War games

Anybody spotted the chess revival that was supposed to take place after Magnus Carlsen won the title last year? Me neither, but perhaps we were looking in the wrong direction. One Anand blunder in his long endgame in the penultimate round Candidates and we might have had our revivial after all.

We all know that the reason chess took off after Spassky-Fischer was the politics, yes? The Cold War on the chessboard, international politics in minature, that sort of thing? We do?

It doesn't seem to have attracted much comment, but the guy who came second in the Candidates

comes from Crimea. You may also recall that not too long ago he changed his nationality from Ukranian to Russian.

Now that would have spiced it up nicely, wouldn't it? You want contemporary geopolitics on the 64 squares, you might have had it.

Of course Carlsen's not the latterday Cold Warrior you'd want in the opposite chair, but you could always elect a Reaganite as FIDE President in time to oversee the match. And watch everything go BOOM.

An ISE by any other name

Black to play and sacrifice the exchange (or not)

Topalov v Karjakin, Candidates’ (11) 2014

Well done Vishy. I’m not sure many people were thinking a fortnight ago that he’d come out of the Candidates’ on top of the pile. I certainly wasn’t. Aside from that, precisely how many World Champions have lost their title in a match and then fought their way back to another? Karpov, yes, but I’m pretty sure he’s the only one.

So what if all he’s done is earn himself an appointment to receive a hefty kick in the nuts from Our Magnus. It’s still an exceptional achievement all the same.

Anyhoo, back to the ISEs. This week we use the Candidates to ask: what exactly is an ISE?

Streatham Library Rapidplay: Sunday April 13th.

Streatham and Brixton Chess Club will be running a rapidplay tournament on Sunday 13th April - venue Streatham Library - to coincide with the opening of Lambeth's newly renovated community hub in Streatham. All welcome.

Full details, including how to enter, are on the tournament website here (but you cannot enter via the S&BChess Blog).

Summary information is:

• Six rounds (each 30 minutes on your clock): first round at 10.30 am. 
• Entry fee £15.00 
• Two sections: Open and under 140. 
• Prizes! 

Rapidplay here! Sunday 13 April. Better weather guaranteed. 
(Pic by Angus French) 

The last time - back in 1986 - that S&BCC organised a tournament it was also a rapidplay. It was held at the White Lion pub (just across the road from the Library), which at some time in the distant past was the club's regular venue.

BORP XXVIII

White to play

JMGB v J. Briggs, London League 19.03.2014

To play 12 Bg5 or not to play 12 Bg5? That is today's question.

Comfort zones. That is today’s theme.

A pair of rook endings. That is today’s bonus.

Nosh-up

The latest New In Chess features a long and interesting article by Nigel Short, in which he discusses his theory that Andrew Paulson is a dubious individual whose relationship to Kirsan Ilyumzhinov may have led (among other things) to FIDE being defrauded of a sum of money. It also recounts his struggle to have this information published in the Sunday Times.

All very readable stuff. However, the following passage inevitably attracted my attention:

Now, suppose you wished to write an article claiming that a chess federation had potentially been defrauded of a sum of money on account of its President's relationship with a dubious individual - and relating your efforts to have this published in the Sunday Times.

Would you, regardless of the excellence of your breakfast, go out of your way to draw the reader's attention to your relationship with a dubious individual who was obliged to resign from a chess federation following allegations that he had defrauded that federation of a sum of money - allegations published in the Sunday Times?

[Andrew Paulson index]

[Ray Keene index]

[Nigel Short index]

Long time AGON

The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above it.

Apocalypse Now

The thing about the Andrew Paulson Affair is, you can't tell where the deception stops and the self-deception starts. It's not even that you can't tell the story from the cover story. You can't even see for sure which is supposed to be which.

Last week, for instance, this column was about Malcolm Pein's incomprehensible claim that he had ceased to support Paulson because of information that he had already had in his possesssion when he backed him.

Similarly, what are we to make of the process by which Andrew Paulson is removed for reasons that - we are assured - are nothing to do with ECU or FIDE politics, and then the deal by which he is persuaded to resign is threatened with reversal because he would be backing the wrong candidates in ECU and FIDE politics?

Vietnam? In English chess, you couldn't keep above the bullshit if you'd fallen into a vat of Red Bull when you were a baby.

Collector’s Item

White to play

Kramnik - Karjakin, Candidates (2) 2014

I wonder if yesterday we saw the end of Kramnik's career as a credible challenger for World Championship. Still five rounds to go, of course, so too early to completely write him off, but a point and a half is an awful lot of ground to make up. Even for a man at the top of his game you’d think that a big ask and Vlad is very much not that right now.

If that is it for Kramnik in terms of playing at the very highest level it was kind of him to check out with a rook ending. Another case study for 'active rook is often a decisive advantage' folder you might say. Mind you being multiple pawns up probably helped Karjakin a bit too.

Anyhoo, rook endings are last year’s obsession. Let’s get on with the ISEs.

Today’s, courtesy of Kramnik - Karjakin from the first cycle, is an unusual twist on a standard theme. It also reminds me to ask a question that’s been puzzling me for a while.

Just Barely Got Something to do with chess XIa

Andrew O’Hagan Ghosting

London Review of Books,  vol 36 #5

One of Julian’s techniques, again borrowed from the spymasters he purports to find criminal, is to tape conversations with friends and colleagues and then use them to ‘prove’ duplicity. My interviews with him were recorded contemporaneously, either on tape or in notes, and I had tapes running and notepads in my hand all the time I was with him. But his use of private recordings with Canongate seemed to me a new low. As for me, the statement that I ‘supported him’, that I was his friend etc, was out of order. He was using me. It was against my consistent wish that I not be dragged into the middle of this dispute. But in this dispute Julian considered everybody but himself a pawn. He was the king we were all obliged to protect. The fact was I supported Julian where I could, but I often couldn’t, and he knew it. I tried to give him as much encouragement as I could, seeing his point of view and all that, and I continued to do so, but my arguments with his were all in the open. The morning after Julian’s press release, Jamie wanted me to refute Julian’s claims and I said that he was just doing the same thing as Julian. I would tell my own version when the time was right but my role in this was to be silent. Did any of them understand that?

Just Barely Got Something to do with chess XI

Andrew O’Hagan Ghosting

London Review of Books vol 36 #5

The National Theatre of Scotland’s adaption of my book The Missing had opened in Glasgow that week. After the curtain one night, Jamie met me in the theatre bar. he said he wanted me to get the first copy of the book. Holding it, I realised I felt nothing. I didn’t feel it was by me and the ghost’s prerogative, to live a half-life in a house that wasn’t mine, was all I had. 

‘We should seek maximum publicity and maximum debunking,’ Julian said the next day, ‘and I think both things can be done at the same time.’ 

‘How?’ I said. 

‘By making as much publicity as possible, the book will sell. This is good. And by showing that the publishers jumped early, when we were working on the first draft, we can question the book’s authority.  We will choose five inaccuracies in the book and thereby invalidate its integrity. We will say you oppose the book ...’ 

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I’m not comfortable with that. I am not willing to be a pawn in this. The book was at an early stage and you didn’t make changes. This is a matter between you and them and it won’t work to tell people I simply disapprove. It is not of any account whether I approve or not. I did my work, and Canongate will say, rightly, that you did not.’ 

‘That doesn’t matter. Readers won’t care about that. The thing to communicate is that we were on a journey that was interrupted.’ He said he was writing a press release and would sent it to me. An email came via the London Review, from the Wall Street Journal, asking me to speak about what had happened. The Sunday Times magazine left a message to say I could have the cover to say whatever I wanted to say. During the evening, Julian, through his Twitter account, sent a bizarre message about truth being stranger than fiction, linking his followers to the book’s Amazon page. Later that night he sent a ‘statement’ - i.e. a rant - to the Associated Press. Jamie Byng was staying in the spare room of the Glasgow flat and I could hear him up in the night responding to texts and messages. In the morning, he told me he had been seeking the advice of Liz Sich at Colman Getty, the PR firm. He was white with rage about the allegations of misconduct directed at him by Julian in his statement.

Wells Wells Wells

Don't know if you remember this piece. Written a few weeks before Ray's vast stash of plagiarism came to light, it introduced the concept of Raygiarism.

What is Raygiarism? Raygiarism is:

• annotating a chess game by borrowing somebody else's notes unacknowledged and wholesale

• changing round the phraseology to make it look original at first glance.

But, because you are Ray Keene, it is also:

• not bothering to do it thoroughly, such that some original phrases still remain.

The piece was basically about the similarity between the annotations that appeared to a game between Ray and the late Ian Wells in CHESS for July 1980

- notes which were based on Wells' own -

and those which appeared in the same magazine for June 1991, under the name Raymond Keene. This new column, by contrast, made no mention that the notes had originated with Wells.

Malcolm in a muddle

Over the next few weeks I'm going to test your patience with more pieces about the ECF crisis and the resignation of Andrew Paulson.

To kick off, this one is about Malcolm Pein's editorial from the current issue of CHESS, regarding which we present some excerpts and some questions.

First, let's look at this section, which states that Paulson lost Malcolm's confidence as a result of Malcolm learning of the AGON/FIDE agreement.

Azmai Could Play

Black to play

Karpov - Azmaiparashvili, USSR Championship 1983

Zurab Azmaiparashvili. Candidate for the Presidency of the European Chess Union; in the news a bit of late because the erstwhile ECF President wants to be his running mate; taker-backer of moves; one time second to the biggest of chess cheeses and, whatever else might be said about him, somebody who once knew his way around a chess board.

Today’s post combines Azmai, things that aren’t there and another trip to a 1980s Soviet Chess Championship. Back to Back in the USSR if you will.

Every Picture Tells A Story:...And A Great Leap Forward

Number 25 - a joint effort by Martin Smith and Richard Tillett - in a story which may (or may not) have reached its conclusion.

Last week we explained that we had received an unexpected, but very welcome, invitation to go and see Thomas Leeming’s painting of the Gents of Hereford that we knew had been sold at Sotheby’s in 1991. It was the one that we had been searching for over four long years.

We have referred to it variously as “the Greenlees version” (because Ian Greenlees had owned it in the 80s), “the Praz version” (because Professor Mario Praz had featured in his book on period interior decoration – it was this that had sparked our interest in the painting) and most recently we thought of it as “the missing version” (because…). This is the painting that we think Thomas Leeming exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818: the one with the man in a red jacket; the one without a dog.

The phone call came after we went back a step and asked Sotheby’s to help once more in contacting the 1991 purchaser, and just as we were about to abandon all hope of success: result! The owner kindly responded to our open letter. Now we were off again in hot pursuit, but not this time westward and Hereford Ho! but now north to the Midlands. One step back…and now a great leap forward. After a quiet period in our Leeming sleuthing it felt just like the old days.  

Probablemente no tiene que ver con el ajedrez

En definitiva, somos peones de un tablero de ajedrez. No nos podemos detener, nuestro destino es seguir hacia delante.

When all is said and done, we're all pawns on a chessboard. We cannot hold back: it's our fate to keep going forward. (Epigraph.)

[Thanks to Ruth]

 [...to do with chess index]

Anti-Imperialism

While I'm complaining about trivia....

....what is this?

I mean, specifically, this?

Ah, heh, how embarrassing.

Overrated

We've been complaining about too-low grades on S&B recently.

Here, by contrast, is a player with a grade that's far too high.

When I were a lad, players of 200* and above were supposed to be good. It was as late as 1984 before I ever beat one. Alan Trangmar was graded 202 and I was nearly four weeks past my nineteenth birthday.

I don't think Alan played very well - well of course he didn't, he lost to me - but even so, it felt like a real accomplishment and I'd waited a long time to achieve it.

Now I am invited to believe that it's the same accomplishment if somebody beats me. I doubt it. I doubt it's really something worth waiting years for.

Now I know that:

• a lot of ECF ratings got boosted a few years ago for perfectly good reasons ; and
• my rating is not actually based on very many games, seeing as I live abroad now. (Matter of fact it'd be higher still if I hadn't lost the last game I played.)

Nevertheless it's still bizarre to see 200+ next to my name. I don't believe I'm playing my best chess at the age of forty-eight. Still less, my best chess by a distance.

Point is, though, 200+ used to be - or seemed to be - some kind of gold standard, something that told you "the bearer of this grade is a really strong player". Which I am not and never will be. And just as my problem with the FIDE Master title is that I've beaten seven or eight of them, and a "Master" ought to be somebody I can't beat seven or eight times -so it seems to me that the qualification for reaching 200+ ought to be that the likes of me don't do it.

[* Of course all this will be incomprehensible to readers who don't know the English rating system. Just take it that 200+ used to be really good.]

Back in the USSR

[Far too much going on to devote any time to the latest AP/ECF manoeuvres. I dare say we’ll get around to it in due course - JMGB]

White to play
Karpov - Malaniuk, Soviet Championship 1988

I wasn’t going to do another one of these Leningrad exchange sac posts, but I stumbled across this game and the temptation was just too great. Not only is there a rather pleasing mirror image of Kasparov - Speelman from last week - again giving up material to get rid of a strong bishop, this time for attacking rather than defensive purposes - but it also gives us a chance to have a little think about the nature of calculation and Andrew Gelman’s contribution to the comments box seven days ago.

All of that, and as a bonus we also get one of those mysteries when a chesser infinitely stronger than you plays down a line that looks very obviously bad for no readily apparent reason.

Every Picture Tells A Story: One Step Back...

Number 24 in a saga without end. This one mainly by Martin Smith, with minor tweaking by Richard Tillett.

Followers of our Every Picture Tells A Story story may remember the update back in November last year. There was, in truth, not much to report Thomas Leeming-wise (he, the painter of the Chess Gents of Hereford, in its several versions back in the early 1800s), but with Richard's help we had some fun at expense of the outlandish "Reverend" William Hollings whose passing had been documented back in 1820 in an evocative obituary in the Hereford Journal. Thomas had in fact painted the not-so-Reverend gentleman in the little watercolour below, setting him against the background of his happy hunting ground, the cathedral city of Hereford.

Thomas Leeming's watercolour of the Reverend William Hollings (c 1819)
Courtesy of the Hereford Museum and Art Gallery ©

Such was the flimsy pretext for episode 23 and we were quietly smug at having squeezed another blog out of Leeming et al., But that, we thought, was that: we couldn't imagine that there might be yet more to say.

But there is. And much sooner than we - and perhaps you - might have expected. We are now able to bring EPTAS to the dramatic and splendid crescendo played out below. We won't, however, call this the finale as you never know what else may turn up, a lesson we have learned well in our four year quest in pursuit of the Gents.

A cheat at chess

Spectator

Is Ray going this year? He doesn't actually say so, but unless I mistake myself, he's usually among the attendees.

Now I appreciate that the Varsity Match (first played 1873) is an even older British chess tradition than turning a blind eye to Ray Keene's record of corruption and misconduct (first played 1978, as far as I'm aware) but are we really going to continue to combine the two?

Given that this is a chess match between Britain's two most prominent academic institutions, is it really appropriate to associate the event with Britain's single most prolific journalistic plagiarist? Any single act of plagiarism could and should threaten an academic career with immediate termination. Ray Keene has well in excess of a hundred of these acts to his name. So if Ray is turning up this year, why would he be welcome?

I'm not a great admirer of the Varsity Match, it's true. Ray's longstanding association with the event doesn't make me any fonder. Like his journalism, that association is shabby and disreputable. Like his journalism, that association should cease.

[Thanks to Pablo Byrne]

[Ray Keene index]

ELO DWP? II

A couple of quotes from ELO DWP?:-

In the days when the ratings were cut off at 2000, a player of a 2100 standard couldn't play a rated game against a player of 1800 standard. Once you extend that range, rated games become possible, but the 2100 player maintains their rating provided they make the necessary expected score.

RdC

Yes. Well, they do if the player of 1800 standard actually has a rating of 1800.

... it is obvious that they cannot all be under performing.

Phile

There are a lot of ways that sentence could be interpreted. Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of Hampstead. I’ll show you proof that, in one sense at least, they can.

When Bishops Are Too Strong

Black to play

Kasparov - Speelman TV Rapidplay, 1989

I didn’t plan it, but my year of ISEs has become rather Dutch themed. Last week’s exploration of Rxh5 in the Leningrad following on as it does from Feller-Williams, 2009 (SMA#26) at the beginning of the month. Mind you, see also the very first ISE (the famous Shirov-Bareev 1990 interzonal game), ISE V (Houska-Rendle, Sheffield 2011) and Ray Could Play VI as well for that matter.

A little curious it should work out this way. OK, I've played the Dutch for years, so it’s no surprise that a couple of exchange sacs crop up in A Collection of Dutch Bits and Bobs. Most of these others have been Leningrads, though, the only main line of the opening which I’ve never played in a serious game.

Anyhoo, here’s one more.

Lucy who?

Just Barely Got Something to do with chess X

Neal Ascherson: A Plan and a Man

London Review of Books vol 36 #4

Once London governments accepted that self-government and ultimate independence were inevitable, it became crucial to make certain that the new state - especially one as formidably rich in export produce as Malaya - remained stable and friendly. Hale, on decolonisation: ‘The points was to somehow ensure that the way the empire was wound up served the interests of the departing power. the new owners of Britain’s overseas properties had to be the right sort of people.’ But nothing could be ensured in Malaya unless the two main communities found a way to live together. 

The pieces of this deadlocked chess game were scattered by the Japanese conquest and occupation of Malaya and the rest of South East Asia in 1942. The arrogant white colonialists, the ‘master race’, were seen to be utterly humiliated. Malay nationalists disliked the invaders, but often accepted invitations to collaborate, taking seriously hints that the power which had chased out their colonial masters would soon offer them independence. Nothing of the kind materialised. Instead, in 1943, the Japanese ceded Malaya’s four northern provinces to Thailand, temporarily leaving the peninsula with a non-Malay majority. But when it became obvious that Japan was going to lose the war, the Malay politicians were too weak and too divided to do what Aung San and Ne Win did in Burma: change sides, and launch armed resistance against the Japanese.

... to do with chess Index

Elo DWP?

I played at Hampstead a couple of weeks ago. Although my score of +2 =0 -2 might not sound that bad, in truth I played extremely badly and quite deservedly failed to match better outcomes I’d achieved at similar events in January, November and October. Frankly, it was not a successful weekend for me at all.

It wasn’t as bad as FIDE would have you believe, mind.

The mysterious case of the missing CAS case

There's a passage in Homage To Catalonia where Orwell is about to discuss party politics on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and he advises his readers that if they aren't interested, "please skip". This goes for today's column too. It's about the CAS case and the ECF. If you're not interested, that's cool - see you again on Friday.

If you're still here, I was reluctant to write about this again. Water under the bridge, reopening old wounds etc. But as the question came up, and as the role of international chess politics, Nigel Short and ECF palace intrigues continues to be controversial, it does, unfortunately, seem pertinent to establish what exactly did happen in 2011, and whether information was kept secret from ECF members as to what was being carried out in their name.

To recap. The CAS case was a legal case, financed by Garry Kasparov but nominally launched by the English and Georgian Chess Federations, in 2011, against FIDE's unconstitutional appointment of extra vice-presidents. ("Tshirt gate" refers to a variety of scandals arising from the conduct of the then ECF President, CJ de Mooi, at the British chess championships in Sheffield in July and August 2011, which continued to occupy the minds and time of ECF officials in subsequent months.)

Standard ISEs

White to play

MacReamoinn - JMGB

Hampstead (5), Hampstead u2200, February 2014

One of those little twists of fate that chess frequently throws our way.  Just as I had at Golders Green a month before I found myself facing Brian MacReamoinn in the last round.

Not too difficult to guess what’s coming. Not too easy to see any way for White to continue the attack other than to play Rxh5. A standard idea after all - we saw one in Jack’s Sacs last week - and, as it turned out, plenty good enough to see me off.

A question for Silvio Danailov

From Andrew Paulson's bizarre albeit entertaining screed:

This is quite serious stuff, isn't it? If it's true, than Danailov has a lot of explaining to do. If it isn't, Paulson does. Right?

So let's ask the Danailov campaign.

Email, Saturday 22 February, 11.01 am:

Dear Mr Hristov

Sorry to bother you.

I write about chess and I have a question for Mr Danailov.

Andrew Paulson alleges that Mr Danailov:

spent six months in jail for arms dealing (materiel stolen from the Bulgarian army)

Can you confirm that Mr Paulson's allegation is false? Will Mr Danailov issue a statement confirming that it is false?

Yours

Justin Horton

Huesca province, Spain

If a reply arrives, we'll be sure to let you know. If it doesn't, we're sure we can rely on the curiosity of the chess press to follow this matter up.

[Screed via Chessvibes]

[Andrew Paulson index]

Just Barely Got Something to do with chess IX

James Wood: On Not Going Home

London Review of Books vol 36 #4

Or Suppose I am looking down our Boston street, in dead summer. I see a familiar life: the clapboard houses, the porches, the heat-mirage hanging over the patched road (snakes of asphalt like black chewing gum), the grey cement sidewalks (signed in one place, when the cement was new, by three young siblings), the heavy maple trees, the unkempt willow down at the end, an old white Cadillac with the bumper sticker ‘Ted Kennedy has killed more people than my gun,’ and I feel ... nothing: some recognition, but no comprehension, no real connection, no past despite all the years I have lived there - just a tugging distance from it all. A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I wonder: how did I get here? And then the moment passes, and ordinary life closes itself around what had seemed, for a moment, a desperate lack. 

Edward Said says that it is no surprise that exiles are often novelists, chess players, intellectuals. ‘The exile’s new world, logically enough, is unnatural, and its unreality resembles fiction.’ He reminds us that George Lukacs considered the novel the great form of what Luckacs called ‘transcendental homelessness’. I am not an exile, but it is sometimes hard to shake the ‘unreality’ Said speaks of. I watch my children grow up as Americans in the same way that I might read about, or create, fictional characters. They are not fictional, of course, but their Americanism can sometimes seem unreal to me. ‘I have an American seventh-grader,’ I say to myself with amazement, as I watch my 12-year-old daughter perform at one of those dastardly school events always held in gymnasiums. Doubtless amazement attends all the stages of a child’s growth - all is unexpected. But there is also that strange distance, the light veil of alienation thrown over everything.

... to do with chess Index

BORP? XXVII: Doesn’t work properly

Now I’m sure Mr Elo was a very nice man, but me and he are going to fall out. Well, not so much me and him as me and the rating system he left behind. More accurately still, me and how that system is working. Because it ain’t.

At all.

Not where I play.

Nothing to see here

What, you may not have been wondering, does Ray do with his Spectator columns at the moment?

Since he seems to have been ordered to pack in both the plagiarism and the recycling, where does that leave a columnist whose whole career has depended on those two staples?

It leaves him with George Osborne.

There's always been a third pillar to Ray's career, which you can call networking, if you prefer it, as a term, to brown-nosing. I suppose they're not actually the same thing, though both are all about connections: the connections Ray has, and the connections he would like to have.

His Spectator column now appears to be devoted to both.

According to Malcolm

Daily Telegraph Monday 17 February

Discuss.

(Starter for ten: if it's a big deal that Azmai once took a move back, does the same apply to Kasparov?)

[Thanks to Mr Bryant Sr and another reader]

[Andrew Paulson index]

Jack’s Sacs (mostly Black attacks)

Rudd out for blood. Three ISEs in three weeks for our occasional blogger.

How would you do?

Black to play

Black to play

White to play

Daggers drawn

It's all gone horribly wrong at the English Chess Federation. Again.

Just four months ago we were stepping on the fast train to the future with the election as President of Andrew Paulson, a train nuclear-powered by the energy that shone, apparently, out of Mr Paulson's entrepreneurial arse.

Now that very same arse is being kicked out of office - not by the electorate who put him there but by a small group of conspirators among the ECF Board.

Not that you would have known this in the five days since Saturday 8, when the attempted coup occurred, since none of the parties involved saw fit to inform ECF members about their action. Neither the reasons behind them nor even the fact of the actions having taken place was made public.

Indeed it wasn't until Professor David Robertson took the trouble to post about it, on the English Chess Forum, several days later, that rumours that had circulated about the coup were confirmed, on Thursday, by ECF Chief Executive Phil Ehr.

I mean at least in a real coup you get military music on the radio.

Just Barely Got Something to do with chess VIII

By the time I turn eighteen, I've been expelled from five schools for practicing the art of the pickpocket on my teachers and the art of card manipulation under my desk. I refuse to take the basic exam to prove I can read, write, and count, and thereby jeopardise my chances of landing a job picking up garbage or operating a cash register. Instead, I leave home and become a wandering troubadour, a street-juggler without a permit who is arrested constantly ... all over the world. 

No one wishes to hire me, practitioner of an absurd arrogance; for a while I make sure it stays that way. It becomes essential to write, play chess, learn Russian and bullfighting, discover architecture and engineering invent hiding places, erect tree houses, train at lock-picking - to indulge my gourmandise for knowledge while honing my perfectionism.

... to do with chess Index 

Another lot of Dirty Little Secrets

The note above appeared on Keenipedia - your one-stop-shop for all things relating to the Penguin - not long after the latest Private Eye piece on the Times Little Book.

So perhaps Harper Collins' apparently ongoing investigation might like to ask what happened to that warning, taking heed of which might have saved the company a deal of embarrassment.

While they're at it, they might like to look at another disreputable aspect of the Little Book, which is the prodigious quantity of material inside which has previously appeared in print, a fact of which neither potential customers nor (one assumes) the publishers appear to have been informed.

Incoming

[JMGB Note: Correspondence received from AP 13/2/2014]

Colleagues, 

The Draft Minutes of last Saturday's Emergency Board Meeting of the English Chess Federation are now available online:

http://www.ecforum.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=6254

The Agenda for some confused pedantic reason chose to call a vote of Confidence rather than to call for a vote of No Confidence against me. The Minutes of the meeting reveal that in fact it was a vote of Whinging (Brit. variant of to bitch, whine, complain): (a) he was doing too much, too fast, (b) he wanted to stand for the Board of the European Chess Union and we weren't sure, (c) he had a strong personality, and (d) two years ago he did something that appeared inappropriate, though in fact it wasn't. 

The ECF Chief Executive, one of the ECF Non-Executive Directors and a former Chief Executive (now Chairman of the Governance Committee) of the ECF all supported me; the ECF Membership Director abstained admitting that he had no grounds for complaint. The remaining Board members all had close connections with either Malcolm Pein or Nigel Short (thence to Garry Kasparov) and I have demonstrated that their complaints are spurious (see Minutes). 

Members of the Board attempted a coup d'état last Saturday, but failed. The Board has not (could not have) removed me. Several may try to call an Emergency Council Meeting to remove me, but the grounds laid out in the Minutes will provoke ridicule of them rather than outrage at me. In an attempt to solve this impasse, I will propose a new harmonious Board (replacing several of its current members) to Council at its regularly scheduled meeting in April, as the current one has been rendered dysfunctional. This will allow us to proceed constructively in the renewal of the ECF and its communications and marketing development that we promised at our election. 

But, what actually happened and how did we arrive at this point in less than four months? It's election time in FIDE! Kasparov needed to distract attention from his agreement to pay $1.5m from his charity in the U.S. to a private company in Singapore, 100% owned by Ignatius Leong. Bad enough to have Leong on his ticket, people were saying, but to have bought him away from Ilyumzhinov at such a high cost to deliver a mere 11 (of 158) votes . . . And, Kasparov was unhappy that my presence lent credibility to Zurab Azmaiparashvili's ECU ticket and, supposedly, by association to Ilyumzhinov (even though I have openly declared that I do not support Ilyumzhinov and am considering standing for FIDE President myself). 

Once again (let me count the times) Nigel Short has acted in his own best interest and not in the best interest of English chess ... or any chess, for that matter: if Ignatius Leong is getting $1.5m to deliver S.E. Asia, one might ask how much Nigel is getting for the U.K. to topple me. He has teamed up with the otherwise splendid and admirable Malcolm Pein whose shop, charity and tournament benefit from association with Kasparov. Kasparov put direct and relentless pressure on both of them as his agents in the UK to get rid of me. They in turn browbeat their pocket members on the Board (several of whom are employees of Malcolm Pein) to lead this failed coup d'état. 

Sincerely,
Andrew Paulson
ECF President

This is our story

A little after ten past eight on Monday morning this blog had its millionth page view since we started in November 2006. Well according to Blogger it did, anyway.

Totally absurd.

Sixty Memorable Annotations

#26: Feller - Williams, Novi Sad 2009

22 Rxb1 !?

(!!) At many levels, this is undoubtedly a great sacrifice.  However, a more human line would be 22 Qe1 Bc2, 23 Bxc6 Qxc6, 24 Qxe5 [White is clearly better]

Viktor Moskaleno, The Diamond Dutch (New in Chess, 2014)

An innocent enough comment. Until, that is, you see that the guy playing White was Sebastien Feller and remember that he was one of the Frenchies who was up to no good three years ago.

In which he played a murderous chess master

Maximilian Schell died last Saturday. Not having seen Judgment at Nuremburg, at least not all the way through, I suppose I knew him best for Cross of Iron. And until I read his obituary in the Guardian, I had never heard of

the bizarre Return from the Ashes...in which he played a murderous chess master.

Dirty Little Secrets in Private Eye - again

Guess what, Ray's in Private Eye again.

Eye 1359, page 13

Fair and square

Chess Note 8519, last weekend:

Jason Childress (Belmont, CA, USA) asks whether a name exists for the box-like configuration (pawns on b7, c7, b6 and c6) which Nakamura had in his game against Anand in Zurich on 31 January 2014. No established term is known to us.

We know one, established or otherwise. Right back in 2007 this blog suggested the term "testudo", for that very pattern. Latin for tortoise, it refers to the shield formation sometimes employed by advancing Roman troops.

Naturally we expected it to be instantly adopted as standard usage in the chess world. Turns out that seven years later, nobody's heard of it. Tsk. Still, Rome wasn't built in a day.

Dirty Little Secrets III

Ray doesn't plagiarise everything from the same source. Not everything is Kasparov: not everything is My Great Predecessors. And not everything in The Times Little Book Of Chess Plagiarism (Harper Collins, 2013) is, either.

Take for instance the third position in the book. It's from the second game of the 1908 world championship match.

The notes weren't written by Kasparov. Nor, for that matter, were they written by the alleged author, Ray Keene.

They were written by Viktor Korchnoi, in Learn from The Grandmasters (Batsford, 1975) from which source Ray has plagiarised them.

A Theoretical ISE

Black to play

Emms - Williams, 4NCL 1999

How good are your exchange sacrifices?  A chance to find out today.

… Rxf3 is a standard sacrifice, yes, but here it's more than that. Not just a thematic sacrifice, but a theoretical one. Not just the sort of thing that you do in this kind of position, but exactly the recommended move in this precise position. Recommended by the GingerGM in The Killer French, that is.

Anyhoo, the point is Black's going to sacrifice the exchange. What I tried to do was take a look at the starting position as if I had reached it in the game. I set up a board and analysed without moving the pieces. I knew that taking on f3 was the theoretical move, but could I convince myself to do it?

Feel free to give it a go and compare your thoughts to mine.

Let's All Move To ...

English chess has been in residence on SNAFU Boulevard long enough, wouldn't you say?









With thanks to Antony Hall