess without actually knowing anything about it, is not to take it all that seriously. Matt Thiesen doesn't, in my favourite of all the films here (give or take the final one to come).

Yes, I know that's not a hard bar to get over, very much the opposite. But it's a nice little film, with some good jokes. It's not pretentious, it doesn't use chess as a clumsy metaphor, it doesn't display its ignorance. It doesn't take its theme too seriously and it's all the better for it.

I mean why make a movie about chess, and pretend you know something - when it's obvious you don't? I know you'll get away with it more often than you won't, but will you actually make something that's any good? Notice how the same things come up. The sudden checkmate, delivered almost always against the player who thinks they're superior. The psychiatric ward. The very title, Checkmate. Even the dialogue. ("Checkmate". "Good game".)

There's a saying about writing, that you should write what you know. If you don't, if you write what you don't know, then you'll not only get things very wrong, you'll also have little idea what's a cliché, what's simply silly, what's been done too many times before. Why do that? And if you must step outside the realm of what you know - as everybody has to do from time to time - then why not try a little more to get it right?

I know all these films are amateur films, most of them are student films, to take them too seriously is like annotating a club game as if the players were grandmasters. But some of them have been in festivals, have won prizes, have been made by people who do, or who aspire to do, professional work. And also, there's this. What I say above reflects something that happens when chess is depicted in professional work, which is that people want chess, they want to take it seriously - too seriously - as a metaphor, but at the same time, they don't want to take the trouble to get chess right. (For more on which, see tomorrow's posting.)

Gaaah. All right, I admit it, I am taking this all far too seriously. That is what chessplayers do. We take things far too seriously.

That's the spirit of chess.



[Thanks to Richard: thanks also to Liza Fletcher, Katrina Yau, Aaron DeLaRosa, Gus Sacks, Howard Rayner, Paul Olding and Navarro Aydemir for their help with this piece.]

The Chess Man of the Moment

Chess-playing Londoners may think that to get the latest on Magnus Carlsen they should head over to Chess & Bridge in Baker Street and check out the specialist magazines: but they may be better off visiting jean and fashion seller G Star Raw in Covent Garden. That's because the shop's free newspaper features a short but entertaining interview with the nineteen year old number one.

There are a few funny quotes from Magnus: I'm not very good at smiling - when I smile I make some strange gesture instead, he says. And how did he celebrate becoming World Number One? I put it as the desktop background on my computer. Magnus Carlsen, Number 1 on the FIDE (World Chess Federation) rankings. Ah, wild, reckless youth!

And there's some chess content to. My whole approach to the game is practical and intuitive - I don't obsess over the perfect move, says Magnus. The other thing is not to think like a computer. A computer will discard something that looks dangerous or wrong, and that's usually the right thing to do, but sometimes, if you think, that is what you should be doing.

And why am I telling you this today? Isn't Magnus's modelling for G-Star Raw old news? But today's the day when Magnus takes on the world, in the G-Star Raw World Chess Challenge - and as I write you can still join the World Team.

I have to say, I'm not sure the World stands much of a chance in this one, though. Magnus has white; the time limit is basically a minute a move each, although the World Team is restricted to voting on three moves suggested by three GMs. Do those GMs have access to a computer? I don't know, but if not surely Magnus is hot favourite. But the time limit adds a randomising factor at least.

But why complain? Because chess should be an art? A science, not a scrap? Because chess is a sport - and sport should be always take place on a level playing field? No. Chess is, after all, only a game, concludes Magnus.

Hand in glove

In 1998, the journalist Larisa Yudina was murdered, in Elista, by men connected to Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president since 1995 of FIDE and since 1993 of the autonomous republic of Kalmykia. A boycott of the forthcoming Olympiad, to be held in the very same city, was proposed by Sarah Hurst, at that time editing the newsletter of what was then called the British Chess Federation. It met with more sympathy than support.

Who killed Larisa Yudina?

Since then, I've taken something of a jaundiced view of complaints about Kirsan within the chess world: the killing of journalists, we could comfortably live with, but let the rules change in mid-competition for the world championhip cycle and we'll get really cross. Or so it seems.

To be honest, I didn't really expect people to pass up the opportunity of playing for their country in order to protest about the mere murder of a journalist. But I would have liked them to be a little less god-damned silent among it. I suppose it might have allayed my suspicion, that nobody who mattered really gave a damn, had any of the leading players taken the opportunity to speak out about the man who, at the time, was taking over the chess world for his own personal and political purposes. Like, for instance, the man who was at that time the FIDE World Champion. One Anatoly Karpov.

But Kirsan had the money. Kirsan had the money and nobody else had the money, so people kept their mouths shut and took his tainted money. Well, it seems to me that people who are prepared to take tainted money should not complain too much when that money dries up. It also seems to me that the chess world knows the meaning of money but not the meaning of murder. That would be a cynical view - but in truth the more I look at the chess world the more cynical I get. Even when people are running against Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.

There is, of course a large temptation to say "so what?", for anybody would be better than Kirsan. I wouldn't quibble overmuch. FIDE is run by an individual whose reputation is for autocracy, corruption and worse, whose closest associates are thugs who have been chosen for that characteristic. And I, for one, haven't forgotten Larisa Yudina. Even if, until a couple of weeks ago, Anatoly Karpov apparently had.

While I was writing this piece, in time to publish it on the day of the Ray Keene Networking Evening on the Strand, the current New in Chess arrived, carrying a long interview with Karpov - not the most searching of interviews, but then again Dirk isn't really one to put his subjects on the rack - in which he is not asked what happened to his ethical concerns about the killing of journalists during the dozen years that passed between Yudina's assassination and his campaign for the FIDE Presidency. So I don't know. Maybe he feels he was scared to speak out against FIDE at the time. Or maybe he lost his memory. A lot of people who talk about Karpov as the saviour of the chess world seem to have lost their memories.

Or, if not their memories, at least their capacity to ask awkward questions, like "didn't you and Garry Kasparov use to hate each other?" and "are those terrible things you said about one another not true any more?". Or "if you've kissed and made up, is it because you both have nothing other than the good of chess on your minds, or might there be something in it for both of you?". Is it really beyond us to look at the history of these people, their public statements about each other over a period of years, and suspect they are not necessarily idealists united by a desire to do what is best for the whole world of chess?

I'll be there for you

This brings us round to the subject of Kasparov, who has been the most prominent of Karpov's supporters. Now I'll be candid and say that I don't like Kasparov much. I don't like his his ego, I don't like his Wall Street Journal opinions and I don't like his dismissive attitude to chessplayers outside the elite circle. I have not forgotten "tourists", nor "a weak player beat a tired player" and I have not forgotten how he treated the world title as his personal property nor how he broke the GMA when it no longer suited his immediate purposes.

As I say, I don't like him. But what I dislike even less is the fawning press coverage he receives, as if everything he did was in pursuit of democracy and freedom rather than in support of Garry Kasparov. This is worse, to tell the truth, in the mainstream press than it is in the chess press, though given that he's a friend, business partner and political ally of Fred Friedel, it's not as if Chessbase is an exception to the rule.

In truth, the reference to Kasparov is the one moment when New In Chess opens the door just a little to scepticism about the Karpov-Kasparov alliance. Although their previous history is glossed over ("you've been on good terms for some time now") Dirk finds himself obliged to observe:

For some countries he will be an asset, but for others he will be a liability, because he is not liked everywhere.

Indeed he isn't, Dirk, because some people do have memories and those memories sometimes oblige them to form character judgements. In this instance, they may have judged that Garry Kasparov does very little without expecting to be in charge of it and without expecting it to benefit him personally. And when he enters into an alliance, he does so expecting to manipulate it to his own advantage.

Can I really be alone in finding Kasparov's closeness to Magnus Carlsen just a touch disturbing? Carlsen emerges as a likely world champion, straightaway there's Kasparov, offering him training and next thing you know Carlsen is appearing with him at celebrity fundraising dinners. It's as well, I think, that Carlsen isn't yet world champion. It wouldn't at all surprise me to see the 1993-2000 circus repeated, with Kasparov this time as the ringmaster.

You need hands

But I digress. I was listing my dislikes where Garry Kasparov is concerned. Let me add "fundraising dinners". I do not like them either. They are there to offer influence, or the promise of influence, to wealthy people in return for large amounts of money. They are the staple of US corporate politics. They are nothing whatsoever to do with democracy and nothing whatsoever to do with the likes of you and me. That is the whole point of them. They are there to exclude the likes of you and me.

Unless, that is, you're the sort of person who has two hundred quid in your back pocket to pay for dinner. Two hundred quid is what it would cost to get into Ray Keene's dinner at Simpson's this evening. God knows what it cost to get into the New York event. It doesn't really matter, because it would be many times more than I could afford to pay. The Karpov campaign is a table at which few of us are invited to sit. So where is my interest in supporting it?

It seems to me that the Karpov campaign is about professional chess - by which I mean elite professional chess, the sort of people who receive invitations to tournaments at Linares and Dortmund, the sort of people who annotate and give interviews in New in Chess - as well as potential corporate sponsors, people who might be interested in backing elite tournaments but are perhaps less interested in the world of chess to which most of us belong. And to which, in truth, most professionals belong.

Four years ago, when he was first considering running for FIDE President - eventually Bessel Kok made an unsuccessful bid - Karpov gave an interview to Chessbase which I think may be helpful in understanding what Karpov is all about. (As I say, it can help to have a memory.) This is the interview in which he made the remarkable claim

I think everybody connected with chess understands that if we allow chess to continue for another four years in its presented terrible state, it will simply disappear from the face of the earth.

Here we are, four and a half years on, and the End Times are not yet with us. There have been plenty of opportunities, of late, to put it to Karpov that he was talking nonsense in 2006. I've not heard that anyone has done so.

To be fair, at the time, Yasser Seirawan attempted a clarification:

Recently, I think Karpov misspoke when he talked about chess disappearing in the next four years. What Tolya likely meant was, "professional chess". Viewed from this qualification he is of course right.

Wrong whichever way you slice it

Of course! And yet, here we are...and so is professional chess. I suppose there may even be more professional chessplayers in the world than there ever were before.

So let us try and clarify the clarification, by reference to what Karpov said next.

Tournaments are shrinking in size, and disappearing altogether from the calendar – this is a huge problem. Linares and Dortmund have significantly reduced the number of participants. Just consider, in the world's five biggest tournaments....there are a total of just 41 places! This only leaves open tournaments, which I, for example, would never play in. I am firmly convinced that, for a world class player, playing in open tournaments is a big mistake, because such tournaments destroy one's style.

So perhaps, when Karpov said chess, and when Seirawan said he meant professional chess, what was actually meant was - elite professional chess, at the level where you don't even play in open tournaments, certainly not if you can possibly avoid it. Not that this level of chess has disappeared either, mind, but at least that would help us understand what Karpov means - and what he is thinking of when he says "chess". He's thinking of the top one per cent. Or a smaller proportion even than that.

Top players, famous names. People who have done very well out of chess: and for that matter, people whose best playing days are behind them but who wish nevertheless to retain a prominent place in the game. Nothing wrong with that as far as it goes, any more than there's anything wrong with wishing to get rid of Kirsan and his chums. But these don't seem to me to be people who have too much to complain about. Few of the people going to Ray's show tonight can be too disappointed about how a life of chess has rewarded them. Not Garry Kasparov, not Nigel Short, not Mickey Adams.

Bring me the head of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov

Of course one can argue that whatever their private motives may be, the top players have had many years to see what Kirsan and his sidekicks are all about - and that if they are largely motivated by self-interest, they may at least be motivated in part by genuine disgust. It is a fair point. Still, if the objections to Kirsan are that he is untrustworthy with money, that he breaks rules for his own convenience, that his motives are principally to benefit himself and that there is a lack of transparency in what he does, are they proposing to say so in conversation with their host tonight?

When the Bessel Kok campaign ended in defeat, I criticised it, in Kingpin, for concentrating on the wealthier parts of the chess world. I stand by that. Chess isn't just about the West - in which, by the way, nobody is prevented from holding an elite chess tournament if they want to. I am uneasy when people complain that Africa and Asia have too much influence, and not only because the expansion of chess in Asia seems to me to have been one of the true successes of the last twenty years. (Possibly the only one, indeed.) But if I was playing chess in China or India, and I read Karpov saying that he wanted FIDE offices in Paris and New York - would I not be justified in wondering what was in it for me?

I wouldn't overdo it. Nobody really believes that the outcome of this election has much to do with the actual policies and programmes of the competing parties. But still, if I am asked to back a campaign - and perhaps still more, if it is assumed, as it seems to be assumed, that everybody should support it - shall I not ask what it is supposed to be about and why I should support it?

Where is, indeed, the beef? Nick Faulks, of Bermuda, wrote a letter to Chess Today in July which made the point quite adequately:

It's hardly as though the Kirsan era has an impeccable record, so when are we going to hear an explanation of what they could do better than the incumbents? At the moment, we seem destined for the same stillborn campaign of four years ago, with a few vague and unsubstantiated accusations but little more.

Message to Karpov and Kasparov - if you have anything constructive to say, now would not be a bad time to say it.

Quite so. I don't think that Karpov has all that much constructive to say, at least to anybody outside the top hundred players in the rankings.

I do not see much in favour of the Karpov campaign, other than his opponents. Who, for sure, constitute a powerful argument in itself. There are a thousand reasons not to support Kirsan, beginning with Larisa Yudina and proceeding from there. That's basic. I can see every reason for disliking Kirsan. He cannot possibly be supported. What I can't see is any reason to like, or to trust, the crew who are seeking to replace him. Do I have any reason? Do I have any reason not to think of them as a bunch of people who have spent most of their professional lives attacking each other except on the rare occasions when they have felt that could make more money by sticking together?

See, I don't care very much about them, perhaps because they have never cared very much for anybody but themselves. What do I care about? I care about Olympiads, that they prosper. I care about the world championship. I care that these events are properly supported, and also that they are not undermined by intrigue. I care about the provision of rules, arbiters and a rating system. I don't think all of these are well cared for at the moment.

I also care about having presidents who are not implicated in the murder of journalists. On principle, even though it doesn't affect me. It doesn't affect me that world football is run by an enormous crook called Sepp Blatter. But I don't think it should be, even though world football is an enormous commercial success. It doesn't affect me that world chess is run by an enormous crook called Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. But I don't think it should be, regardless of whether or not world chess is a commercial failure.

"I know where you live"

What good does it ultimately do, to operate a system of memory-loss in place of a system of healthy scepticism? Didn't Karpov use to be the man everybody loved to hate? Because he was FIDE's man, because he was Soviet Man? "We have to beat the system", he says in New In Chess. Didn't he use to be the system, and its man?

Were the things that were said about him then not true? Have they changed? If so, when did they change? They might have done so and we might believe it, but not if the passage from then to now goes unacknowledged and unexamined. It is not, quite, as if the past did not exist. It is as if half the past did not exist.

As I say. The more I look at the chess world, the more cynical I get. Loud statements of outrage turn out on inspection to disguise the pursuit of personal interest, and the better one has done from chess, the more assiduous the chess press is, in listening to one's tales of how one has been treated unfairly. Which is diverting enough - especially if you believe what the top players say about each other more than you believe what they say about themselves. But chess isn't just about its top players. It's about all of us who play. I don't think Anatoly Karpov has very much in common with that view.

It's like Chelsea v Manchester United: I hope that both sides lose. It's a fine thing when you can't put together a ticket that's more appealing than Kirsan and chums, but there's something almost as unattractive about Garry Kasparov's Puppet Show. Yes, of course, I don't mean that entirely. Yes, of course, I hope Kirsan loses more than I hope that Karpov loses. Yes, of course, consorting with the Penguin is not as bad as having your henchmen whack a journalist. Yes, of course.

Kirsan deserves to lose, but that doesn't mean Karpov deserves to win. There is too much about his campaign that raises awkward questions. And there are too many awkward questions that a partisan chess press are not prepared to ask. They have their reasons, good as well as bad. But I put it to you that had we been in the habit of asking awkward questions, we might not have ended up with Kirsan.

[K&K photo: Associated Press]
[KvK photo: Hairulovchessmaniacs]
[Yasser photo: Chessbase]

Had we but World Service enough and time

Chess fanatic Simon Terrington explores the game in today's world. Is modern technology changing it and how it's played?

So says the blurb for Seeking The Endgame, a two-part documentary going out this coming weekend, and the next, on the BBC World Service. It's in a strand called the Friday Documentary, though in fact the programmes are broadcast at various times on the Saturdays and Sundays too. As well as, presumably, at your convenience for a period after those broadcasts, via the above-mentioned modern technology and the World Service Documentaries web page here.

I'd hoped to track down the mysterious Mr Terrington for an interview in connection with the programmes, but despite spending a fair part of last week trying to track him down I've not - yet - been able to make direct contact. Thanks, nevertheless, to Penny Crook at the World Service for her help.

Anyway, this, I think, is our host for the shows, presumably just having played 6.Nbd2 in a symmetrical line of the London System.


One trusts the programmes will be more diverting! Do please listen to them, and find out.

Chess in Art Postscript: Happy Birthday

The "Shipwrecked Surrealists" who found themselves together in the States as a result of the Second World War have appeared several times in these Chess in Art blogs, starting here, because they enjoyed a nice game of chess, especially between friends, Marcel Duchamp included.

Last year, in Chess in Art Postscript: The Significance of Seeing Ernst we noted that the sole survivor of the group, Dorothea Tanning, was then 99. Here she is a few years before, when a sprightly 80 year-old. She is about to spot the deliberate mistake and set the board up right.

Dorothea Tanning in 1990.

"Primitive Seating in front of chess set".

Photo by Wolfgang Wesener.

When she was "only" 91, she was referred to, a little ungallantly perhaps, as the "the oldest living surrealist". Ms. Tanning has continued to wear the accolade with pride: she turned 100 on the 25th August just gone. So: Congratulations, and Many Happy Returns.

This post, on our chess blog, makes a modest contribution to the celebration of this long-lived and prolific artist, designer, illustrator, poet, writer and sociable chess lover. We start with the relationship that centred her life for over 30 years, with Dada-cum-Surrealist Max Ernst.
In 1942 Ernst, already established and in his 50s, was scouting for talent for an exhibition of women artists and, as she recounts in her biography happily titled "Birthday"(1986), he noticed a chess photograph in her studio. "Ah, you play chess...let's have a game" and they played "frantic chess" for days. He moved in; four years later they married; they were together for 30 more years until he died in 1976. She wrote, about that first chessic encounter, "There is something voluptuous, close to the bone about chess". Surreal paradox. Erotic allusion. Fleshy trope. Sadly, we don't talk about the game like that down at the club.

On the cusp of 1944/5 gallerist Julien Levy organised six of his friends and associates to challenge George Koltanowski to a blindfold simul. It was part of Levy's "The Images of Chess" exhibition which married his two obsessions: chess and Surrealism. Chess sets, boards and tables were designed, art works created, and music composed (see Chess in Art Postscript: Exhibitionism). Dorothea notes en passant, that Julien Levy "was deadly serious about chess, and as we didn't play with a clock, a single brain-cudgeling parti with him could last for days".

Perhaps Kolty, playing blindfold, was happy the sets were out of sight: a jamboree of Totemic Ernsts, a Modernist Bauhaus and, to make up the numbers, some Classic Stauntons. Marcel Duchamp played out Kolty's moves (they'd met before, when Marcel beat him, in 15 moves, in the Paris International tournament of 1929), and K. triumphed emphatically: Maestro 6.5 v 0.5 Équipe Surréaliste.
Dorothea collaged a composite picture of the occasion. She sits one along from Ernst on the right. He plays a set of his own design, she has a more conventional model (full line up in Note 1).

Dorothea Tanning.

Chess Tournament at the Julien Levy Gallery. 6th January 1945.

Collage with three photographs by Julien Levy.

Collection of the artist.

When war broke out, Ernst, German by birth, had been living in France with Leonora Carrington (another Surrealist, born in England in 1917, and also happily still with us, but in Mexico). He was anti-Nazi; they had deemed his art "degenerate". Occupied France was too dangerous, and aided in Lisbon by his new lover Peggy Guggenheim (known best for her art collecting; and her affairs) they escaped to New York, and married in late 1941. But it was to be short-lived after he crossed Dorothea's threshold the following year (it's OK, Peggy found solace in Samuel Beckett - also a chess player - among others).

This sets the scene for her artistic contribution to Levy's show, "Endgame".

Dorothea Tanning.

Endgame. 1944.

Private Collection.

Larry List and Yves Marek (see acknowledgements) have interpreted the chess clues in the picture roughly as follows: the White Queen, in shoe disguise, manoeuvres around the King's side before emerging out of the darkness to climb the g1-a7 diagonal. She zaps the bishop's mitre, and deforms the board on c5, in the blood-red zone. It represents, they say, the artist's frustration with conventional attitudes to her live-in life with older, thrice married Ernst, who would finally manage to divorce Guggenheim in 1946. The fall-out from trouncing this narrow-mindedness would be the space of peace, harmony and light on the first rank, queen's side.

I'd like to add my two-penceworth: the show-down of the Queen/shoe and Bishop wittily takes place on the Queen's Bishop's file. Also, for my money, the shoe has a Knight's profile (think sea-horse), for which the heel is the snout. So it could be a White Knight/Queen amalgam in which Max and Dorothea are fighting as one (1. Q&NxBc5 - their favourite move?). Moreover there is a bishop double meaning: in French the "Bishop" piece is called a fou, also "mad" or "crazy". Maybe that's just a happy coincidence; but we can be sure that the artist would have been aware of the pun.

Max Ernst in a Blue Boat. 1947.

Mutual chess references abound in their work, as in the above portrait of Max, where they have a board aboard (my clunking word play; Ms. Tanning, I think I'm right in saying, has worked-in some rather more subtle references to his art). And there's Ernst's own The King Playing with His Queen, which was created in the same period (His Queen is of course she herself, borrowed from his designer chess set).

Ms. Tanning's autobiography was subsequently amplified into "Between Lives" (2001). It mentions chess a number of times in later years, including when she and Max "....played for two days non-stop with two Duchamps" - that's Marcel and Teeny - and also when, sometime in the 60s, the same four spectated at a Congress in Monte Carlo: "Equal time was spent watching the greats and playing our own boards".
There were Congresses in Monte in 1967, 68 and 69; won respectively by Fischer, Larsen and Portisch/Smyslov. It's not clear which one she is referring to, but it's a delicious thought that these grandmasters of the plastic arts would have been watching, and savouring, the art of the GMs of chess. One feels sure that Smyslov, with his musical gifts would have appreciated it, Portisch and Larsen, too; but rough-neck Bobby? (But see Note 2.)

Ernst died in 1976, and so Ms. Tanning has since spent as many years again without him. Happily she found another partner, Jimmy Merrill, a poet, though he too succumbed. She observes that she has outlived so many of her contemporaries. After Max, chess features less frequently in her biography, but the game yet provided a useful metaphor to embellish her telling (in English) of an eyebrow-raising episode in her home in France. It was occasioned by her housekeeper's lover, and would have made an interesting French exchange as he (no spring chicken) tried to solicit Dorothea's help in procuring a female play-mate for his lady so as to enjoy some hanky-panky (ooh la la!), voyeuristically à deux, or peut-être communally à trois:

""I thought there might, perhaps, be someone in your circle. Oh, I would be present of course." And as he murmured these words his gaze moved like a chesspiece to the square on the wall above us where hung my painting Family Portrait, a handsome (I thought) drift of nudes." (Note 3.)

Before we close this hommage it's worth noting that there are several works of Ms Tanning's in the UK, including this one owned by the Tate.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. 1943

Tate Gallery.

This haunted psychodrama is, admittedly, not played out on a chess board; though that paranoiac miasma, that contextual displacement: it's like you feel when you're losing. By the bye, the sunflower is rather like one in my neighbour's garden; the one that pretends it's not watching me.

Her later styles included soft, fetishistic sculptures, sometimes in complex mis en scène (for a taster, see the Wolfgang Wesener photo at the top), and paintings of imaginary flowers. But they, together with her poetry, would take us too far afield, except to note that a Guardian review of her first novel Chasm: a Weekend, published when she was 94 (!) says she "moves her characters like chess pieces....who will be sacrificed?...who will win?". Which is a more perspicacious compliment than the reviewer may have realised.
To sum it all up, if that's possible: what a wonderfully rich artistic achievement over such a long life: Happy One Hundredth Birthday, Dorothea, and may you play many more games of chess.

Notes1. For the full list of works see The Imagery of Chess Revisited. List (and Tanning, in Between Lives) gives the players as follows, from left to right: vacant Staunton set (presumably Julien Levy's - he is taking the photos); Frederick Kiesler (who got the draw); George Koltanowski (back turned); Alfred Barr Jr (playing Ernst's 1944 Wood Chess set on his Strategic Value Chess board); Marcel Duchamp (standing, back turned); Xanti Schawinski (on Hartwig's Bauhaus Prototype set); Vittorio Rieti (on another Ernst set and board version 2); Dorothea Tanning (Staunton set and board on top of Noguchi's chess table); Ernst (playing, of course, on one of his own sets).

2. A passage from Francis Naumann (2009) may, repeat may, shed some light, leaving aside his assessment of Teeny as "an exceptionally strong player". He mentions that in the late 60's the Duchamps once acted as tournament chaperone to Fischer. So, if Duchamp knew Fischer, might they not have gone out of their way to Monte Carlo to see him in '67? If so, did Dorothea meet Bobby? If so, did he like her pictures? So many "ifs". If she reads this, could she let us know!
3. Although the "handsome drift of nudes" is reproduced in Between Lives, sadly I've not been able to find a postable version.
Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Dorothea Tanning Collection and Archive for their help, and permision to use Endgame and the Chess Tournament pictures, and for the link to WoWe.
Thanks to Wolfgang Wesener for the use of the Dorothea at 80 photo.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusic is in Tate Modern. It is not on display at the time of writing, but two other of her works are: A Mi-Voix , and Some Roses and Their Phantoms.
Larry List (ed). The Imagery of Chess Revisited (2005). George Braziller, Publishers. New York. Yves Marek. Art èchecs et mat (2008). Imprimerie Nationale. Paris.
Francis Naumann. Marcel Duchamp - The Art of Chess (2009). Readymade Press. New York.
Dorothea Tanning. Birthday (1986). The Lapis Press. San Francisco.
Dorothea Tanning. Between Lives (2001). Northwestern University Press, Evanson, Illinois.

Chess in Art Index

My favourite moves XII

Reshevsky-Petrosian

Candidates' tournament, Zurich 1953

25...Re6!!

Black has a difficult position. White's centre pawns look ready to advance and sweep everything from their path, supported as they are by well posted pieces. Black's pieces are cramped on the back three rows. His main strength lies in the queenside pawns. For the moment the enemy centre pawns have a black square orientation which suggests that it would be well to blockade them by a knight on d5. But this post cannot be reached as the square e7 is occupied by a rook. Well then, give up the rook so that the knight can reach d5 and be supported by a pawn on e6.

Kotov, Play Like A Grandmaster, Batsford, 1978

I was musing about this series: there's something odd about the selection, and it's not just that the first nine moves selected were all played by Black. It may be, also, that only two of the moves have involved moving a piece into the opponent's half of the board. Or that only three, before this one, have been sacrifices.

This is a collection of favourite moves, not of "best" moves, and "favourite" need have no identifiable criteria. Even so, there may be some accounting for individual taste. So what is there in this, say, that appeals to me more than any number of famous mating attacks? Possibly I have a notion that attractive, dazzling even, though a mating attack may be, there is a kind of mystery only to be found elsewhere, in other aspects of the game. The attack may well be brilliant, but when one is attacking, one is looking for a mating attack - even if the actual means by which that mate is found is unexpected.

This move of Petrosian's is, at least, a sacrifice. But the most unexpected of sacrifices. The most counter-intuitive. Tony Miles is quoted as saying "the most important trait a player needs is a warped sense of humour", and while Petrosian might have claimed he found the rook move purely by applying logic - "iron logic", says Bronstein - and chess principles, I think it might take another human quality or two, above and beyond that, to find a move like this. One of which might be a sense of the perverse.

I mean surely it is White, not Black, who might be looking to sacrifice the exchange here? You would surely think that Black, already under pressure, can't afford to give White material as well, except in desperation. Yet a few moves after this bizarre, apparently passive move, the position was equal, the exchange was returned and a draw was agreed at the time control.

Crouch (How To Defend in Chess) isn't completely convinced. He gives the potential line 28.Rf3 Nd5 29.Qd2, on which my unimpressed computer improves with 29.Qc1!, directed against 29...b4. It thus prefers 28...b4, and though it likes 29.d5 Nxd5 30.Qxc4 for White, it seems to me quite possible that after 30...Qxa4 Black may hold.


Moreover, as Crouch himself adds

...this should not be taken to imply that Petrosian's sacrifice was "unsound" or "psychological", since he would have been flattened if he had not given up the exchange.

I'd add that there are some sort of moves one finds because there is no alternative other than immediate defeat: but this was not so here. Other plausible moves existed. The astonishing thing is that Petrosian found this one plausible too. Kasparov's greatest moves, I could never hope to calculate. Petrosian's, though, I would never contemplate.

Petrosian considered it "a move so simple, there could be no doubt of its correctness". That translation, from Petrosian's Legacy, appears in Watson's Secrets Of Modern Chess Strategy: in Beliavsky and Mikhalchishin's Secrets Of Chess Intuition (translated by Gavin Lock) it is rendered rather differently: "as far as the idea is simple, it should also be correct". Whichever way you prefer it, it prompts the thought that this is what a genius is - someone who perceives something that is beyond the rest of us, and shows it to be simple. Gravity is a simple idea, simply explained, simply understood. But who, before Newton, perceived it?

There are some masterpieces which have been devalued by computers. This is not one of them. Even at 17-ply, my computer doesn't place the move in its top twenty. Perhaps it is, then, a move rooted in human perversity rather than sheer logic. Watson calls it a "creative sacrifice". He adds:

I don't believe this would have been played by another player in Petrosian's time, and probably by precious few today.

Nor by a computer - and surely nobody would play like this if they had not learned how to. From Petrosian.

[Favourite moves index]

The Interesting French Exchange XIII

1. e4!
I usually play 1. d4, but I took this decision because I knew that against 1. e4 my opponent always chooses the French Defence, which is also part of my repertoire.

1... e6
Now I do not care about the colour of my pieces!

Viktor Moskalenko: The Flexible French, New in Chess 2008

If I recall correctly Botvinnik counselled against letting our opponents play our favourite defences against us. Still, with due respect to Mikhail Moiseyevich, I have to say I'm with Moskalenko on this one.

I rarely play kings' pawn openings these days so I don't often get the White side of a French Defence any more, but if I know my opponent will answer 1. ... e6 I'll very likely switchback to 1. e4 just for that game. It doesn't always work out - in JB v Peter Lalic, Surrey League 2009 I managed to both mix up my move order and blunder a piece within minutes of the start - but usually I get the sense that I have more of a clue as to what's going on than is typically the case when I try to play chess.

For example, I had this game a couple of years ago:-

White to play
JB v AN Other
Slater-Kennington 2008

I'd reached similar positions previously, but never this exact one. Black's 10. ... f6 had surprised me a little and at first, try as I might, I couldn't find a way to prevent my centre collapsing after something like 11. ... fxe5, 12. fxe5 cxd4, 13. Nxd4 Ndxe5. Eventually I remembered an idea from a line in the Winawer I used to play as Black where White plays exf6 at a certain point then follows up by supporting his f-pawn with his g-pawn.

After 11. exf6 Qxf6, 12. g3 I'd expected mass exchanges on d4 and a decent endgame for me, but instead my opponent pushed his pawn to c4. I had considered this response but had dismissed without too much thought because it seemed to me that pushing the c-pawn, as is usually the case with this kind of French structure, releases all the pressure from White's centre and Black's queenside play will take far too long to organise to be genuinely threatening. As it happens, that turned out to be a pretty accurate assessment and I won the game by hammering away down the e-file and the h3-e6 diagonal. 1-0 to JB, then, the point courtesy of a familiarity with such positions gained by defending the French rather than attacking it.

Not your author's finest hour

Perhaps, though, there are some amongst our esteemed and valued readership who are currently thinking, "This is all very well but it's got jigger all to do with the French Exchange." Well, as Jules might say, allow me to retort ...

Last week, the Ginger GM's newly released Killer French DVDs dropped into my letter box. I'll have more to say about them in due course, but, for now, suffice to say I did what any right-thinking person would do when provided with some new material on the French Defence: I immediately looked up what Williams has to say about the Exchange.

I soon discovered that Williams recommends answering 4. Bd3 with … c5; good news for those of us who’ve been thinking about playing IQP set-ups for some time now. Pasting in some analysis around Korchnoi’s famous battering of Tatai at Beersheva, 1978, [TIFE IV - a game mentioned by our regular visitor Mike G in the comments box to the original TIFE] he is convincing when he suggests that Black’s activity more than compensates for the pawn weakness.

TIFE theory: White to play

I was also pleased to see some time allocated to 4. c4. It’s a move that is sometimes rather neglected in opening books, particularly older monographs, but, in my experience, it’s one of White’s most popular choices at club level. Juniors, especially, seem fond of playing this way: when I was playing the French exclusively against 1. e4 I seemed to be having a munchkin playing 4. c4 against me every couple of months or so.

TIFE theory: Black to play

Anyhoo, have another look at the two diagrams for a moment. The bishop is a little misplaced in diagram one. What if White decides to use his extra move to improve his wayward piece, say by moving it to b5? This could be straightaway with check or perhaps later on to pin a knight on c6. The result, clearly, is diagram two with colours reversed if Black plays a quick ... Bb4+ there (as Williams suggests he should).

So Williams’ recommendation against 4. Bd3 could lead Black to play the French Exchange himself! Not so much "Now I do not care about the colour of my pieces" as "now I don't care about the side of this I take."

I suppose you could say that this is not the same thing at all. The French Exchange could be considered progress for Black (=+ to =) but a retrograde step for White (+= to =). Even so, you don't get positions that you can play with either colour and from either side of the board very often. To my eyes that's something interesting. Very interesting.