De Mooi the merrier

I still remember the first time I went to London, as a lad, to see a band: it was at the old Hammersmith Odeon. I can still remember the seat number on the ticket and everything: I can also, regrettably, recall that the band was Status Quo, my musical tastes having changed a little in the subsequent thirty years. (Perhaps more than the band themselves have changed. I was amused to note that their Wikipedia page uses the term "currently" in relation to the year 2008, which will surprise many of their fans....who may think we are still in 1975. Not that this site has any problem with nostalgia items.) They were probably on one of their innumerable farewell tours, even then, when I saw them back in February 1981.

For some reason this came to mind when it came to my attention that another old rocker will be starting a UK tour next week - beginning, coincidentally, thirty years to the day since I saw the Quo. Compère, acting in (as I understand it) a personal capacity, is the estimable CJ de Mooi, ECF President and star of Eggheads. It looks like both Nosher and CJ are branching out into exciting new directions, and we wish them well.

I notice that CJ is, in fact, revamping his website, and the new format, while attractive, doesn't, yet, have quite the detail of the old one, parts of which you can see below. (Click to enlarge.)

This is unfortunate, though no doubt it will be rectified soon, as it previously enabled us to read details of CJ's pre-Eggheads career, when he was a young actor with a role in Threads

and then, after a number of years in modelling:

"the acclaimed Zimbabwe miniseries Heat Of The Sun and the popular science fiction series Bugs".

It's a shame to lose this information, albeit only temporarily, since other sources seem to lack it: notably a resource I previously considered authoritative, the Internet Movie Database. Oddly, that site's records appear to be incomplete, since looking all the full cast and crew lists of the three shows listed - Threads, Bugs and Heat Of The Sun - I cannot find CJ listed.

Now obviously I'm aware that CJ de Mooi is not his birth name, and was apparently coined, by himself, "when he first reached adulthood":

he decided he wanted to make a name for himself, and he started by doing just that – literally. He made up the name Connagh-Joseph de Mooi, the last bit being Dutch for "the pretty one".

although he was still competing in quizzes as Joseph Connagh as late as 2000, after Heat of the Sun and Bugs (both unmentioned here). Still, no Joseph Connagh is mentioned in the cast lists either.

Never mind, one can use as many names as one likes - the present writer certainly has - and presumably, if we search for people who were involved in both Bugs and Heat Of The Sun, we will find CJ somewhere. Though I do not think that he is Hugh Bonneville, nor Flora Montgomery, and the other five people listed are not actors.

It's a mystery. But IMDB is not perfect: and if and when it is updated, then CJ's career as a television and even a film actor (as his Twitter bio used to say)

will, at last, be properly acknowledged.

[Thanks to Tom, Jonathan and Sean for various help with this]

[Nosher index]

[CJ index]

Keene's Move

Click for a closer look

Keene's Gambit
Ray Keene Index

Almost Here . . .

. . . the chess movie we've all been waiting for. Mate:

Two former world chess champions battle wits to determine the greatest champion in history. After one is mysteriously killed, the other is unsuspectingly catapulted into a deadly conspiracy that he must win on and off the board if he is to escape the same fate.

Chess Pub: A Review (Part II)

After a week away to ponder the state of chess journalism, today sees the completion of my review of Chess Pub, the chess theory website.   Consider TIFE XIV and Part I the preamble and general overview respectively and this post a more detailed look at the Chess Pub world.  Indulge me for a moment, though.  I want to begin with a conversation that I witnessed several years ago:-

5 year old boy: Mum, I need some crisps.

Mother: You don’t need some crisps, you want some crisps.

The mum – a friend of mine – then turned to me and explained to me that she was trying to teach her son the difference between needing something and wanting it. “Good luck with that”, I thought but didn’t say, “I’ve got thirty years on the nipper and I still struggle to distinguish one from the other.”

Not much has changed since then. As I write these very words, for example, I’m sitting in Earl Grey and Rose, just over the road from Streatham Hill station, enjoying a cup of tea and eyeing-up the cakes they have on the counter. There’s a layer cake (heavy on the icing), a lemon drizzle and at least three different kinds of cupcake up there. All of them look extremely tasty; all of them I want; none of them can I, in any way, claim will do me much good.

As it happens this is also pretty much how I see Chess Pub - a tasty cake that I want, but don't need.  In what follows I'll try to justify that position, for the most part referring to the website's French Defence section for the simple reason that that's the one that I've looked at most closely.  Initially I'll look at the Chess Pub archive and updates then move on to consider the question of whether internet based products like this one mean the end of books and DVDs.  Hopefully, what I have to say will be relevant to people who are considering subscribing to other areas and not just those who like to play ... e6 in response to 1 e4.


THE ARCHIVE

As I mentioned two weeks ago, Chess Pub first opened its doors more than a decade ago its archive of annotated games has grown into something quite substantial. At the time of writing some 1,338 annotated games are available in The French section alone.

1,000+ games is all very well, but it won’t do you much good if they’re all in lines that don’t interest you. After checking out the French Exchange, the first thing I did was have a look at what material they had on some of the variations that have caught my eye of late.

First I took a look at a sharp line recommended for Black by Simon Williams in the DVD on the French that he released last year (reviewed here).

Winawer Poisoned Pawn: 12 ...d4!?

… Bd7 is probably the traditional mainline, but 12 … d4 seemed the perfect place to begin. It’s one of those lines that can be completely destroyed (or rehabilitated) by a single new move, and since Kamsky played it in a couple of super-GM tournaments at the beginning of last year, it’s become highly fashionable.

You’d have to wonder about the value of a website dedicated to opening theory if it didn’t have much material devoted to this line. In the Chess Pub archive, though, I found 62 games that followed the main lines and no fewer than 14 games in this newer variation, many of which were played recently (6 from 2010 and 5 from 2009).

Next I checked out a basic variation in the Advance - 1 e4 e6, 2 d4 d5, 3 e5 c5, 4 c3 Nc6, 5 Nf3 Qb6, 6 a3 Nh6, 7 b4 cxd4, 8 cxd4 Nf5, 9 Bb2 Bd7 - as seen in Duffer’s Delight III, and found 11 games.

After that, I wondered what I'd find if I decided that as well as the Winawer I wanted to be able to play some safer lines with 3 … Nf6, basing my repertoire, say, on Watson’s recommendations in Play the French 3 (Everyman, 2003). Would Chess Pub help with that?

1 e4 e6, 2 d4 d5, 3 Nc3 Nf6, 4 e5 Nfd7, 5 f4 c5, 6 Nf3 Nc6, 7 Be3 cxd4, 8 Nxd4 Bc5, 9 Qd2 O-O, 10 O-O-O a6 – 28 games (3 from 2010, 3 from 2009 and 13 in total played after PtF was published).

1 e4 e6, 2 d4 d5, 3 Nc3 Nf6, 4 Bg5 dxe4, 5 Nxe4 Be7, 6 Bxf6 Bxf6 – 22 games (0 from 2010, 2 from 2009 and a dozen played post PtF).

Finally, I checked out Moskalenko’s “Black Queen Blues”, 1 e4 e6, 2 d4 d5, 3 Nc3 Bb4, 4 e5 c5, 5 a3 Bxc3+, 6 bxc3 Qa5 !?, as used by Shulman to beat Nakamura at the American Championships last May - 18 games (3 2010, 4 2009)

and the Fort Knox Defence, 1 e4 e6, 2 d4 d5, 3 Nc3/Nd2 dxe4 4 Nxe4 Bd7 – 43 games (no fewer than 10 played by Neil McDonald but none since 2008).

The coverage seems to be pretty broad, then, with the numbers I found indicating a policy of putting the most focus on the most fashionable variations at any given time. Perhaps for that reason there are some lines that didn’t seem to get much attention at all.  For example, there are just four games that feature 1 e4 e6, 2 d4 d5, 3 Nd2 c5, 4 exd5 exd5, 5 Ngf3 Nc6, the old-fashioned way for Black to answer the Tarrasch, and a mere three that begin 1 e4 e6, 2 d3 d5, 3 Nd2.

In my experience The King’s Indian Attack is played rather frequently at club level, but, given that its popularity is out of all proportion to its theoretical status, it’s probably no surprise that it doesn’t get much attention on Chess Pub. It’s a shame that there aren’t more of those IQP Tarrasch positions, though. To be fair, it’s hardly all the rage either at higher-levels and many amateur chessers don’t like it because it’s perceived to be a bit dull, so I can see why there aren’t many to be found.

Dull? Dunno. Is it isolated?

These reservations aside, it seems to me that the coverage for most branches of the French Defence is very good. Indeed, I would say that anybody who wants to punt the sharper lines of the sort recommended by Williams on The Killer French should probably consider a Chess Pub subscription to be an essential purchase.

Consider the diagram above that shows the position as Black plays 12 … d4. You get to this by

1 e4 e6, 2 d4 d5, 3 Nc3 Bb4, 4 e5 c5, 5 a3 Bxc3+, 6 bxc3 Ne7, 7 Qg4 Qc7, 8 Qxg7 Rg8, 9 Qxh7 cxd4, 10 Ne2 Nc6, 11 f4 dxc3, 12 Qd3

Williams, for example, looks at 12 h4 as an alternative for White but not 12 Nxc3. It looks funny (“What's this? Hasn't this been refuted long ago?” – John Watson on Chess Pub) but in fact it doesn’t just drop a piece to … Nxe5 and Chess Pub has three games in which it was tried in 2010 including one by Shirov and one by Karjakin. This last one is particularly interesting because it was played against Sutovsky who (a) was rated 2660 at the time, and (b) has worked with Kamsky in the past and may well have helped him prepare the line for his World Championship eliminator match against Topalov. If Karjakin was prepared to employ 12 Nxc3 in such an encounter it’s clearly an idea worthy of attention.

There is also the obvious advantage that Chess Pub includes games played after Williams’ DVD was released. One line given on the Killer French ends in this position,

Winawer Poisoned Pawn Theory
White to play

with Black said to have “a very good game.” In the most recent update Watson includes the following game in which a near 2600 GM goes down against a player 200 points below him on the rating list.

Not that I think Chess Pub makes Williams’ DVD redundant. I shall have more to say about the use of the archive as a standalone resource a little later. In the meantime suffice to say that, all things considered, I feel that for the French section at least, the archive alone is worth the price (£12) of a subscription.


THE UPDATES

The updates for each section are simply more of the same. Not that is in any way a bad thing. Typically eight to ten games will be analysed, some with other complete games included in the notes. From time to time older encounters will be looked at – e.g. some of Simon Williams’ recent update on the Classical Dutch for Chess Pub’s ‘Daring Defences’ section – but for the most part the selections are topical. Watson’s January update for the French includes Caruana-Short played at Reggio Emilia just before New Year’s Eve and even Smeets-Ponomariov, who’d met at Wijk aan Zee literally days before the update appeared, makes it in.

Nosher’s game, by the way, appeared shortly after I’d lamented the lack of the IQP Tarrasch games in the Chess Pub Forum. That was, I’m sure, a coincidence, but interaction with subscribers is encouraged, and authors often take a look at certain positions at the direct request of subscribers.

All in all, given that a year’s subscription will bring you 12 x eight (or more) annotated games, i.e. 96 in total, the cost seems pretty reasonable when compared to the price of a chess book or a DVD. All the more so when you consider that you get access to that section’s archive too.


THE END OF BOOKS AND DVDS?

If Chess Pub is so great, you might be wondering, does it mean I don’t have to buy books and/or DVDs anymore? The answer to that, I think, is ‘no’. Learning an opening from scratch using this website alone could be quite tricky for two reasons.

Firstly, there’s just so much material available it’s not necessarily going to be easy to navigate your way through it unless you already have some idea of what you’re looking for it. Also, when you search for games that begin from a particular position you can be sure that the computer will spit plenty out, but they won’t necessarily have appeared in the updates in the order that they were played. While this isn’t necessarily disastrous, it takes some work to check that the comments to any given game haven’t been superseded by something that came along later.

Secondly, some basic knowledge is taken for granted by the section authors. This position,

Slav Theory
Black to play

comes from one of the Slav main lines. In all the games in the Chess Pub database, Black continues with … 0-0. If you are new to this line, though, you're first thought might be to wonder why you can’t grab a pawn by taking on c3 and then on e4. The answer is that ever since Kasparov-Bareev, Tilburg 1991 it’s been thought keeping Black’s king in the centre with Ba3 gives White more than enough compensation.

Even if it rarely appears in GM encounters these days, understanding – or at least knowing of – this pawn sac is really rather necessary to justify both sides’ play in this line, but Chess Pub won’t tell you about it. Neither, incidentally, does it mention the fact that, club players often play … 0-0 before … Nbd7 to avoid those forced drawing lines that result from Qb3 and Qxb7 a few moves before the diagram position.

For these reasons, then, I think Chess Pub will work best as a supplement to existing sources rather than a complete replacement for them.


PROBLEMS?

Is there a downside to Chess Pub? I have a few minor quibbles, but that is all.

Firstly, although you can view/play through the games and analysis online, you lose access to this facility when your subscription expires. You’ll probably get most out of Chess Pub if you have a database to store and sort the games, but, that said, I know my fellow blogger EJH manages to be a happy subscriber without (yet) handing over any Euros to Fred Friedel.

Secondly, in the past there has been the occasional issue of updates for some sections being delivered several months late. Clearly for a website that is supposed to be a topical resource, this would a significant problem. Happily, at the moment all sections seem to be on schedule with many updates being delivered in the early days of the month.

Finally, when exploring the archive for games played in the Dutch Defence, I noticed quite a few that were not actually annotated. These seem to stem from the time when Jon Tisdall was in charge of that section. There’s literally not a single note or variation given, just a few lines of introduction at the beginning.

I don’t know how many of the 16,000 games in the database as a whole are like this. It’s probably not that many; the real issue is that the quality your subscription will vary according who the author of the section is.

Subscribers interested in the French Defence have been lucky to have Neil McDonald and now John Watson as their guides. Similarly, if, say, I was interested in the Dragon, I’d want Chris Ward and Corporal Jones to be around to explain it to me. For the other sections, though, I don’t know enough about the individual authors to be able to make a judgement as to how good their work for Chess Pub is likely to be.

photograph from RAW Baking

All in all, I find Chess Pub to be a very good, value-for-money resource for anybody interested in keeping up with the developments in opening theory in their favourite lines. The only thing you can say against it is that you almost certainly don’t really need it.

Everybody knows that, save for those higher up the ladder, improvements in results are much more likely to be achieved by building up our middlegame and endgame skills: enhancing our tactical ability, gaining an understanding of a broader range of positional themes, learning how to mate with bishop and knight against king and so forth. These are the things that will really help.

Books on the opening might be the most popular amongst us amateurs, but they don’t necessarily do us much good do they? In my own games I tend to play folk up in the 150 to 170 ECF Grade range (around 1850 to 2000 elo range) and sometimes up to around 180/190 (2100+). Only rarely do I face what the books say are the most testing lines.

Why bother learning the theory if you never get a chance to play it? Well, it’s not for everybody, but a lot of people – myself included – find keeping abreast of theoretical developments interesting in and of itself. There’s also the obvious point that playing through master games in your favourite lines is likely to help your understanding of kind of structures and themes that arise in those openings.

Ultimately, while we might not need all that stuff on the opening that we buy, if we’re going to shell out money anyway we might as well get something good. Chess Pub is that alright. It’s not necessary, but I do want it. In fact, I’ve just gone ahead and bought myself a one-year subscription to the French section and now, review written, I think I’ll have that cake too. Lemon Drizzle will do nicely.

Every Picture Tells A Story: Hereford Ho!

Blog 5 in a series of collaborative posts. This one by Martin Smith, with comments by Richard Tillett.

In our last episode Richard didn’t buy a painting of the gentlemen chessers of Hereford that probably wasn’t by Thomas Leeming. This time the Institute of Thomas Leeming Studies is off on its first field trip. We are going to Hereford City Art Gallery to see their version of the picture which, we are confident, is definitely by the man himself. As we explained in an earlier blog, we discovered the existence of this painting while trying to trace the whereabouts of the “Greenlees” version. Yes, it is all a bit confusing and we get them muddled up too.

En route Richard muses on what might have been at the Christie’s auction a week or so before, and how he is now rather relieved that he didn’t shell out £2k+ on a picture that wasn’t, to borrow a phrase our Thomas might have used, up to snuff.

With a bit of time to spare before our appointment with Catherine Willson at the Gallery we check out the Cathedral. We hope we might chance upon Leeming’s 1816 portrait of the Reverend J. Russell, who was sometime Canon there. We knew about this picture from our research at the Royal Academy, but didn’t know its current whereabouts. Leeming, we had established, was primarily a portrait miniaturist who exhibited over twenty works in the RA Summer Exhibitions in the ten or so years up to 1822, when he suddenly stopped. We hope we might one day get to the bottom of this seemingly abrupt end to his career.

A Royal Academy exhibition at Somerset House in 1800, by Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Charles Pugin.

The Reverend Russell declines to reveal himself, and we press on to the Gallery where Catherine welcomes us. Eagerly we go to the picture store to see the Gents picture, and very fine it looks too, knocking the Christie’s version into a cocked hat, to borrow yet another phrase that Thomas might have used.

We show Catherine our reproductions of the “Greenlees” version and the Christie’s curiosity. Even if two of the images were only print-outs, maybe it is the first time all three have been together in one room. Anywhere. Ever. A small bit of History is made.

In-store at Hereford Art Gallery.

Reproduced by kind permission of Hereford Museum and Art Gallery.
Herefordshire Heritage Services ©

Although it’s a bit dark and maybe could do with a clean, the Hereford version shows clarity, confidence, and skill. No iffy hands, dodgy perspective or wobbly niches here. It is seven miniature portraits, eight if you include the dog, arranged to show off everyone at their best.

The picture over the fire-place catches our eye. It appears in the “Greenlees” version as well. It’s a view of the Cathedral, with Hereford’s very own Nelson’s Column in the foreground. The Column was erected in 1809 as a local monument to the hero of Trafalgar but the money ran out and they never got to put a Nelson on top. So the great man is represented by an, ahem, urn.

A picture within a picture.
The cathedral, with Hereford’s Nelson-less Column in the foreground.
(The real thing is a bit clearer than this).

But is this a miniature copy of a real painting we wonder, or did Leeming cook it up for the occasion? Another little mystery to solve, along with a bigger one: if that’s a “portrait” of a real room, where was it?

Now comes the best bit. Catherine says that the Gallery had the picture re-lined sometime after acquiring it in the 1940s and had the foresight to photograph the original lining on the back of the picture before it was destroyed.

The back of the picture before it was relined....almost as interesting as the front.

Photo courtesy of Hereford Art Gallery.

It’s a revelation. Not only can we see a list of the sitters (in what we have since satisfied ourselves is the artist’s own handwriting), we are also able to confirm their positions in the composition, the date of the painting (1815), and that it was indeed painted by Leeming (we know that from the “Pinx^t” after his name). The picture has a simple title, “Hereford Chess Club”, in contrast to the “Greenlees” title which is more expansive “Portraits of the Gentlemen of the Hereford Chess Society”. There is also the fascinating snippet of information that Hereford Chess Club was established on the 29 November 1812.

So this is more than just an interesting picture – it’s a piece of chess history. Here is documentation of the date of formation of what may be one of the earliest chess clubs in the land. We wonder if the gents at the present day Hereford Chess Club know that they have a bicentennial coming up in 2012.

Thomas Leeming, you rascal – what have you got us into? Now we have to investigate the origin of chess clubs. That’s along with unearthing the biographical dates of the artist himself, and solving the riddles of why he stopped painting in 1822 and why he painted this picture at least twice. We also have to track down the “Greenlees” version, locate the room, tell the stories of the people in the painting and the pictures on the walls and find out who owned them. Questions, questions, and more questions! The Institute of Thomas Leeming Studies has a rosy future.

But there is something else stuck on the back: a label from the art dealers Agnew’s, who sold the picture to the Gallery. It has what looks like a stock number that could be a lead to who owned the picture before it came to the Hereford gallery. Richard will follow this up back in London.

Surely this is enough excitement in one day for two London chessers far away from home. But no! Your intrepid bloggers call in at the local library to look at the volumes of the Hereford Journal dating back to the time when the pictures were painted. Edwin Goode Wright, the player in the foreground making the move, was its editor – surely he’d have reported the chess club and its formation as he was there when it happened. Alas, a quick search reveals nothing about the inauguration of the Chess Club, nor the painting, nor anything about Thomas Leeming. Then, as now, chess wasn't news.

Better luck at the excellent Herefordshire Record Office (pausing at Castle Green on the way to admire Nelson’s Column and the Cathedral framed by the trees)...

...where we find a reference to Thomas Leeming’s marriage to Mary Link on the 22 April 1817 in the parish church of Hereford, St. Peter’s. Is this the first step in reconstructing the biography of our artist, and putting some flesh back on his bones?

And so back to London, with a long To Do List and a pesky parking ticket. Read about the next leg of our adventure on the 26th February.

Acknowledgements.
Thanks again to Catherine Willson, Collections Officer: Fine and Decorative Arts, Hereford Heritage Services.
Royal Academy for the Rowlandson.
Herefordshire Council for the view across Castle Green.

Every Picture Tells A Story Index
Chess in Art Index

A Phailure Of Imagination

Last month ESPN published an extraordinary article about the Ugandan teenager Phiona Mutesi, who played in the Khanty-Mansiysk Olympiad. It is a long time since I read anything quite so interesting about chess: longer still since I read anything so interesting about chess written predominantly for a non-chess audience.

Like many articles written by those who do not actually play, the story contained not only some errors, but tended to over-rate substantially the strength of its subject. Some problems with the story were highlighted by Dylan Loeb McClain in the New York Times, who cast doubt on the description of Mutesi as a "prodigy", observing, quite reasonably, that her age might well be greater than the fourteen officially attributed to her, and that her actual playing strength is not particularly high.

He's right on both counts, as he would have been right to note, among other things, that that article uses "matches" where it should use games and mistakes Fool's Mate for Scholar's Mate. For my part, I'd forgive the use of "prodigy" in this instance: a prodigy doesn't have to be a Mozart, and anybody who has got as far as Mutesi, from where she began, has achieved something extraordinary. For that matter, I'd also forgive the mistakes in the piece, simply because the piece itself is so engaging that its errors are insubstantial in comparison.

Talking of comparisons, if we wanted a piece without the sort of mistakes that a chess specialist would never make, you'd want a chess specialist to write it, wouldn't you? And would that have been impossible? After all, where were the world's chess press while Tom Crothers was writing about Phiona Mutesi?

The answer is that they were in Khanty-Mansiysk. In the same town as Mutesi and her interviewer. Attending the same event, perhaps even stepping into the same playing hall, perhaps even staying in the same hotel.

How long were they there? For two weeks. What did they do while they were there? They complained. They complained about their journey, they complained about Kirsan, they complained that there was nothing to do.

All perfectly legitimate complaints without a doubt. But seeing as there was nothing to do, could they not have had the minimum amount of imagination required to go round the playing hall, go round the hotels, and find some stories? Find Phiona Mutesi? Or find somebody else, among all the hundreds of players from dozens of countries all over the world, who were sitting there right in front of them?

I mean, dear God, how hard can it be? The world's chess press attended the the single most interesting chess event in the world, for a fortnight, and the single most interesting piece, by many a country mile, that came out of that event was written by none of them. Did none of them have the wit to realise that something of the sort might be of interest to their readers? Did none of them even meet Tim Crothers - during the two weeks that the world's chess journalists were parked in a handful of Siberian bars talking to one another - and think, hmm, maybe I should find a story like that too?

Apparently not. New In Chess went all the way to Khanty-Mansiysk and all they brought back was a lousy piece of saloon bar prejudice. Perhaps, next time they are ruminating on how badly Kirsan and his cronies have performed, they might also like to consider how badly they themselves has performed.

Tim Crothers showed what could be done, and he doesn't even seem to know how the pieces move. Good for him: not so much praise for Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam, who, in common with some others of his profession, has a reputation for not asking difficult questions. Perhaps he should start asking them of himself.


[Photo and caption: Sports Outreach]

lolchess

Remember the bit of interweb funny on the right, featured here a year and a half ago? Turns out failblog from whence that came is part of the cheezburger network, an empire of pointless websites that has expanded rapidly in the last eighteen months.

And why I am I telling you this? Why, there be golden nuggets of chess that gleam in them there bilge waters, and if you don't have the time or inclination to prospect for them yourself - then take a peek after the jump.

Still Cagey After all These Years

Yesterday's post on the state of chess journalism over the last few decades prompted a reader to respond questioning my feeling that the British Chess Magazine's coverage of the 1978 Buenos Aires Olympiad is a prime example of very poor journalism. I shall answer our anonymous friend in the comments box to the original post in due course, but for today I want to thank him/her for drawing my attention to what s/he calls,

"Jon Mestel's brave and risky protests against the Argentinian junta".

This was not something of which I was previously aware, the BCM not having found Mestel's stance (whatever form it took) worthy of a mention. That sort of thing, I suppose, was just not their cup of tea.

Back in the day a chap might write half a page on a foreign chap's disorganised hotels, but he certainly wouldn't want to get involved in any distasteful business about death squads and whatnot. "Dirty War"? Is that something to do with house keeping not being up to scratch?

Anyhoo, if anybody out there has any more to say about Mestel's protest do please make a contribution to the comments box.  I'd love to hear more about this.

BCM Exclusive: "Concierges at Buenos Aires Sheraton not very nice"

The comment sparked a memory, though. Hadn't I read something similar somewhere before? Another Olympiad, another stand on principle from Mestel and another questionable editorial policy from the BCM?

It took me an hour or two last night, but then it came to me: The British Chess Magazine of September 1986 (volume 106, number 9), page 410. Correspondence from Dr. Mestel observing that while the BCM had reported that some English regulars would not be going to the Dubai Olympiad the reasons why had not been given.

Well perhaps, you might be thinking, the BCM didn't know why the English players didn't want to travel. Ah, but they did.

"This issue was raised in my letter of last October which you declined to publish … It also arose in the press conference given by Campomanes at the GLC tournament, but again you did not air the issue."

Dr. Jonathan Mestel

And the thing that the BCM were so reluctant to tell their readers about? It was the fact that Israel were not to be invited to the Olympiad.

Fair enough, I suppose. These discussions about anti-semitism, international politics and FIDE discriminating against a member country are all a bit tiresome after all. A chap doesn't want to get involved in any of that does he?

When we were Kings XVIII

... we kept schtum.

In which, initial appearances to the contrary not withstanding, the author ponders the state of chess journalism.  Reference is made to current intrigues in the French chess world and the conclusion drawn that a similar incident in the 1970s may very well have been ignored by the British chess press. A mysterious feature of the 1978 Olympiad in Buenos Aires is examined (as is the even more curious absence of any mention of it in the British Chess Magazine’s coverage of the tournament) before suggestions are offered as to how the contemporary print media might save itself from an otherwise certain doom.

Karpov-Korchnoi, Game 32 Baguio 1978

... in the main lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Buenos Aires in November 1978 Korchnoi was to accuse me directly of having “sold” 6. … c5 to the Russians

Ray Keene, Massacre in Merano (Batsford, 1981)

It was all kicking-off across La Manche last week. There was naughtiness at the Olympiad in Elista apparently – or, then again, maybe there wasn't. La farce Olympienne Seani (our invisible Blogger) is calling it. For those of you who missed all the va va voom, here’s the story (so far)¹:-

21st January: The French Chess Federation release a statement saying that it has begun “disciplinary action” against Sebastien Feller, Arnaud Hauchard and Cyril Marzolo relating to suspicions arising from the Khanty-Mansyik Olympiad last autumn.
24th January: Sebastian Feller denies the accusations and gets himself a lawyer, suggesting en passant that he’s been targeted for being pro-Kirsan.
24th January: The French Federation’s own Brief tells Europe Echecs that the action was “justified” given the evidence available and that Monsieur Feller’s denials were “pathetic”.
27th January: The other four members of the French Olympic team express themselves shocked at the allegations and supportive of the Federations decision to investigate.

Since the opposing camps are wheeling out the legals I think I'll say no more other than to observe that (a) there's obviously a whole lot more of the story still to emerge; and (b) until such time as Feller and the others have formally been found guilty it is only right to presume them to be innocent.

Anybody remember this?

Anyhoo, establishing what did or didn’t happen isn't as interesting to me right now as the fact that all this is being played out in public. Whether or not you consider this to be a 'Good Thing' (for the record, I feel that it is in principle, but I also find the timing/content of the French Federation’s announcements to be a little curious and perhaps even bodged to some extent), what’s undeniable is that this is different to how things used to be.

I wonder if an analogous incident thirty or forty years ago would even have been mentioned in the British chess press.  There was no internet back then, of course, so it's entirely possible that Average Joe Chesser wouldn't have got to hear about it at all. Well, not for a year or two anyway.

If most aspects of the game in the 1970s were pretty fabulous, one exception was that chess journalism was often pretty dreadful. Re-reading the old magazines in the light of what we know now, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that some 1970s chess journos, the British Chess Magazine folk in particular, would rather have eaten a chessboard than report anything even remotely controversial that had happened on or near one.

The Buenos Aires Olympiad of 1978 makes a good case study of how the BCM went about their business back in the day: there was a faithful reporting of the England team's results, but no mention of a team member publicly falling-out with the World Championship challenger (his very recent employer), no word about a rift that had emerged between him and an England team-mate and only the merest hint that while all this was going on this fellow was massively under-performing at the board.

No, anybody relying on of the BCM's coverage of the 1978 Olympiad alone would never had known about the torrid time that our out-of-form chesser - none other than Raymond Dennis Keene - had in Buenos Aires.  Re-examining the situation in the light of what subsequently became public knowledge, firstly events that preceded the Olympiad and then what happened in Buenos Aires itself, we will see just how far the BCM had to turn their necks to be able to look the other way.

Keene and fellow English Grandmaster Michael Stean had been working as Korchnoi's seconds during the World Championship match against Karpov that took place in The Philippines from July to October 1978.  Stean stayed with Viktor until the re-match in Merano in 1981 but Keene never worked with either of them ever again.  Korchnoi came to see Keene as a "traitor".  Since he had defected from the Soviet Union just a couple of years beforehand, and had plenty of mud thrown at him by his former comrades in consequence, the choice of that particular word is rather significant and makes clear the depths of his antipathy towards his former employee.

The estrangement resulted from Korchnoi's feeling that Keene had been working against his interests in Baguio. Specifically, he believed that Keene had told Karpov's team the opening that he intended to play in the crucial 32nd game at Baguio (played with the score at 5-5 in a match that would be go to the first man to score six wins) and the fact that while supposedly working for Korchnoi, Keene had also been busy writing a book² despite having signed a contract that specifically prohibited him from engaging in such activity³.

The Baguio dispute didn't just mean the end of two working relationships for Keene, it also meant the end of his personal relationship with Mike Stean.  The two men had known each other since their junior days, had  studied at Cambridge together and had worked as Korchnoi's seconds during the most recent World Championship Candidates'  Championship cycle.  In an interview published - astonishingly - in The Sun Keene had explained that he and Stean always agreed draws when paired together in tournaments because "friendship is too important"⁴. After Baguio, however, the pair barely exchanged another word for decades⁵.

"There is no doubt that all the work Ray was doing in the Philippines detracted from his performance as a second. The terrible thing was that Viktor had always been betrayed and let down. That was why he defected. He needed people around him he could trust. I could not forgive what Ray did …."

Michael Stean: quote from Kingpin

Had the Baguio match been limited to traditional 24 games the Olympiad would very possibly have been quite a different experience for Keene and the English team.  With 24 games there'd have been no suspicions around 6 ... c5 and the match would have ended on the 19th of September.  Instead it didn't finish until the 17th of October, barely a week before the Olympiad began.

If the World Championship match had been the traditional length, then, there'd have been a cooling-off period and a chance for the tensions between Korchnoi, Keene and Stean to have eased a little. Instead the three men had to go directly⁶ from Baguio to Buenos Aires without a break, with none of their differences resolved and with emotions running high.

With the backdrop to the Olympiad established, we can now turn to Buenos Aires and the total (k)nightmare that Keene had there.  He would write later⁷ that he experienced an eight-month chess depression after it was over, such was the impact that it had on him.  Was it really that bad?  Indeed it was: an awful tournament and the complete opposite of Keene's previously glittering Olympiad career.

Keene made his Olympiad debut at Havana in 1966 when aged just 18, and quickly became a key figure in the England squad.  He played at least ten games at each event prior to 1978 and averaged nearly fifteen.  At Buenos Aires, though, he played just four times.

It wasn't just that Keene was mysteriously absent from the board; when he did play his results were, by any standard, appalling.  No wins, two defeats and two draws was his meagre haul - and that from a man who until that point had a superb record playing for England.  Consider his achievements up to that point:-

• GM norms at the two previous Olympiads (Nice '74; Haifa '76);
• an IM norm at Siegen '70;
• playing through three separate events unbeaten (Lugano '68; Siegen '70; Haifa '76);
• losing just five games out of 88 played;
• a 'worst' Olympic score of +5 =13 -2 (registered playing top board at Skopje in 1972).

In football terms - not entirely inappropriate given that the Buenos Aires Olympiad took place just a few short months after the same city hosted football's World Cup Final  - Keene, once a Bobby Charlton, had turned into Emile Heskey; he'd gone from a man who scored at will to one who couldn't hit a cow's arse with a banjo.

It isn't easy to live up to an illustrious past, but Keene's record at Buenos Aires wasn't just rank compared to his previous Olympiads.  In 1978 he was the worst performing member of the squad and playing badly too.  In his game against Lein in the sixth round, for example, he simply left a rook en prise.  The move Keene found, 32 ... Qg4, is a very good candidate for the worst that he ever played.

32 ... Qg4, the blunder of a lifetime?

Lein - Keene, Buenos Aires Olympiad 1978

So Ray Keene had a shocker at the Buenos Aires Olympiad, but it cannot be said that he was the only one.  In writing the BCM report,  Kevin O'Connell turned in a performance that was equally abysmal.  No doubt  he wasn't acting alone - I'm sure BCM general policy had some influence on what eventually appeared in the magazine - but I tend to favour the view that a man should be held responsible for anything that appears in print under his name and O'Connell was also the BCM's Assistant Editor at the time so can't get away from his part in editorial decision making anyway.  With that caveat in place, then, let us open the February 1979 edition of the BCM (no. 2, vol. 99) and see how the BCM and Kevin O'Connell completely ignored the story at the centre of England's Olympiad fortunes that year.

"Both Stean and Keene were exhausted after the goings on in Baguio but the strain showed more on the latter ...."

BCM: February 1979, p. 55

That's your lot. Those twenty words are all you get from O'Connell on the incredible turn around in Ray Keene's Olympiad fortunes and the only hint that the aftermath of Baguio might have influenced England's result in Baguio.  The "goings on" are never mentioned again, let alone explained.

O'Connell gives the results of Keene's games - defeat against Lein (USA) in round 6; defeat against Kuligowski (Poland) in round 7; draw with Day (Canada) in round 9; draw with Jakobsen (Denmark) in round 11 - but makes no attempt to give his performance any context.  There is neither reference to Keene's previously excellent Olympiad record nor comparison to his team-mates' much better results this time.

O'Connell does not appear to notice that Keene turned up at the Olympiad two rounds after Stean and Korchnoi (or at least does not find it worthy of comment); he does not find it odd that tiredness causes Keene's poor play but does not prevent Stean from scoring +3 =7 -0 (on a higher board); he doesn't ask if a World Championship match would usually be expected to leave a second more worn down than the Challenger himself; does not ponder how Korchnoi managed to win seven games, draw four and lose none on his way to the Gold Medal for best performance on Board 1.

No, the BCM's coverage of the 1978 Olympiad doesn't ask any of these questions.  If curiosity killed the cat, O'Connell was clearly in no bodily danger.  The BCM's man on the spot just remained curled-up by the radiator, rousing himself only for the occasional lap at his saucer of milk.

Am I expecting too much?  Should O'Connell and the BCM have known about the conflict that Keene faced?   If so, should they have reported it?  "Almost certainly" and "most definitely" are my answers to those questions.

For a start, by Keene's own account (see the head of today's blog), Korchnoi publicly accused him of secretly working for Karpov - and did so in the lobby of the hotel that housed the majority of Olympiad's participants.  Did nobody witness this exchange?  Even if they didn't, it seems unlikely that Korchnoi would have kept his gob shut for the entire fortnight, or Stean for that matter.  Again, even if they had, did nobody notice that relations between Keene and Stean were suddenly frosty?  Was there no atmosphere in the English camp?

If anybody who was actually there should ever get to read this, I'd be very interested to hear some eyewitness accounts.  As somebody who wasn't present (I was 10 and sat at home enjoying the first appearances of Grange Hill on my TV screen) it seems to me rather more likely that Buenos Aires was full of talk about what had (supposedly) happened at Baguio than that the representatives of the world's chess-playing nations were walking around blissfully ignorant of such things.

However, let us be generous and assume that it wasn't as I imagine, or if it was that O'Connell wasn't there (i.e. that the Kevin O'Connell who was elected to FIDE's Commission for Publications and Information and the Commission for Assistance to Chess-Developing Countries on 10th November 1978 was either not the K.J. O'Connell who was writing for the BCM or was elected in his absence).  Let us further assume that circumstances conspired against anybody at the BCM from approaching anybody with first-hand knowledge of the Olympiad that they could pass on to their readership.  Even in that case, it seems incredible that neither O'Connell nor anybody else noticed Keene's uncharacteristically poor play.

What seems extremely possible is that O'Connell knew very well what was going on, but either he or the BCM thought it should not be reported.  Did he/they consider it a private matter and not the business of anybody except Keene, Stean and Korchnoi themselves?  An arrogant point of view, if so.

The fortunes of a national team were and are a legitimate interest to that country's chessers.  Anything that affects their performance in a major tournament, therefore, becomes a topic that can and should be covered.

Keene scored poorly and hardly played.  This clearly had an impact on the English team as a whole.  O'Connell, limits himself to merely outlining the 'facts' though: he tells of England scoring four wins, a draw against the Soviet Union, and then of Keene arriving and England immediately losing to the USA.  The next round he describes a "disappointing result", the following one "another disappointing day".  England's challenge falls away, but O'Connell has nothing more to say.  Well, almost nothing.

"The first of the new month brought a change in England's fortunes.  It is unclear whether this first loss should be blamed on the arrival of November or the arrival of Keene!"

K.J. O'Connell, BCM February 1979 p. 55

At this distance it's hard to tell what O'Connell meant by that remark. Just a joke perhaps, or maybe the merest hint that he allowed himself that the England camp was unsettled by what was going on around Keene? Who knows?

What is clear, however you look at this, is that O'Connell and the BCM failed - and failed in much the same way as Andy Coulson did regarding the News of the World's phone-hacking scandal. Either he knew - in which case he had a duty to tell. If he didn't know?  Well, let's just say a competent journalist/editor would have known.

Andy Coulson: didn't do anything wrong which is why he resigned from two jobs

Am I being unfair to O'Connell and the BCM?  I don't think that I am.  This very weekend the Guardian published a column⁸ - apparently written anonymously by a professional footballer - discussing the disdain that those within the game have for the TV pundits.  Why?  Because their stock-in-trade is "the trivialisation of what [footballers] do"; because their analysis is "lazy" and "takes you, the viewer, for a fool."  The report that O'Connell wrote, and that the BCM published, is no different and the reason why it, and that whole 'style' of 'journalism', should be condemned: it insults the reader.

It's not that I think that they should have convicted Keene (it seems quite plausible that at the time the BCM wouldn't have known for sure that Keene had broken his contract with Korchnoi - that was only established later with Stean's mother's letter to CHESS monthly - and even today I'm not aware of any specific evidence to support Korchnoi's suspcions around the 32nd game).  It's not that I think that they should have concluded that it was absolutely certain that Keene's poor form was the result of his acrimonious conflict with Korchnoi and Stean (association in time is not necessarily proof of a causal relationship, after all).  It's not that I think that they should have placed the entire blame for England's 12th-14th place finish on Keene's shoulders.

It's not that I expect any answers in particular, it's that I want the legitimate and obvious questions to be asked.  I want the whole story, not just the bit of it that some pitiful excuse for a journo thinks I should be given.  Let us not forget that by not asking them, the BCM managed to fail to address the issue of whether the World Championship match was won through subterfuge⁹ - which is something the average chess fan might just have a faint interest in I would have thought - although it did find room for half-a-page on the difficulties that some participants had in finding themselves a hotel room.

The future of chess journalism?

Contemporary print media publications are currently under huge pressure from the internet and this is true in the chess world just as much as it is everywhere else.  More so maybe. Curiously, as incomprehensible in its incompleteness as it was, the BCM's coverage of the 1978 Olympiad gives us a clue as to how the industry might save itself.

It seems that the BCM was in a bit of a pickle in 1979. Throughout O'Connell's article somebody, presumably the editor, had sprinkled a series of begging messages aimed at the readership:

"RENEW YOUR SUB EARLY!" (p. 52);
"BOOK A SUB ... or two!" (p. 58 );
"We're still looking for that ONE elusive reader : each ..." (p. 61).

That takes quite a bit of front, don't you think?  Decide to publish an article that completely fails to tell your readers the full story and then use it as an opportunity to ask them them to pay you more to be able to receive the same privilege again at some point in the future!

As bad as it seems to have been for them back then, can you imagine how it would have been had the internet been around?  The BCM might not have had anything to say about the Keene-Stean-Korchnoi business, but it would have been all over the web - much as the French Olympiad intrigue is today.  It's hard to imagine that any publication would have been able to get away with not covering an incident/issue that was of obvious interest to a large proportion of their customers.  If they tried, at least the modern-day reader would know that the writers and editors were withholding information from them.

Although these are challenging times for some,  readers are fortunate to be living in a time when those who produce paper and ink based magazines have to up their game.  The old BCM way of going about things simply won't do any more.  'Facts' you can get on the internet for free, and much quicker than a printed magazine or newspaper could ever manage.  To survive, magazines will have to provide something that the internet doesn't. Results, the moves of games, even who is suing whom - all of these can be found on chess websites.  What magazines can offer is something often lacking on the internet - interpretation, meaning and, ultimately, explanation.

Quality magazines will survive, but I'm quite sure that whether it turns out that we dig its grave in the short-, medium- or long-term, old-school chess journalism is inevitably doomed.  Good riddance to it, it won't be missed. Chess is a great game.  Those who want to read about it deserve not to be treated as fools.






Many thanks to Seani for his assistance in the preparation of this post.


Footnotes:-
1. I am grateful to Sean Hewitt and other members of the EC Forum for bringing the details of the case to my attention.
2. Ray Keene, Karpov - Korchnoi 1978: The Inside Story of the Match, Batsford 1978
3. "The second will not write, compile, or help to write or compile any book during the course of the match" - Korchnoi: Chess is My Life, Edition Olms 2005.
4. "Chess Mates Bash Boris" The Sun, 21/12/1977
5. There appears to have been some form of thawing of relations more recently:  I spotted Stean in the audience at the 2009 Staunton Memorial tournament, for example, though whether or not he spoke to Keene while there I have no clue.  Korchnoi himself, of course, was playing in the event.
6. Well, as directly as international travel in the 1970s allowed anyway.  According to the BCM, Stean arrived in Argentina via Hong Kong, America and Guatemala.
7. Chandler & Keene: The English Chess Explosion from Miles to Short, Batsford 1981
8. With thanks to EJH for the tip.
9. About the FIDE Congress, 9th November 1978 sitting, O'Connell wrote, "This day also saw the first discussions on Korchnoi's protest about the World Championship match and the 32nd game in particular.  This question is now sub judice in the Dutch courts where Korchnoi is suing FIDE and Karpov".  That's as close as he got to the subject.

The Worst Move On The Board XI

Georgieva-Lada, Gibraltar 2011, round one. Position after 48.Qb8-e5+, kindly forwarded to us by Jack Rudd.

A panic job, this one: if we go back a move, to the position after White's 47th, we can maybe see what went wrong.


Black is obviously not only winning, but close to mating. But she has two causes for concern - the possibility of White's a-pawn promoting, and the potential for White to save the day with a perpetual check. As it happens, there's nothing much to worry about: simply 47...Qe6+ 48.Kg2 Qe2+ followed by ...Ne4 will get White mated before she has any time to do any damage, since if Qe5+ then ...Kh7 and White has no time to get closer to the king.

Unfortunately, Black blundered with 47...Qf3?? which crucially not only loses a tempo (since White can move a piece other than the king) but allows White's queen into e5 before Black is ready to deliver mate. Hence 48.Qe5+ and now it's panic-stations: 49.a7 is coming and Black doesn't even have a perpetual check with the queen (the king can hide on h4).

Best, in fact, is 48...Kh7 after which 49.a7 actually fails to 49..Ne4, but 49.Qe7 appears to secure a draw. But Black didn't find 48....Kh7, and all other moves lose. She chose the worst of them.

[Worst move index]

A Literary Reference : Nineteen Eighty-Four

A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard and the current issue of The Times, with the page turned down at the chess problem. Then, seeing that Winston's glass was empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There was no need to give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboard was always waiting for him, his corner table was always reserved; even when the place was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitting too close to him. He never even bothered to count his drinks. At irregular intervals they presented him with a dirty slip of paper which they said was the bill, but he had the impression that they always undercharged him. It would have made no difference if it had been the other way about. He had always plenty of money nowadays. He even had a job, a sinecure, more highly-paid than his old job had been.

The music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took over. Winston raised his head to listen. No bulletins from the front, however. It was merely a brief announcement from the Ministry of Plenty. In the preceding quarter, it appeared, the Tenth Three-Year Plan's quota for bootlaces had been overfulfilled by 98 per cent.

He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two moves.' Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin, 1983, p.249. (Original date of publication 1949.)

[A Literary Reference index]

Once was enough I : Latvian Gambit 3.Nxe5 Nc6

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 f5 3.Nxe5 Nc6

Mark Twain seems to have been in the news quite a lot lately, which is not bad going for a dead man. With all the controversy over what he said, and what some people think he should have said, I should be careful to note that his commentary on smoking - that it was easy to give up, because he'd done it thousands of times - is, as far as I know, "attributed". It would still do as an epitaph.

It will also do, moreover, as a theme to a series: opening variations that I have given up. But in this instance, not only given up, but given up after playing the line only once. As if we were to give up smoking every time we had a cigarette - then change the brand, and have another one. And then give up again. And so on.

Whether this really is an apt analogy, I don't really know, never having smoked a cigarette in my life (or not a legal one, anyway). But it will do until we find a better one. So it may last rather longer than the openings to which it is being applied.

These openings. These short-lived openings. Why would anybody adopt an opening, read it up, "learn" it, expend time and money and effort in the process, and then abandon it after a single game? One can think of a number of explanations, most of them coalescing around the theme of "stupidity".

Well, obviously. Most of what we do looks stupid when we look back at it. But even stupidity has its reasons. So let us see if we can see how this stupidity became, if only to see how other players can avoid it in the future. Or find, more likely, other stupidities, equally stupid in their particular stupid way.

What actually constitutes a variation we have played only once? In a sense almost any game might qualify, since with the exception of very short and very unusual games, almost every game is unique. Almost every game creates a new variation, in its way.

So I shall mostly select lines which would have been major choices. Which, if I changed my mind, would have had an impact on whichever first or second move I chose (though the variation, itself, might "begin" rather later in the day). Not sidelines, but positions I could have expected to reach on a regular basis. Lines, which, if they were to be abandoned, would involve a large rethinking of my repertoire. Lines of which one should, therefore, be reasonably confident before choosing them. But choose these lines I did. And abandon them I did as well.

Most (if not all) of the variations that we'll see involve my playing the Black pieces, and most (if not all) involve defending against 1.e4, against which I have played many, many different lines, and like Twain, given up almost every one. Many of them, too many, after just the one attempt.

You wouldn't catch me playing this rubbish

There's no end to this process, and no obvious beginning, but much of it took place a period in the mid-Nineties, when I was, mostly, playing a lot of chess and buying a lot of chess books. I had taken a long break from chess after going to college in 1983, and when I resumed, I started by playing the same openings (Benko Gambit, Sicilian Scheveningen and 1.e4 with White) which I had been playing when I left school.

Gradually I became dissatisfied with each, the Benko going first and the e-pawn being replaced with the English late in 1994. I stopped playing the Scheveningen earlier the same year, for reasons which (in so far as I can remember them) we'll talk about at a later date. For a while I'd also been throwing in the occasional Petroff, another favourite from my youth, but (and we may also touch on this in a future post) I'd suffered some disillusionment in this line too, at roughly the same time. So I needed to find something else.

I didn't. Or at least, not for around another ten years. Ten. It took me that long, not so much to find something that answered all the questions I was asking of a Black defence, but to appreciate that I was asking too many. In the meantime, I thrashed about like a spider on the run. For a short period I decided I was happy with the Lopez in one form or another, but then everything fell apart and over the course of 1996-9, looking back at my scorebooks, I find I played:

• four different kinds of Ruy Lopez
• three different kinds of Sicilian
• two different kinds of French Defence
• two different kinds of Philidor
• two different kinds of Scandinavian

and a partridge in a pear tree, that partridge being the Latvian Gambit. Not just any Latvian Gambit, but a particularly loony Latvian, this line being the theme of today's post. And like too many partridges, it got run over the first time it tried to cross the road.

WHERE I FOUND IT: In Tony Kosten's The Latvian Gambit (Holt, 1995, the British publisher being Batsford) which I had picked up somewhere or other, and bought on the strength of having liked the same author's book on the Philidor.

WHY I PLAYED IT: At this distance it's hard to be sure of anything. To compound the problem, as this was right in the middle of my thrashing-around period, I was making and unmaking so many choices that in all probability, nothing can have been very clear at the time, let alone much later. However, I think that in my choice, I was influenced by the fear of what the other player may know. The other player may know the weakness in my line. Hence, or so the mental process may have gone, let us find a line that they do not know, one that is perhaps underrated, and play that instead. It's as if our spider on the run had decided to escape by heading down the plughole.

Originally I'd intended to play the "normal" line, with 3. Nxe5 Qf6. I'd played the Latvian twice against strong (190+) players in a tournament early in 1998, both of them responding with 3.d4 instead. I drew one of these game and lost the other, but obviously felt sufficiently vindicated in my choice to try it again against Adam Hunt in the county championship in April.

Not so vindicated, though, that I played it in between: I had Black three times in the intervening period and played one King's Gambit, one Centre Counter and one Wormald Variation of the Lopez. (That's the line with 5.Qe2. Had 5.O-O been played, I might have intended 5...Nxe4. Who knows.)

Possibly I may have been influenced by the possibility that Adam, who'd been present at the tournament, had seen those two games, and would do some work on the Latvian before playing me. And I wasn't really happy with Black's prospects in the main line, which continued 4.d4 d6 5.Nc4 fxe4 6.Nc3 Qg6 7.f3


in which position Black has sacrificed perhaps too many tempi for the privilege of opening up his queen and king.

So, with the logic that was informing my choices at that time, I replaced an intended line that was little-known and a little dubious with one that was even less well-known and even more questionable.

WHY I STOPPED PLAYING IT: The outcome of the game may have had something to do with it, since Black was lost before the move count got into double figures. That said, it might have been a different story if, instead of 7...Qxe5? Black had played 7...O-O-O since after something like 8.Nc3 Qxe5 9.Re1 Bd6 10.g3 Qf6


Black seems to me to be doing perfectly OK.

But White had rather better options on moves 5 and 6. Or, for that matter, on move 4. Round about this time I bought a very good book by John Nunn which, among many other things, took time out to criticise Tony Kosten's book and the gambit it was recommending. This caused a certain among of friction, since Kosten seemed to feel that Nunn had accused him of being less than candid with his readers. (Nunn, for instance, talked of "secret code words", i.e. phrases that admit that a given recommendation is not actually that strong, without openly saying so.)

Be that as it may, Nunn also paid some attention to the 3...Nc6 line, about which he was no more complimentary than he needed to be, and which he claimed, convincingly enough, to have refuted almost without trying. He gave 4.d4 and if 4...Qh4, which was Kosten's suggestion, then 5.Nf3 Qxe4 6.Be2



and Black's position is manifestly rubbish. I don't know precisely when I saw Nunn's book, or whether I had decided to junk the Latvian junk before I'd seen it. I do know that once having seen this variation, I was never going to play that line again.

Not just because of Nunn, though. Because it was rubbish. So I had to find some other rubbish to play again. And, as we will see, I certainly did.

CHANCES OF MY PLAYING IT AGAIN: I'd rather beat myself around the head with a brick.

[Twain photo: Gutenburg.org]