The Survival Guide to 4 v 3

Black to play

Keith Arkell v JMGB, Penarth (4) 2013

Time (for me if not EJH) to say cheerio to Penarth. Hard to believe it was a month and a half ago already. Time seems to fly past ever faster these days. Anyhoo, in this last post I'll finally fulfil a promise and take a closer look at the '4 v 3, pawns on the same side' rook ending that I didn't get against Keith Arkell.

I'll be back - although sadly not next year as the tournament is moving to Cardiff

Before Penarth any knowledge I had of these rook endgames with the pawns all on one side of the board came from John Emms' The Survivial Guide to Rook Endings (Everyman Chess, 1999). Since returning to London I've looked at Levenfish & Smyslov and found out about Gligoric - Euwe, Zurich 1953. Back in Wales, though, I was entirely reliant on what I'd picked up from Emms' book.

I certainly didn't have a clear memory of his analysis during the game. Far from it.  Of the fragments given below I had a good idea of the starting positions and final results of Cohen-Timoshenko and Kramnik-Kasparov, but no definite idea of how they got from one to the other. Of Sokolov-Chernin, Xu Jun-Liang Chong and Nikolic-Ftacnik I had no conscious recollection whatsoever. Even so, after rereading The Survival Guide and reflecting on my thoughts at the board I can see just how heavily Emms' book influenced the decision that I made.

So from the starting position I spent most of my thinking time on 25 … c5. The idea being that after 26 dxc5 Bxc5, 27 Nxd5 Qxd5, 28 Qxc5 Qxc5, 29 Rxc5 ...

...  we'd reach a rook endgame with me a pawn down, but with everything on one side of the board. I knew that the ideal defensive set-up in this kind of 4 v 3 position is to push … h7-h5

e.g as we might have got after something like 25 … c5, 26 dxc5 Bxc5, 27 Rd1 d4, 28 Ne2 Rc8, 29 Nxd4 Bxd4, 30 Rxd4 Rxc2, 31 Rxd7 h5

It’s still possible to go wrong [in the excerpts that follow I'll simply reproduce the game scores and the punctuation. If you want the analysis go get a copy of the book for yourself - it's worth it] …

… but on the whole saving the game is much easier when you’ve pushed your rook’s pawn forward two squares.

Notice, by the way, how Black is happy to let his king get cut off on the back rank here (Amateur Hour IV). Anyhoo, I clearly didn'’t have the option of advancing my pawn two squares, so what about 29 … h6 instead?

The problem there is that with less space you can easily end up squished and then zugzwanged …

… so I didn’t fancy that. I paid most attention to 29 … g6.

I’d be threatening … h5, so White would play 30 g4.

That would be dandy if the h-pawns fell off the board, e.g. after something like 30 … h6, 31 h4 Kg7 (in reality Black would throw a spanner in the works with ... Re4 here), 32 g5 hxg5, 33 hxg5 ...

… but if Keith doesn’t push his g-pawn …

… I felt things could get rather unpleasant …

So in the end, given my position seemed perfectly serviceable at that moment (as indeed it was, although it wouldn’t be a second later) I decided not to trade down after all.

A book in the second edition of which the current game is unlikely to feature

During the game I wasn't clear whether I wanted my pawn on h6 or h7 in this ending. Later I concluded that it would be better to leave it at home with something like 29 ... g6, 30 g4 Re4, 31 h3 Kg7, 32 Kg2 Ra4, 33 Kg3 Rb4, 34 h4 Ra4, 35 h5

Later still I (re)discovered that almost this exact position (the only difference is Black's rook is on a8 rather than a4) is the end of the only variation that Emms offers on Nikolic-Ftacnik which he doesn't conclude is lost for Black*.

Not that I'd have saved the game in any event. The reality of defending that kind of ending is that Keith finds ways to keep the game going for as long as it takes for him to win it - a sentence I'd written before Anderson-Arkell from round 5 in Torquay, by the way - and if Ftacnik and Euwe can't hold this kind of position I'm certainly not going to. It would have been fun to try, though. Not to mention that it would have made a good blog post.

Holes in my understanding of this kind of endgame notwithstanding, I think rejecting the exchanges must have been objectively the right choice. It's not like I was obliged to toss the game away with 25 ... h5 instead.

And after all, you can't choose your moves on the basis of future blogging opportunities can you?  Can you?

Rook and pawn Index
Tournament Diaries Index

* With the White rook on a5 and the Black rook on b1 the position would match Gligoric-Euwe at move 39 although there it was White to move. Which was supposed to be saveable, but Euwe lost in the end anyway.

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Assiduously avoided duplicating

[If you've come here as a result of seeing Private Eye, yesterday's piece is a good place to start - ejh]

This post is largely courtesy of a reader's comment on our post last Friday

which comment, as you see, drew our attention to possible similarities between the notes in Ray and Julian's 2006 Batsford book Petrosian vs the Elite

and the 1975 Batsford book edited by Ray, Learn from The Grandmasters.

We don't have the 1975 volume (which is available here) but we do have the New Algebraic Edition, which was first issued in 1998.

So, here from the 2006 book (page 63) is "the long passage starting with '..we reach a fascinating position'"

and here from the earlier book (page 92) is the same passage.

When I say "the same passage", I mean "the same passage". The 2006 book does, indeed, "lift wholesale" from the earlier one. Wholesale and practically word-for-word.

When I say "practically", I can see "fine" in 2006 and "OK" in the earlier work. Other than that, all I can detect by way of difference is this small section:

from which the incriminating part - that is, the date - has been excised.

I wonder what it said in the 1975 edition?

I wonder, also, whether anything else has been lifted wholesale...

The multiple plagiarisms of Ray Keene: Private Eye says more

Hello! It's possible you're here as a result of having seen page 7 of the new Private Eye.

Private Eye, issue 1348, 6 September 2013.

Naturally we recommend you purchase a copy.

Or you may have seen the recent piece on Chessbase, which has sent several thousand extra page-views our way since it appeared on Monday.

Score at around 2200 BST last night

Should either of these apply, you may be new to the affair of Ray Keene's multiple plagiarism, so let us direct you in the first instance to:

• our Ray Keene Plagiarism Index
• the piece on which the Eye reported in June
• the particular plagiarism on which the Eye reports this week (by coincidence, covered by us yesterday).

Basically, the story is that after a long career of intermittent plagiarism (and more-than-intermittent recycling of his own articles) Ray Keene embarked on a large-scale campaign of crude plagiarism, dating roughly from towards the end of 2010. More than one hundred and thirty examples of plagiarism have been found in Times and Spectator chess columns that have appeared since the start of 2011.

The Eye observes:

still his employers at the Times and Spectator do nothing.

The Spectator's editor, Fraser Nelson (editor@spectator.co.uk) was emailed on 19 June 2013: so far no response has been forthcoming, in line with what appears to be established practice at that publication.

Nevertheless, yesterday morning I sent Mr Nelson a letter with a full list of all the Spectator chess columns we have found (from the period of his editorship) that have plagiarised other people's work.

The Times were contacted by phone on 23 August, when I spoke to a Craig Tregurtha, who asked me to email both him and a man named Ian Brunskill. I sent them an email with a full list of all the Times chess columns we have found (from 2011 onwards) that have plagiarised other people's work.

I've not yet received a response from either, so yesterday I emailed again.

From: Justin Horton
To: craig.tregurtha@thetimes.co.uk, ian.brunskill@thetimes.co.uk

Dear Sirs

I wonder if you are yet in a position to respond to my email of 23 August concerning the multiple plagiarisms of your chess correspondent.

Yours

Justin Horton

Huesca province, Spain

and attached the relevant page from Private Eye.

Should I get any response from anybody, I'll let you know. In the mean time, should any readers, new, regular or occasional, wish to email any of the gentlemen concerned, by all means do so.

[Thanks to Sean Terry and Chris Brooke for scans]
[Ray Keene index]

Predecessors XII: Botvinnik-Smyslov 1954

In his Spectator column for 4 July 2009, entitled Triple Crown, Ray Keene annotated the second game of the 1954 World Championship match between Botvinnik and Smyslov. (You may recall that a game from their 1958 match, notes from which were twice plagiarised by Ray in the Times, was the subject of a column last month.)

The introduction was devoted to discussing a new book on the three matches Botvinnik played against Smyslov, published by New In Chess and with notes translated into English by Ray's associate Steve Giddins.

The introduction is a little misleading, though, since the notes in the column come not from the New in Chess book but from Part II of My Great Predecessors.

In that work, notes to the second game of the 1954 match appear on pages 220-222. They also, of course, appear in the Spectator column. They also appear in Ray's Times column for 25 February 2011

which is plagiarised from the same source.

Chess goes to the movies: 2001

[WARNING: This post contains spoilers]

The space odyssey breaks down like this: a curious black obelisk pitches up on pre-historic earth and does something - it's not entirely clear what - that causes monkeys to evolve into homo sapiens. Wind the clock forward four million years and another obelisk is discovered on the moon. Whoever left it buried there did so in such a way that ensured it would eventually be found and when the strange object fires a signal in the general direction of Jupiter humanity decides it might be a good idea to head out there to sort out what's going on. It is on this long old journey that we find Frank playing chess against a HAL 9000 computer.

Hal's "I'm sorry Dave, I think you missed it" foreshadows the considerably more sinister "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" which will come half an hour later. Other than that, though, at face value there doesn't seem much to this scene*.

It all just a little hackneyed, no? Well yes it is, but only because it's been copied so many times since. In 2001 we have chess as something you do when you have a huge amount of time to kill and not much to do (The Thing) and we also have a 'computer besting humanity at the game' storyline as a shorthand for technology advancing far beyond humanity's ability to cope with it (Saturn 3; Blade Runner).

The 2001 chess is rather commonplace to us now, then, but it must have been rather special at the time. Think about it for a moment. The film was released in 1968: humanity wouldn't arrive on the moon (or not) for another a year and colour television wouldn't be standard in British homes for a decade**.

Forget that the computer won. Considering that the bat and ball tennis game that made an occasional 'blip' sound would be state of the art for video games throughout the 1970s, just playing a game of chess against a machine must have screamed "INCREDIBLE FUTURE AHEAD" to the folk who saw 2001 when it was first released.

Chess Goes to the Movies Index

* There is a school of thought that suggests that the chess game is actually a hyper-subtle early clue that HAL is going to malfunction. This is based on the fact that (a) he says "queen to bishop three" when he means "queen to f three" or, more likely, "queen to bishop six", and (b) he apparently overlooks that White can delay mate for a couple of moves by not taking the queen. With all due respect to Mr Stanley Kubrick, though, I'm rather minded to believe these discrepancies are much more likely to be mistakes.

** The first FA Cup final I watched in colour was Ipswich 1 Arsenal 0 in 1978.

This is our 2000th post

Chess in Art Postscript: Themes Likely

We have been leafing through Yves Marek's splendid survey of chess-art Art échecs et mat (2008), taking his themes one by one. In the first post, Themes Like Only Yesterday, we looked at Orient, Rois de jeux/jeu des rois, Renaissance, and Divertissement. Then, in Themes Like Today Already, we picked over Érotisme, Abîmes, and Mat. This week we continue in contemporary vein with Géométries, and then after a brief dip into Le moment Duchamp, and L'art est jeu, we go on to suggest a couple of modern-day chess-art themes of our own.

Reeling in the years

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

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

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

Predecessors XI: Capablanca-Bogoljubow 1922

Like many of Ray Keene's columns, this piece has been written well in advance (albeit it's not been copied off anywhere or anybody else). Today I should be flying back home from my holidays, which in my case meant coming back to the UK and among other things playing in a tournament in London.

So let's have a glance at a game from another London tournament, one played in 1922. Specifically, the game Capablanca-Bogoljubow and the notes provided to that game in Ray's Spectator column in the issue for 15/22 December 2012.

You'll not be amazed to learn that Ray's notes were plagiarised wholesale from the first part of My Great Predecessors, where the game appears on pages 296 to 299.

Rudd's Rook Ending

Black to play

Gosling - Rudd, Penarth 2013

OK, after the interlude it's back to some unfinished business from Penarth.

I wasn't the only one getting amongst the rooks and pawns in Wales. Jack Rudd also had a rather interesting one and he kindly sent me the moves so we can look at it here. Always worth reminding ourselves that not all rook endings are drawn. Not even the ones with level material.

JR

Since I've no idea what either of the players were actually thinking during the game, I'm going to indulge in a spot of idle ill-informed speculation.

Jack's decision here doesn't seem to be too difficult. The queens are coming off anyway, so you might as well inflict a little damage on White's pawn structure before they go.

White's thought process requires a bit more guess work. His last move was 33 Re8+ Kh7 so I assume he was planning the trade. It also seems likely that he'd have expected the position that arose after 34 ... Qxd3, 35 cxd3 axb3, 36 axb3.

Black to play

What was he thinking, do you imagine? Was Tartakover's famous aphorism coming to mind? Something along the lines of "This should be drawn", "This doesn't look so bad" or "I can hold this", perhaps?

When I was looking at this position, trying to assess it for myself, I was reminded of a passage from Mihail Marin's marvellous chapter on Rubinstein in Learn from the Legends.

After a thorough study of Rubinstein's games, I have developed a rough method for preliminary evaluation of rook endings. For each favourable element such as an extra pawn, spatial advantage, the more active rook or an important weakness in the enemy camp, one point is awarded. If the difference between the two sides is one point (scores such as 1-0, or 2-1) the position is clearly better but not necessarily winning ... With the exception of some extreme cases (for instance, the ending with f- and h-pawns) a score of 2-0 or 3-1 should guarantee a win.

All every well, but it kind of depends on how you define "important" doesn't it? So White has weak pawns on b3 and d3. Are they important? If they are do they count as one point or two? What about the second rank which looks a little vulnerable with the pawn already on f3. Is that significant? And what of Jack's queenside majority and the potential for creating a passed pawn on that side of the board?

The other side of the coin: White's rook looks much better than Black's at the moment. On e8 it stops Jack getting at White's weaknesses because he can't get his rook to either open file. As we'll see, though, Black can actually evict the enemy rook rather easily.

36 ... Kg6, 37 Kf2 Rd7, 38 d4 Kf7, 39 Re5 Rd8, 40 b4 Ra8, 41 b5 Ra4, 42 bxc6 bxc6

White to play

So White's liquidated one of his loose pawns, but at the cost of allowing Black's rook into the game. d4 looks considerably more "important" than c6 right now and everything else is pretty much the same save for the fact that Black's improved his king. I wouldn't want to give a definitive judgement, but to me this looks rather tricky for White now.

Tashtastic

I wonder if the position at the beginning of the rook ending was simply much more difficult than White imagined when he decided to head for it. I've been looking at a few of Rubinstein's games recently and off the top of my head I can think of four that The Man won despite the rook ending starting with an equal pawn count. In every one of those four his opponent, like Jack's, had pawn weaknesses to defend.

Black to play

Schlechter - Rubinstein, San Sebastian 1912

White to play

Rubinstein - Alekhine, Carlsbad 1911

Black to play

Spielmann - Rubinstein, St Petersburg 1909

White to play

Rubinstein - Cohn, Carlsbad 1907

Whatever the objective assessment might be for this kind of position - the consensus of opinion seems to be that both Alekhine and Spielmann had chances to split the point - it seems that holding such positions is often just too big an ask in practice.

So thanks to Jack for sending me the game. What to take from it? Other than the truism that if you're facing somebody who has 300+ elo points more than you do you're probably going to lose in the end whatever you do, I mean. Maybe, to adapt a phrase of John Nunn's, there's something about loose pawns in rook endings and their tendency to make your game drop off?

Rook and pawn Index

Tournament Diaries Index