Chess Geeks

My Birthday cake




Rodolphe the Chef gets to work

Click to enlarge if you want to find out what's attracting T.C.'s attention

Chess in Art XV

Arabes jouant aux échecs

Eugène Delacroix (1847)

[National Gallery, Edinburgh]

Schachpartie

Ludwig Deutsch (1896)

[private collection]

[Chess in Art index]
[Chess in Art collected]

It was Adams, and it was Short

Michael Adams v Nigel Short, European Union Championship 2008, penultimate round, position after Black’s move 9...Be7-g5 - and indeed after Black's 11...Bh4-g5, after which White played 12.Qg3, inviting a repetition and offering the draw which Short accepted.

This swift and abrupt finale to a much-anticipated game produced a certain amount of disappointment, if not actual criticism. (In my case it produced a certain amount of relief that it had coincided with Jonathan's fortieth birthday posting, since otherwise I might well have liveblogged the game and this would have been a very damp squib indeed.) Whatever the rights and wrong, I don't think it was what any of us had wanted to see.

However, on the English Chess Forum, the tournament organiser, Professor David Robertson, bids us put aside our disappointment: it wasn't what it looked like. He says:

Adams-Short was not a "short draw", absolutely not in the sense that neither player relished the fight. I've spoken to both players at length this evening, separately and together. Both are largely in agreement on the circumstances. Adams arrived ready to play for a win; Nigel arrived well-prepared for Mickey. Nigel out-prepared Mickey, and Mickey was forced to bale out or risk significant disadvantage.

Well, fair enough. But is it really so simple?

It's probably not too much to say that Michael Adams could be considered the world authority on the White side of the Tarrasch version of the French Defence. I can think of no player, since Karpov ceased to play to super-GM strength, who has played 3.Nd2 so exclusively, for so long, at such a high level. Even in the 3...Be7 variation (in which Adams, normally almost unbeatable in the Tarrasch, has lost a couple of games to Morozevich) it would be highly unusual for him to be out of his depth before ten moves had been played. Is that really what happened?

Looking at the Chessbase online database, I find that after 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nd2 Be7 4.e5 c5 5.Qg4 Kf8 6.dxc5 Nc6 7.Qg3 the reply 7...Nh6 had apparently only been played once before, previous to the game under discussion. But that game was scarecely obscure – Svidler v Nepomniachtchi in the 2006 Russian Championship, a game in which White declined the repetition with 12.Qa4 and went on to win. I'll say with confidence that it is inconceivable that Michael Adams has not studied both that game and the diagram position. He must therefore have formed a view on whether White was obliged to acept the repetition, or whether it could be avoided, either in the way Svidler did or with some other move. Yet nevertheless he chose to go down this line, and a grandmaster draw resulted.

So why would he do this?

(a) Although playing for a win, he deliberately chose a line in which he knew he would have to accept a draw, in the hope that Short didn’t know it. (This seems unlikely.)

(b) Although he thought White should be able to play for a win with Qa4, he was surprised that Short was prepared to go down this line. He therefore assumed that Short had also investigated the variation and come to a different conclusion, and on the day he lacked the nerve to test his preparation against Short’s.

(c) He was surprised by 7...Nh6 and decided that this was not an occasion on which he wished to reveal his preparation after Qa4, and thus decided to accept a draw rather than show it.

(d) This is all irrelevant as the players had implicitly agreed to draw before the game and therefore went straight for the repetition.

I'm not sure which of these best represents my view. But I'll say this, too, with some confidence: I don't think the evidence is wholly compatible with the idea that Adams arrived at the board full of desire to play for a win.

Two against one is not quite equal

L'Ami v Laznicka, European Union Championship, 2008, eighth round, position after White's 59th move, in which he took the last pawn on the board and thereby created the unusual ending of two bishops against a knight.

This is one of those endings of which our view has changed since computers were set to work on them. My edition (McKay, US, 1941) of Basic Chess Endings - which I consider still to be the greatest single book ever written about chess - has relatively little to say about the ending, and, perhaps unavoidably, is not able to offer a definitive opinion. Fine does say that (of all two-pieces-against-one combinations in pawnless positions) "two Bs against Kt offer the best winning chances of all" and he adds:

Attempts have been made to show that two Bs win against Kt in all positions, but the prooofs are inconclusive.

Half a century later in Batsford Chess Endings (1993) Jon Speelman was of a different view, giving four different ways to break down the "Horwitz and Kling fortress" (which can be seen here) which process takes, if Wikipedia is correct, a maximum of 45 moves with best play.

One assumes this means 45 moves until the knight is captured: the point is worth raising, since you'll see different figures used in these situations, and those different figures mean different things. When, for instance, I entered the diagram position in the Nalimov Tablebase it informed me that Black loses in 55 moves. Ah, more than 50, I thought - until I realised that of course this was 55 moves until mate, a distinctly and importantly different yardstick.

Indeed, while typing the last paragraph I received Wednesday's Chess Today in which Alex Baburin makes the point explicitly: "White checkmates in 55 moves against the best defence", although a more useful figure to give might be the number of moves it takes to capture the knight. I'll not take you through the analysis itself (you can of course employ the database to do this for you) except to give the final position:


in which, on White's 38th move after capturing the final pawn, the knight is finally trapped.

So, you ask, does this mean this is now a winnable ending within the fifty move rule? As it happens, not all positions of this type are won within the limit, since not only does it take nearly fifty moves to break down Kling and Horwitz, but it can take some time to get there in the first place, taking us well beyond the fifty. Wikipedia suggests 66 moves as the absolute limit, though Speelman gives 69 - so I can only assume that the analysis available to him a decade and half ago has been improved upon.

For this reason, there was a period of some years in which the fifty move limit was extended for (mostly) pawnless positions of various types. In 1992 the rule was changed back and the fifty move limit was applied strictly to all positions, which, in fact, had not been the case before.

Speelman gives two examples of the defender failing to hold the position: the second game of the 1961 Botvinnik-Tal rematch and his own defeat at Linares in 1992 by a very well-informed Jan Timman.

Laznicka did all right on Tuesday, though: and L'Ami threw in the towel after seventeen moves. Whether through fatigue, frustration, or recognition that his opponent knew what to do and he did not, I cannot say. Personally I'd have no idea whatsoever what to do if the ending ever came up: probably I'd just move the pieces around the board and see what happened.

But that's pretty much what I do most of the time.

[Also see John Saunders' round eight report from Liverpool.]

The Interesting French Exchange VI

incorporating JB's Favourite Moves III

Today is the day that the Tick Tick Tick ... is over. I've finally arrived at the age of 40 so a celebration is in order I think. What could be better than an S&BCC blog post that covers one of the most fascinating opening variations and one of my favourite moves at the same time?

After 1. e4 e6, 2. d4 d5, 3. exd5 exd5, 4. Bd3 Nc6, 5. Ne2 Bd6, 6. c3 how about Alekhine's 6. ... Qh4?*



White's quiet play leaves Black with a lot of options to choose from here. Psakhis, for example, has analysed ... Nge7 and Watson mentions ... Bg4 while somewhat further back Nimzowitsch recommended ... Nf6 and Alekhine himself also suggested ... Qf6 as a possibility.

Regardless of the objective merits of these moves it seems to me that amusement value alone demands 6. ... Qh4 be played. After all, it's not often that flinging your queen into opposition territory right at the beginning of the game is a remotely sensible idea. There's also the fact that ... Qh4 only works because Black is taking advantage of being a move behind in development**. Pleasing as these two points are, what I really like about the idea ("!!" according to C.J.S. Purdy, a more restrained "!" from Watson) is that Black isn't trying to start



or conclude

A. Bloke v J.B. @ RHP

an attack. No, he's chucking his queen deep into the enemy position simply to impede White's development. "It was important to prevent 7. Bf4" says old Alexander*** and I can't but agree.

What's not to love about 6. ... Qh4?**** The only downside is that I so rarely get to play it. Just once in fact and then, sadly, although I got an extremely good position out of the opening the game ended as if Amir Khan had suddenly taken over control of the Black pieces. Cue an instant knock-out.

Ah well. Maybe I'll get a chance to make amends to ... Qh4 soon. In the meantime there's always Alekhine's games to enjoy.

Two Alekhine wins on the Black side of a ... Qh4 French Exchange and the prospect of cake later on too. Being 40 is turning out to be not too bad at all.





The Interesting French Exchange
TIFE
OK, I admit it. The French Exchange can be dull.

TIFE II
Castle long then chop him up.

TIFE III
Castle short then (nearly) chop him up.

TIFE IV
Korchnoi shows the way.

TIFE V
Uhlmann can do it too.


Other posts that cover the French Exchange
Gurevich-Short, 1990
Nosher wins a critical game.

JB Plays the Black side of the French Exchange
but doesn't handle the clock very well.


Favourite Moves
JB's Favourite Moves I
JB's Favourite Moves II

Favourite Moves Index



* Just to be clear, the '?' is for the sentence not the move.

** As pointed out by C.J.S. Purdy. Needless to say Black wouldn't want to play ... Qh4 if White hadn't already committed the knight to e2 thereby losing the option of kicking her majesty with Nf3. Moreover in the French Exchange Black often plays ... Bd6 and ... Ne7 but the response Qh5 is ruled out because White will typically have already blocked the d1-h5 diagonal by developing the king's knight.

*** C.J.S. Purdy quotes Alekhine thus in "Action Chess: Purdy's 24 Hours Opening Repertoire", Thinkers Press Inc. 2000

**** See *

Seeing things

While most of you were probably watching England beat Croatia last Wednesday, I was following the chess from Bilbao, as the game between Anand and Aronian stretched out well beyond the time control. Anand, having blundered, found himself with rook for queen, but in an ending that, it seemed to me, Aronian might easily fail to win.

One of my earliest memories of watching live chess on the internet involves a Gelfand-Svidler game from the FIDE world championship in 2001 which came down to Gelfand's rook against Svidler's queen, and other than that just the two kings*. It must have been a frustrating and embarrassing experience for the Russian, who will have known that it was a theoretical win, and presumably also knew roughly how it should be won - but in practice, he couldn't do it. (Especially embarrassing, on at least one occasion he missed a simple win.) It's not so easy though, especially with time running out. If you feel like giving it a go, try winning the same endgame against the computer - with the analysis window hidden. Not easy at all.

Anyway, Anand didn't manage to put up the same fight Gelfand had - or rather, Aronian proved rather more adept at finding the right line than had Svidler - and we got to the position at the top of the column after Anand had played 71.Kc5-b6. I was just expecting Aronian to check on e6 and finish off the game, when the online service claimed he had taken on a5 with the queen instead.


This seemed improbable unless either Aronian was doing it for a bet, or there had been some earlier error in the rendering of the moves and the position was therefore not as given. Still, play continued for some moves - the queen, suspiciously, not being captured - and I gave up in frustration and started following the football on text updates. Later, I went back to the Bilbao website and found that it had been corrected. The queen hadn't gone anywhere near a5: Aronian had indeed checked on e6 and won in short order.

No great harm done. Nevertheless, once that sort of thing starts happening, you start distrusting the evidence, not so much of your own eyes, as of the online board in front of them.


On Saturday we came to the last round and the last game to finish, Aronian v Radjabov. After Black's 44...Qc3-d3 we reached the position immediately above, and I naturally expected Aronian to finish the game with 45.Rbe1. Instead, however, after Aronian had thought for a long time, the board showed that he'd played the incomprehensible 45.Reb2.


What madness was this? Instead of winning the knight and the game, he takes his rook away from the open e-file and puts it en prise to the bishop on f6.

Naturally, the rook was captured and Black won the game in a few more moves: equally naturally, I decided that in all probability no such thing had happened and that there must have been some sort of transcription error prior to the Aronian's inexplicable 45th. I continued to believe this until opening my daily Chess Today newsletter the following morning and finding out that Black would have enjoyed rather more play than I had thought.

Alex Baburin gives a main line 45.Rbe1 Rxb3 46.Rxe8+ Kc7 47.Qh7+ Kb6 48.c5+ dxc5 49.Ne3 (49.Bxb3? Rf2+ 50.Kg1 Qf3! -+ is difficult to foresee, but impossible to answer) 49...Rb2+ 50.Kg1 (or 50.Ng2 Rff2!) 50...Qxh7 51.Bxh7 Rg3+ 52.Kf1 Rf3+ with perpetual check.

Indeed, if you input the position before White's 45th into a chess engine, you may find that at 14-ply, the winning advantage awarded to 45.Rbe1 (which, although less than on earlier assessments, is still a tasty +2.00 on my Rybka at 13-ply) suddenly flattens out to 0.00. It's still barmy though, since having a perpetual check half a dozen moves down the track is better than resigning after five, as actually happened. (I don't think White can do better than a forced draw: Baburin offers 46.Ne3 as a possible alternative but it doesn't seem to make any difference after 46...Bd4 47.Qg5+ Nf6).

So something, still, is very wrong. What did Aronian see? And what did he think he saw?


[* in point of fact this isn't quite true, since Svidler could, I believe have held onto his extra pawn with 75...Qf1. But even after that, the ending is of course still won.]

Clothes for Chess Players?

Now. Either my dress-sense has reached a new all-time low (again), or Chess Motifs really do produce some great clothing. My favourite from their vast array is this Fischer t-shirt:


And don't worry if green's not really you - it's also available in various other colours, a few different styles, as well as as a hooded-top, a tracksuit for women, a mouse-mat, a bumper-sticker, a bag, a teddy-bear, a mug, a bib and (as Americans are wont to call pants) as knickerbockers.

Then again, this badge looks to me the best reason to begin the game with an orangutan that I've seen for a long while:
You can buy a hundred here.

So will you see Chivers decked out in such items at a chess tournament near you soon? Probably not. Shipping from the States is usually prohibitively priced, and frankly, it's quite possible my dress sense really has just hit a new all-time low.

Or has it . . .

Tick Tick Tick ... X

Flag Hanging

I'm seems like we've only just said goodbye to last season but already the next one is just eight days away. Will a new chess year be any different to all the others? For some of us perhaps ...

• Our London League Second Team captain has new domestic arrangements. There used to be a widely held view amongst professional players that getting married automatically led to the deduction of a good wodge of rating points. This time around Antony will be finding out if the same applies to amateurs. He, sensible lad, is rather more concerned about the impact of the demands of another year of getting us all to Golden Lane on time.
  
  
• The allegedly rusty T.C. has not (yet) joined Antony in either matrimonial bliss or team captaincy but he does now have a swanky new grade to defend not to mention his title of S&BCC Club Champion.
  

Somehow I expect another successful season for both my club mates. My own prospects I'm not so sure about since I'll be finding out whether reaching my 40th birthday does indeed result in the immediate leakage of brain tissue out of the ears. Either way it is the passing of that particular milestone that I'll employ as an excuse to explain any disasters that befall me at the chess board over the next year.

Different or otherwise, one thing that is pretty certain is that most of us will be back. Our game, for the most part, is just not the sort of hobby that a person walks away from. Why so? Well to borrow and then mangle a phrase of Martin's from his latest contribution to the comments box (here):-

This is chess not art

That we all implicitly accept this is the only explanation I can think of for why we keep returning despite the near impossibility of playing the game properly. It's the competition that's the thing. We play because we like to play. We play because the rubbish we serve up for ourselves is better than not playing. Prettiness and accuracy are the exceptions not the rule and we accept that to keep playing.

Win Ugly was T.C.'s advice from his recent Improve your Chess series. Well most of us don't have any choice. Marriage, advancing ratings or advancing years won't change that.

Chess in Art XIV

Schachbrett

Paul Klee (1931)

Überschach

Paul Klee (1937)

[Kunsthaus Zürich]

[Chess in Art index]
[Chess in Art collected]

Ray of hope

The prominence of Ray Keene in English chess is such that I often feel he should be awarded some sort of official title, perhaps in lieu of "Grandmaster", which status, in Ray's case, is rather reminiscent of the safety routine on an aircraft: it is mentioned so often, without actually being used in practice, that nobody takes any notice of it any more.

Tatmaster might not be inappropriate, to mention one area where he has some stiff competition but nevertheless leads the the field. Grand Self-Promoter has a certain appeal: Ray On Anything usually means Ray On Ray. Van Gogh painted himself thirty-seven times, but at least when he painted The Potato Eaters he didn't paint himself in the middle of the picture, distributing chips. Or, as would be more likely if Ray were the artist, sitting at his favourite table in Simpsons-in-the-Strand, being served personally by the specialist Potato Chef.


Van Gogh, of course, was a genius, and died penniless. Ray's genius lies largely in his capacity to avoid that condition by an enormous distance without doing much that is meritorious to deserve it. It also lies in getting on my nerves, as occurred when I happened on this posting on Sean Marsh's blog and suffered some persistent irritation as a result.

You may read the whole thing yourselves, should you possess the patience, but in brief, it largely consists of a letter from Ray to Kate Hoey, proposing the organisation of an annual grandmaster tournament in London. Well, what an admirable venture, you may think, and you would be wrong. Of course in principle you would be right, but in this particular instance you would be wrong.

Why do I say so? There's a few reasons, as it happens, but in the first instance, I don't believe that prestigious chess tournaments - or anything else - are organised by people writing letters out of the blue to the Mayor's office, containing no concrete proposal, no indication of any funding and nothing at all more specific than an invitation to lunch.

What's more, I don't really believe that Ray thinks that either. If Ray had anything serious to say, he wouldn't be popping a letter in the post, he'd be in Kate Hoey's office talking to her about it. He'd be in her office - having first of all discussed it with her boss, Boris Johnson, for whom Ray worked at the Spectator for a period of six years. Or perhaps Boris isn't answering Ray's calls these days. Which is probably a good thing, but it casts some doubt on the suggestion that Ray is Mister Mover and Shaker in the world of chess.

He does, it's true, mention Boris in his second paragraph - the one in which he refers to the 130 books he's written, while wisely omitting to mention the reputation this oeuvre, substantial in numbers if in no other way, has earned him. Did I mention that Ray On Anything is always Ray On Ray? He starts to talk about himself in his second paragraph: the actual proposal has to wait until his sixth.

Prior to this, we have a spiel about how

chess is an extraordinarily - even uniquely - effective remedy and antidote in the fight against Alzheimer's and related dementia illnesses

which might or might not be true, but it is odd - or it ought to be - that rather than attach some of the research that has taken place on the subject (in the New England Journal of Medicine) Ray attaches

an article I have recently written for "The Times" about this

presumably considering his piece a more impressive authority.

Well, I could go on, as Ray goes on, eventually informing Hoey in a classic Ray Keene touch that

My preferred route would be to invite you to lunch at Simpsons in the Strand so that I can explain at leisure

but it is Friday and I suspect our readers lack the determination to plough though the whole letter raising their eyebrows at each questionable claim. So suffice it to say that:

i) an examination of his letter reveals that the total amount of funds so far raised towards the project is nil, this also being the total amount of effort that Ray has so far put in to secure any ;

ii) the letter, despite being written in May, has received no response.

Well I never. How rude.

I have been racking my brains to work out precisely what Ray is up to here. I have narrowed it down to three possibilities:

a) Ray knows very well that this is bullshit, but has written the letter as an effort-free way to make good publicity for himself ;

b) Ray thinks that something of the kind might happen in the future and has written the letter so that his name comes up if it does - it's all about positioning Ray Keene ;

c) I am quite wrong above and Ray really has started to believe his own publicity, perhaps as a result of spending too much time at Simpsons-in-the-Strand.

If so he must have been terribly disappointed that so far he has received no response. I am a little less so: personally I'd quite like to see a grandmaster tournament in London, but I'd like to see Ray Keene separated from any attempt to organise same.

I have to admit he has a certain style, Ray. I don't mean a certain style, in the sense that Thierry Henry or George Clooney has a certain style, I mean a certain style, which in his case which involves saying things that aren't, really, entirely true but which at the same time are not, entirely, demonstrably false. Not so much False Memory Syndrome as remembering with advantages.

Or perhaps the sheer extent to which he keeps getting away with it does constitute style, of a sort. Ray Keene as Arthur Daley. Or Ray Keene as Budgie.

Photo: Chessbase

Yes, I should probably let him bother me less, and see him instead as a comedy act, an important part of our cultural life, his place cemented by many years of performing a well-rehearsed and well-loved act. That title? Chief Embarrassment to the World of English Chess.

Oh, I see Ray's getting into vanity publishing now. A shame that, since I've always thought of vanity publishing as a means of parting the unwise from their money while doing very little for them. Which, for Ray, would be a new departure.

Tick Tick Tick ... IX

Best Served Cold

0-1
Short v Arakhamia-Grant, 10/09/08

"That Short result can't be right . . ."

said T.C. as he pointed me in the direction of the EU Chess Championships live feed and the final position of Nosher's game against Arakhamia-Grant. I couldn't but agree ... until EJH suggested I read John Moore's post on the English Chess Forum:-

Round 2 breaking news - those who think that the result of the live Game Short- Arakhamia is a misprint and that it was agreed drawn are wrong. Nigel's phone rang - default 0-1.

So who was it that left Nigel hanging on the telephone? Is it out of the question, I wonder, that Nosher's mystery caller was Doris Stokes passing on a message from Tony Miles?

Richmond Rapidplay, report!

Three Streatham and Brixton Chess Club players took part in the 79th Richmond Rapidplay this Sunday, amidst a bumper field totaling 127 competitors. The present writer somehow managed to win half of the Under-180 grading prize, with 4/6 in an Open that was jointly won by GM Simon Williams and IM Gavin Wall with 5/6 - that's ahead of a strong field that also included GM John Nunn and IMs Graeme Buckley and James Sherwin. Full results will soon be able available on the tournament website.

I'd like to say I fully deserved my prize and that I'm proud of my 4/6 - but in fact, I didn't play anyone higher rated than me! I'm not even sure I deserve a grading prize on the back of such a lucky draw, but of course that didn't stop me taking it.

To the right is a position from one of my games - where it's black to play. "Nice tactic," my opponent said after the game. Kind of him, given the slew of blunders I followed it up with, going on only to draw this particular one. I wondered before the tournament how rusty I'd gotten over the summer - the answer being, very.


Here's a photograph - again thanks to Vad - of myself and co-winner Alex Galliano receiving our prize:

Now, has that put you in the mood for some pre-season rapid chess? In that case, this Monday evening (15th September) will see the Third Gerald Duncumb Memorial Open, taking place upstairs at The Crown & Greyhound in Dulwich Village. Prizes total £100 - first place taking home £70 - and games start at 7.45 sharp, with registration from 7.15 onwards. Entry is £2.50 or £1.25 for conecssions. More info is available here.

Tick Tick Tick ... VIII

What's that coming over the hill? Is it a monster? Is it a monster?

No my friends it's the future. Well it is assuming we don't all die tomorrow*.

Future Boy:-
Magnus Carlsen's win over Aronian at Bilbao yesterday lifted him beyond what could be explained away as a purely mathematical advantage over Anand into clear first on the Live Rating List. Regardless of what you think about real time rating updates it's hard to avoid the feeling that Carlsen's going to be dominating the chess world for the next ten years. That could be twenty if he lasts as long as Anand (and if professional chess is still going in 2028).

Future Scoring System:-
Carlsen now has three wins, two draws and one defeat while Topalov has two wins, four draws and no losses. This would normally tie them for first on plus two, or 4/6 if you prefer, but three points for a win at Bilbao means that the Norwegian lad has his nose in front. It would seem Mike Basman's time has come.

Future Time Control:-
According to the tournament website the time control at Bilbao is 90 minutes for the first 40 moves and then another hour to finish the game. Is there really no time increment in operation? I'd find that a little quick for a league game let alone a Grand Master tournament.

I'm far from convinced that two of these three are A Good Thing but then that's the future for you. It's a package deal. You don't get to pick and choose.





* and let's be honest the knowlege that the Daily Mail and its readership are going down with us would sweeten the pill more than a little wouldn't it?

Improving the Image of Chess?

As I've said before, the last thing I want is for chess to become more popular - because that would just mean more players able to beat me, of which there must be hundreds of thousands alive already, if not millions. Not everyone sees it that way, of course, and there are even those who - for reasons entirely alien to the present writer - try to actually improve the image of chess.

Like David Levens, reports This Is Nottingham, who plans to run a marathon whilst playing six games of chess:

David is . . . taking on the challenge to counter rumours that chess players are nerds.

He said: "It's just something different. I was thinking of ways to raise awareness about chess. It gets no publicity because it's not classified as a sport, but it's very popular.

"I'm doing it to raise money for the Leprosy Mission, but particularly to make people aware that chess players are not all geeks!"

Goodness. It makes chess players sound a healthy, charitable and fun bunch, doesn't it? (Is that what we want in our opponents?!)

Tick Tick Tick ... VII

How long does now last?

Who is the strongest player in the world right now? Such a simple looking question but surprisingly tricky to answer.

Starting with the obvious we could remind ourselves that it's Vishy Anand who is World Champion. Leaving aside the complicating issue of whether or not Anand can legitimately consider himself 'champion' before winning a match, it's now virtually a year since he won Mexico City. Is his victory there relevant to 'now'? We might want to reserve judgement until the forthcoming* Anand-Kramnik contest but that won't kick-off for another five weeks. Depending on your point of view it may, or may not , tell us who's strongest then but I want to know now.

So let’s try again using the official ratings.

According to FIDE Anand has been Number One since April 2007. Unfortunately for our purposes the most recent official FIDE official rating list was published over two months ago and a lot of pawns have been pushed since July 1st. Anand has played just four times** since the last list came out but FIDE's July top ten average over 18 games each. At this distance, then, we can't be sure the official ratings tell us about the relative strengths of the leading players now.

Sadly, it's not just the fact that a new list appears only once per quarter that causes problems for the FIDE ratings. In fact the current process ensures they are out of date even on the day of publication (which particularly hurt Magnus Carlsen this time around).

So let’s try again again.

Once more, it seems, we have to return to an unofficial website, chess.liverating.org, to find out what we, or at least I, want to know.

My visit to Hans Arild Runde's site earlier today showed clearly that the results of Friday’s games from Bilbao have had a significant impact on the top of the list. The upshot of Anand losing to Topalov and Carlsen beating Radjabov (see the excellent reports at Chess Vibes for details) is that for the first time Carlsen has an objective claim to be the strongest player on the planet. It's true that they are a just a wafer thin mint apart but right now Magnus Carlsen is number one with a rating of 2791.3 and Vishy Anand is in second place with 2790.9.

It's not surprising Anand is slipping down the rankings.
As this photo from chess vibes clearly shows, Vishy is losing his head.

Now there's an obvious question as to whether a 0.4 elo point differential actually reflects anything in reality. Even if you accept that a live rating system is preferable to quarterly updates (I do) and even if you accept the idea of updating the system during tournaments and not as they finish (I do) you'd be hard pressed to defend a claim that any system could be quite so accurate. For now, then, we'll just say that mathematically speaking at least, Magnus Carlsen is the strongest chess player in the world.

Of course that's my now.

As I sit here in Clapham’s Green Bag cafe munching my chocolate cake, slurping my tea and tipity-tapping away at my lap-top it’s late on Saturday morning. In a few hours time Anand will be playing Carlsen in Bilbao so by the time anybody actually reads this – your now – things could be very different.

* If you want to know precisely how long you have to wait you can go to the official website where you'll find a clock that's counting down to the kick-off. At time of writing it's 37 days, 22 hours, 6 minutes and 24 seconds.

** He shares the title of 'Most Inactive' of the leading grandmasters with Topalov. Ivanchuk, not surprisingly, has played more games - 44 - than anybody else.

Chess in Art XIII

The King Playing With The Queen

Max Ernst (1944)

[Museum of Modern Art, New York]

© 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

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Double or quits

In the same tournament I was watching the last games of a round come to a close and was treated to one of the most egregious examples of I Can't Lose From Here Syndrome I've seen in a while. The position (the game, by the way, took place on one of the higher boards) was as given below, Black having offered a bishop exchange for a second time: White had been moving his own bishop this way and that in the hope of finding a breakthrough that wasn't really there.

Resigning himself to the impossiblity of winning without swapping the bishops, he neverthless convinced himself that he was the only one with winning chances: after all, it was a pure pawn ending, and Black suffered from doubled pawns on the b-file, something which ought to be a crippling disadvantage in such an ending.

So White, with the knowledge that he was the one with pawn moves in hand, continued with some confidence: 1.Bxe6 Kxe6 2.g4 Kd6 3.a4 Ke6 after which he proceeded to immobilise Black's pawns entirely: 4.a5 bxa5 5.bxa5 Kd6

and suddenly he realised that he had undoubled his opponent's pawns and conceded the opposition - and that it was his pawns which, in fact, had been immobilised.

Actually to tell the truth, I don't know whether he realised any of that: he did however realise that he was completely lost, and while a few more moves were played, resignation followed hard upon.

Perhaps one day I shall write a series for this blog about objectivity: which for our purposes we can define simply as not thinking your position is better than it actually is. There are all sorts of reasons why we do so: our strength relative to the opponent, the possibility that we were better, maybe even winning, earlier in the game, or simply the tendency, which is more and more pronounced the lower the strength of the players, to take far more notice of our own moves and ideas than those of the other side.

Rowson calls this Narrative. We tell ourselves a story about how we're beating the opponent, and we consider the board in the light of the narrative rather than the objective truth. In the instance, it does seem to me that whatever the whole story, part of it was I Can't Lose From Here. But, objectively, you always can.

I had my own doubled-b-pawn adventure a little later in the tournament, the very round after the missed-attack episode that I recounted yesterday. There's something about it which makes me cast doubt on yesterday's theory that I may have missed an attack on an opponent's rook at a7 because that piece was partially obscured by a queen on a6. What I think is mostly the truth, about yesterday's game and today's, is that I found myself concentrating so hard on the portion of the board where the action appeared to be, that I essentially forgot about the rest of it.


Gil Capape-Horton, Aragon Individual Championship 2008: position after White's 63.Kg2-h3. It may also be the position after White's 61.Kh3: if truth be told, my handwriting by that stage, four hours into the game, was so poor I cannot be sure whether or not the moves are as given below, or 60...Kf5 61.Kf3.

Either way, it was clear to me that I had made a meal of a pawn ending that had looked easily won, just as I had nearly made a meal of the equally-easy queen ending that preceded it. (What would I have done, I wonder, after 44.Qf5?) Black's f-pawn is too close to the White king to be of any use: and as White's king has access to as many useful squares as does Black's, it cannot be driven away.

I was desperate. I had already drawn too many games and had to win this one if I was to get up among the leaders, but I couldn't see how to do it. The game had surely been won: but there was no way in for the king. I had just a couple of minutes left on the clock (and I only had those courtesy of my opponent having attempted to play 38.Kg2, thus gaining me two extra minutes from the arbiter).

Once again, the answer is obvious if you are looking at a diagram, because you see all parts of it with equal facility: less obvious if you're leaning over the board, getting as close as you can to the king on the h-file to see if you can put it on a killing square, looking essentially at a position like this....

....and forgetting all about a b-pawn that has, after all, been in precisely the same place for four hours and fifty-five moves.

Until, that is, you look round the board just in case there's a miracle to be found, and discover that, Deo gratias, there is.

Three-dimensional chess

In Think Like A Grandmaster, Kotov mentions the following incident:

During a round of the 1946 Moscow Championship the usual silence of the tournament room was suddenly broken by a frightful cry. The players jumped up from their seats and went over the board where the game between Bronstein and Bonch-Osmolovsky was being played. The temperamental player of Black (who by the way was a good boxer and was well used to receiving physical blows as well as mental ones) was sitting there holding his head in his hands, while young David Bronstein who was also very upset by the unexpected reaction of his opponent was showing everybody what had happened.

In the diagram position Black had just checked with his queen. White moved out of check with K-N2 [I have an old, descriptive-notation copy, and on this occasion have chosen not to translate - ejh] and after some thought Black advanced his KP. Bronstein then played RxQ.

"It's just terrible", said Bonch-Osmolovsky in his distress. "The white king on N2 is a big piece and I didn't notice the fact that the white rook behind it was now attacking my queen."

Kotov is a little sceptical about this explanation, as am I, but perhaps a little less sceptical after a game I played in the recent Individual Championship of Aragón, in which event I came tenth.

In the sixth round I played Lorenzo Montes Santos and found myself in a strange pseudo-Benko Gambit in which I had a tempo to spare over orthodox lines. Nevertheless, I played with the nervousness that is my hallmark in that kind of opening and which probably explains why I play 1.Nf3 which normally avoids them. After Black's fifteenth move, the position at the top of this piece arose, and I decided I should ease the mounting pressure by trying to exchange off Black's g7 bishop. Play continued along the lines I had envisaged: 16.a3 c4 17.h3 Ne5 18.Nxe5 Bxe5 19.Be3 attacking the queen in the following position -


Black moved his queen to a6: and I followed my plan, moving the bishop to d4 and swapping off the bishops. The game was later drawn, in an unimpressive effort on my part (given below for anybody who needs to be convinced). I was just preparing myself for a post mortem in which we'd see how I'd failed to win the ending, when my opponent startled me by asking instead: "why didn't you take the rook with your bishop?"

What? I didn't understand what he was talking about for a moment, until I realised that god, yes, the e3 bishop must have been attacking the rook on a7. How could I have possibly failed to see it? Because, I imagine, I was so wrapped up in my plan to exchange bishops that I didn't see what else was happening on the board. I had an idea, and it was a good one, so I played it: and I never took the couple of seconds I might have taken to look round and see if anything else was on.

But maybe something else, too. When we sat down to look at the game, using a nice, chunky set, and actually got to the position where I could take the rook, I wondered.


Perhaps I never saw it, because I never saw it. The diagram, for once, actually serves to obscure rather than to illustrate: it obscures because you can see.

Everything is the same size, because everything is flat. I should have still seen it, in both pertinent senses of the word: of course I should. But I didn't. And maybe because, on the real, three-dimensional board, the queen - which, like Bronstein's queen, is a big piece - hides the rook.

Tick Tick Tick ... VI

The other half

It's pointless talking about time management if you're going to ignore the up to 3 1/2 hrs of the game when it's not your move.

... as Richard rightly said in the comments box to this post.

In Excelling at Chess*, Jacob Aagaard considers the time during a chess game when it's the opponent's turn to move to be analogous to the breaks between the individual games of a tennis match. According to Aagaard the realisation that five sets might actually involve playing tennis for perhaps half an hour at most led to attention being focused on those parts of the contest during which 'nothing' was happening. It was found, not coincidentally he feels, that "the best players all had a similar pattern of behaviour" at those times.

In the light of his findings Aagaard goes on to describes his visit to the Wijk aan Zee tournament of 2001.

"Kasparov, Anand, Morozevich, Ivanchuk and Kramnik all did the same thing. They walked up and down on the stage, staring down at the floor. They occasionally glanced at other games, but never with true interest. The only one of these who was not totally focused was Anand who, occasionally, would talk with Piket or another player. Anand, by the way, did not have a strong tournament ... [**]

Shirov behaved differently, sitting at the board for most of the time. After six or seven games he was leading by a point."

I had this passage in mind during my visits to the Staunton Memorial last month. I took a close interest in what the players did when it was not their turn to move and found their habits remained remarkably consistent throughout the event. Nigel Short, for example, would typically retreat to the arbiters' table where he would often share a word or two with Steve Giddens while Jan Timman would usually spend his time wandering the playing hall taking a close look at each of the other game. The Dutchman had a very lackadaisical attitude towards the clock and on more than one occasion I noticed him returning to his board then wandering off again without noticing that his opponent had actually moved.

Only one player - Michael Adams - was Shirovesque in his approach. Adams rarely left the board and indeed would even remain seated when it was not his move and his opponent was absent. He seemed to make a habit of going for a stroll around the playing hall for a few minutes once he'd reached the time control but other than that once he'd sat down for the start of play that was pretty much where he'd stay for the next few hours. It hardly need be said that it was Adams who ended up winning the tournament***.

Of course outward behaviour doesn't tell us for sure what these guys were actually thinking about. Timman clearly wasn't focused on his game but Short could have been contemplating his position just as much as Adams seemed to be. For that matter it's perfectly possible that England's number one didn't have his mind on chess at all but instead was spending the time pondering just how much fun it would be to find himself trapped in a confined space with Ann Margaret with nothing but a large tin of baked beans and a vat of melted chocolate for entertainment****. Still, if you had to put money on it, you'd have to say that it was most likely it was Michael Adams who was making fullest use of the available time wouldn't you?

Acting on the outside what you want to be on the inside is invariably a helpful technique. Not a cure all for sure but a good start. It's certainly not enough on its own though. We also have to find an answer to the question of what it would be helpful for us to be doing while our opponents' clocks tick away. Unfortunately in the otherwise very helpful and comprehensive chapter on Clock Control in Chess for Tigers Simon Webb doesn't have too much to say about this. His advice pretty much amounts to,

"The Tiger is determined to do his best, and so gets up only as often as necessary to refresh his brain. He spends his opponent's time thinking generally about the position and what manoeuvres are available to both sides so that he can start thinking in terms of exact moves as soon as his opponent makes a move."

What Michael Adams thinks about while waiting for his opponent to move. Maybe.

Sadly he doesn't give any examples of how exploring a position in general might look in practice. I suppose this is about positional understanding and identifying the key features of a position - fianchettoed bishop, queen side pawn majority, insecure king etc etc - but that's much easier to talk about than to do I feel.

So at the end of today's meanderings I'm left with the knowledge that my opponents' clock time is an important resources for me but without any clear idea of how I can best make use of it. Not for the first time I throw my troubles out to the esteemed and most valued readership of the S&BCC Blog and ask two questions:-

(a) what do you do while your opponent is thinking?
(b) what do you think is actually 'good' or 'helpful' behaviour at these times?

All answers gratefully received.










* A book I've discussed many times on the blog (from most recent backwards ... 1, 2, 3)

** Regular S&BCC blog visitors with elephantine memories may find these words familiar. If so it's because this passage is the lead in to the quote about Anand not reaching his full potential as discussed here and the prior to that in the original post here.

*** I might also add that unlike Peter Wells and Ivan Sokolov, Adams invariably arrived at the tournament hall five minutes before the start of play.

**** Or is that just me?

Improve Your Chess IX: Earplugs

Why did I lose? Because the door kept banging shut behind my board. Because the geezer's throat I was playing kept gurgling. Because of the boredom of blokes and their predictability of prattle, couched away in the corner of their club. Because the light bulbs were weirdly buzzing. Because, because, because. Not because of my own failures of concentration, accentuated by a weakness to listen to distractions good or bad - and certainly not because I was outplayed from start to finish, after which I fished around for some noises to blame that unpleasant fact upon . . .

And so such excuses after losses went on - until I read what novelist Nicholson Baker had to say about the one thing that got his creative juices flowing. He described the effect of the thing as follows: "I can sit anywhere, in any loud place, and work. Everything becomes 20 feet farther away than it really is. The chirping, barking, jingling cash-drawer of a world is out of reach, and therefore more precious." I realised the solution to his problem might work as a solution to mine, too.

Now, don't worry. The solution won't delude you into believing that the world is a cash-drawer and more precious as such, or something. It was just that earplugs suddenly sounded to me a straight-forward aid to concentration and immersion into any activity (except music.) So I decided to try them myself during chess games. Remarkably quickly my results picked up; these two draws, for instance, can be taken as representative from a tournament where my performance grade averaged ten points higher than the rest of the season up to that point.

I had never drawn with an FM before, let alone against an IM - and then with earplugs, I'd done both in one tournament. Can earplugs alone really be responsible for such a sudden change? I'd like to answer yes, but in my case, it's hard to tell for sure because I began nearly all my attempts at chess improvement at approximately the same time. So instead, does it follow therefore that earplugs might be wholly responsible for my improvement, or maybe for none of it at all - and that there's no way to tell? Maybe . . .

But I think not: in my experience, earplugs have not only a practical value, but a philosophical one too. I might even go so far as to say that even as a placebo that filtered no noise, they would have had a useful function for me. And I think these other lessons earplugs taught me have helped improve my play in general, that there is a sort of Philosophy of Earplugs.

What I mean by this, is that committing to wearing earplugs represents not just a practical decision to filter out distractions as far as possible, but that it also engenders a philosophical attitude to the game. That attitude is to take as much responsibility as possible for your chess games: to say to yourself, so what if the opponent is noisy? The venue creaking? The door banging? I'm entirely on my own, insulated in silence, and everything is down to me. I have nothing to blame but myself. Botvinnik probably benefited from something similar, when he used to play seven hour training games next to a blaring radio or in a cigar-smoke filled room.

Aside from helping to ignore distractions, I think the Philosophy of Earplugs helps decision-making at the board itself, too. In the second link above, for instance, you'll find a position where I sacrificed two pawns and a knight to achieve a drawn endgame. I did this after fifteen minutes thought, and felt almost silly about playing the sequence - especially because of the look it provoked on my opponent's face! Would I have found the same sequence without earplugs? Maybe not. The aloneness of silence frees us from such self-consciousness, reminding us there is no-one listening to our thoughts, however daft they might turn out to be. So we are free to consider ludicrous-looking moves, free to feel unselfconscious about being out of book on move three and thinking for ten minutes, free to play chess as best we can.

In conclusion, try earplugs. Or if you're not distracted by noise, try the Philosophy of Earplugs anyhow!


And finally . . .
A few other bits and bobs before I sign the series off.

Firstly, I'm not the first to advise the use of earplugs for playing chess. In an entertaining article that I recently discovered Nigel Davies praises earplugs here, writing about advantages they bring such as: filtering out the noise of spectators, filtering out the snores of room-mates or other sources of noise in hotels, that you might not hear draw-offers, and so on.

Secondly, I'm amazed that earplug companies don't sponsor chess events, providing say one free pair to each competitor in a tournament and setting up a stall to sell further in bulk. Or alternatively sponsoring a league team that uses them, that sort of thing. Why not?

Thirdly, aside from the Philosophy of Earplugs, pragmatics are important too. Most earplugs sold on UK highstreets - that I've encountered - are orange and chubby, like those to the right. They all seem to be the same, and the cheapest I found were at Tesco. These also usually come with an informative instruction booklet and a handy mini-carry-case. However - and whilst accompanied by no such niceties - I definitely prefer the slimmer, cheaper, softer, yellow "Worksafe Earplugs" sold at Travis Perkins under the code SEP403 - although they are harder to come by.

Finally, this article is the last in this series. I've appreciated the feedback, discussion and links the series has generated, and I hope my posts might have helped improve your own chess in some little way! The series also now has an index.

PS. Beware the dangers of earplugs!

Pinch, Punch

September, serious month. Back to work, back to school, summer in descent, the sense of a winter sun, the chess season approaching, everything in full-swing or about to begin again.

And . . . . why not start it off with a nice rapidplay tournament for a bit of practice? This Sunday the 7th will see the Richmond Rapidplay return in its 79th incarnation down in Hampton, and you can click here for more details or here for the PDF entry form. I'll be there, trying to work out just how rusty I've gotten over the summer.

And here are some photographs from the last one, supplied by our man on the spot Vad, who'll also be playing this Sunday.

Familiar faces . . .


Tough competition (click to enlarge) . . .



The tournament hall in action . . .


Time-scrambles, crowds - inevitable!

PS. The final post in the "Improve Your Chess" series will appear tomorrow, rather than today.