Nunn that I'm aware of

It's an interesting question...

...but since you ask, did Dr Nunn actually ever become a professor? I wasn't under that impression.

Maybe he did. Maybe they'll tell us in the show. Do listen.

[Screenshot from yesterday, so the broadcast listed as "tomorrow" is actually tonight. I'm guessing it may also be on iPlayer for a while. Or download here.]

Attack Ships on Fire

I’ve ... seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

An uppity computer claiming mate in two when it isn’t. I watched Ginger coming over all International Arbiter in a game with Scary on a tour bus (which may or may not have been near the Tannhasuer Gate at the time). Glaring continuity errors lost in time like chess scenes edited out of a movie script.

Yes, sometimes Chess goes to the Movies. If it doesn’t always travel very well, one honourable exception is Blade Runner. The director’s cut of Ridley Scott's hugely marvellous film is released in cinemas for the first time from today and your author is rather delighted to have a ticket for the first screening at the British Film Institute on the Southbank.

If dystopian futures aren’t your thing but you want to go to the pictures (as we used to say when Batty and Deckard were first giving it large on rainy Los Angelesian rooftops), perhaps you’d prefer Dark Horse.

One-time Maori speed-chess champ, Genesis Potini, lives with a bi-polar disorder and must overcome prejudice and violence in the battle to save his struggling chess club, his family and ultimately, himself.

 it says here.

Chess but without the pollution, Voight-Kampff tests, or - presumably - murderous robots. You pays your money, you makes your choice.

Dark Horse is also out today.

Chess goes to the Movies Index

Dark Horse

Announcement

Following representations made by legal representatives engaged by Mr Raymond Keene OBE, the Streatham and Brixton Chess Blog would like to make the following announcement:

• We accept that all Mr Keene's business dealings have been entirely proper and above board, especially those relating to the Interzonal at Tunis in 1985, his contract with Mr Viktor Korchnoi in 1978, his activities relating to Brain Games, his hosting of events at the House of Lords and all such similar activities.
• We accept that Mr Keene is in fact a well-respected figure within the chess world and not at all the "tawdry" or "disreputable" figure that we have occasionally sought to paint him. He does not have a circle of cronies, especially not Mr CJ de Mooi or Mr Steve Giddins and nor does he misuse his chess columns to plug his friends, family and business partners.
• We accept that Mr Keene has at no point ever engaged in plagiarism and nor would he ever do so. Nor would he recycle old material without informing the reader. Except possibly now and then by accident.

We therefore withdraw all claims and allegations that we have made against him and offer a public apology for traducing his good name. We have in addition made a substantial donation to the Brain Trust.

A Good Book That May Well be Useless

49 Black resigns

Shirov - Timman, Wijk aan Zee 1996

If you’ve spent any time with endgame books recently, this position may well be familiar to you. You’ll find it all over the place. Partly because it’s an interesting position, both instructive and deceptive in its apparent simplicity. Mostly because Timman managed to do something even worse than making the worst move on the board. He resigned the game in a position which is not in fact lost.

Benjamin devotes two entire pages to Shirov - Timman. Around three-quarters of that he spends on the position in which the Dutchman threw in the towel, showing what could and should have happened. I don’t really consider myself qualified to pass judgement on the quality and accuracy of his analysis, but when compared with other sources - e.g. Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual or Muller and Lamprecht’s Secrets of Pawn Endings - Benjamin’s coverage can hardly be described as skimpy.

It is a comprehensive and detailed analysis of a position that bamboozled two chessers who were part of the world’s elite at the time the game was played. It is also a very clear example of Liquidation on the Chess Board’s fundamental flaw.

Brixton Byways 10: Howzat

In the last episode we found some helpful corroboration of the likely Year Zero of Streatham and Brixton Chess Club, viz 1871. This was the moment of stellar creation when, out of the void of the Stockwell, Kennington, Camberwell sector of the ever expanding chess universe, there appeared the nebulous form of the Endeavour Club of North Brixton. Over the following decades it tracked ever southward, touching down in the 1920s at the Half Moon Hotel by Brockwell Park, where the outer reaches of the eastern Brixton fade into the lower slopes of Herne Hill, with the upper crust of Dulwich just visible beyond. It had by then condensed into an entity referred to as Brixton CC.

As we noted in that episode, the club President, speaking at the 50th anniversary garden party in 1921 (reported in the British Chess Magazine of August in that year), told how Brixton CC had been making its mark on the Surrey chess scene in a way by which it would want to be remembered. For starters, it had won the County Championship several times. And now the club was now about to make its mark on the London scene. But, to add our own comment, in a way that it might have preferred to forget.

End of the Immortal

Ray's Times column for 28 February, or the opening two paragraphs anyway. The advertising material's a lot of fun but in fact the subject of today's piece is the Immortal Game, rather than the history of dining at Simpsons-in-the-Strand.

Notes are based on. "Based on", you may have guessed, is Ray's new get-round for using other people's notes to write his columns. Instead of just copying out notes from Kasparov's My Great Predecessors series with very slight changes, he just copies out notes from Kasparov's My Great Predecessors series with very slight changes and flicks in "based on". (Or if not from Kasparov then from elsewhere, as often as not something by his lapdog Steve Giddins.) I reckon most other people would be sacked for this, but Ray's not been sacked for a great deal worse.

Anyway, this is how Ray wrapped up his largely copied-out column:

neglecting to mention that his description of White's eighteenth is actually plagiarised from Euwe

rather than, ah, "based on" Kasparov.

But that's not the subject of today's piece either.

At the chessboard with Lucy Mangan

Guardian last Friday:

Whether you agreed with what was being said or not, there was the odd and welcome sense of being talked to as an adult by an adult – at least until Phillips interviewed Tony Blair, which was, as ever, like being addressed by a calculating machine trying to manoeuvre its way between irritating, human-shaped obstacles so that it can get to the chestful of cash on the other side of today’s chessboard.

Eh?

Work Avoidance

"Can Black draw with 53 ... Bxf3 54 Kxf3 h2 ?"

Joel Benjamin: Liquidation on the Chessboard

An interesting conversation about chess improvement broke out in the comments to 10 Types of Chesser III last week. I particularly liked the comment from An Ordinary Chess Player which ended with,

I'm pretty sure all the computer stuff is just a trap. I was reading an online review of ChessBase and the blogger was all glowing about how great it was going to be for his game, but a couple of years later his rating was still the same. I think most amateurs use the computer like the television and the smartphone: as a way to avoid work.

and began,

Rolf's basic idea is that you improve by testing yourself.

The conversation between AOC-P and Niall is well worth a read if you haven’t already seen it. "Rolf", by the way, is one Rolf Wetzell who apparently went from 2000 ish USCF to 2200 in his 50s. Impressive stuff.

Anyhoo, back to Benjamin’s book. I have certain reservations about the book - next week I will deal with my principal concern, in the meantime you can find a contribution from Tim Harding on the issue of typos and misprints in the comments to Sixty Memorable Annotations #32 - but one thing I like very much about Liquidation on the Chess Board is that every chapter ends with a series of exercises. The position at the head of today’s blog being one of seventeen puzzles to be found in the chapter on bishop versus knight endings.

I chose this problem partly because it sets us up for next week’s post and partly because it leads to a rather lovely and instructive (to me, at least) pawn endgame. Do spend a moment to think about it if you can. Alternatively, if you fancy a bit of work avoidance - and what is this blog for if not that? - then the solution as given in a video made by one of the players involved can be found below.

King and pawn Index

...and I am glad

Encountered by chance in a Sheffield remainder warehouse last month...

In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse

Clive James

[Little Book of Chess Plagiarism]

[Ray Keene plagiarism index]
[Ray Keene index]

On the Chequer'd Field Array'd

Interviewed on BBC Radio 3 on Wednesday 11th March: Hannah Kendall, one of "Five Under 35 - Contemporary British Women Composers" featured in Composer of the Week.

"On the Chequer'd Field Array'd" is "a piece for solo piano in three movements, the title is taken from the 1763 poem Caissa by Sir William Jones and depicts the three sections of a game of chess (the opening, middlegame and endgame); each taking inspiration from different sources".

The Great Chessboxing Swindle: Marsh Madness

Here's a load of old tosh (or most of it) from the Standard last week. It's about chessboxing. Chessboxing and the Standard - what chance does that give us?

10 Types of Chesser III

01 Those who don’t train;

10 Those who don’t train, but say that they do.

37 ... Rf5
Andersson - Brynell, Malmo 1994 

Nobody does any chess training. Not really.

OK, that’s not entirely true. My friend and (for the most part former) blogging colleague Tom Chivers did a tonne of work in the year before he wrote his Improve Your Chess series back in 2008, Jonathan Hawkins evidently didn’t go From Amateur to IM and beyond without putting his back in to it and that Matthew Webb chappie is grafting away Up North somewhere. Those three are pretty much it, though.

Fair enough. Chess training is bastard hard work and it’s not exactly difficult to find something more pleasant or less demanding (or both) to do. So what if that thing is less productive in the greater scheme of things? Much less productive. Much much less productive.

Like blogging for instance.

Brixton Byways: 9. Fast Forward and Backtrack

The series Brixton Byways set out to describe the ancient history of the Brixton bit of the Streatham and Brixton Chess Club combo, insofar as we have been able to reconstruct it. By episode 6 we had got to the end of the 19th century, just tipping into the 20th, and about as far as we then wanted to go, when the series morphed into the ancient history of the Streatham bit. Further surprises arrived: especially for current members of the Club (your blogger being one). It seems that Streatham CC went back further that anyone had supposed.

Now we return to Brixton again. Back, in fact, to where we started. But in order to backtrack we need to go forward and follow the club into the 1920s.

A bad smell

Take a look at the image attached to this tweet, from the Varsity Match that took place last weekend. I've written about that match before, but it rolls around once a year and once a year some obvious points require restating. So take a look at that image. What does it tell you about the Varsity Match? What does it tell you about the institutions involved?

Sixty Memorable Annotations

#32: Al-Rakib Abdulla - Nigel Short, Dhaka 1999

60 Rd8!?

Only a player with complete confidence in his understanding of pawn endings should consider this move

Joel Benjamin (Liquidation on the chess board, New in Chess 2015)

That sounds a bit like the Soltis quote. The one RdC tipped us in the comments box to Grandmaster Preparation: (King and pawn) Endgame Play. Except that Benjamin goes an awful lot further than

Never to trade down into a king and pawn ending unless you could safely bet your first-born child on the result. The reason is that K+P endgames are 90% *calculation*. No matter how much book theory you know, even a world class player can err badly.

via

In Liquidation on the chess board he suggests that trading down isn’t always a good idea even when you know for sure that the game should end in a draw.

"Football is a bit like chess..."

Football is a bit like chess: it's not just the piece being moved that matters, it's also the effect that move has on all the other pieces.

Mal Peet, who died last week.

We Are Not Amused X

It's been a long time coming: a pretext for another "We Are Not Amused" post - and I'm not referring only to yesterday's Chess Queen reference by Jonathan. The last WANA was just about two years ago, provoked by a faux pas from a prestigious London gallery in its display of Duchampian chess-art. Now it is the Evening Standard - London's free evening paper dished out so liberally on weekdays at the capital's tube stations etc - that has caught the eye.

As free-sheets go, the Standard's reportage is not as superficial as some, and the paper is noteworthy for its well-informed arts reviews on a Thursday. A recent one (26th February) had a headline with a familiar ring to it, and it is that which has prompted today's Chess in Art post, reverting, exceptionally, to its old Saturday slot.

Definitely Got Something to do with chess XI

The queen, now the most potent piece on the board, surprisingly did not exist in the early days of chess in India, Persia and the Near East. She was born around 1000 AD in Europe, but by 1497, when Isabella of Castile ruled over Spain and much of the New World, she had come to rule the game.

Or so it says here.

... to do with chess Index

Minor point

I was vaguely following Giri-Domínguez Pérez from Tblisi when it suddenly seemed to me that there was something a bit unusual, or unfamiliar about the ending.

What it was, was that - from move 40 to move 56 - they were playing with four minor pieces on each side. No major pieces, but a full set of bishop and knights. Am I mistaken, or is that a balance we don't often see?

You get plenty of major piece endings, since it's the minor pieces that come out first and get swapped off, which they are always liable to be when there are in close conjunction with one another. But in order to reach a four-minor-piece ending (or a rookless and queenless middlegame, if you will) you need them to leave one another alone on a full board while a file or two opens up - and the rooks and queens to wipe one another out while their smaller counterparts miraculously survive.

It's my impression that this doesn't happen very often. Am I right? And what would happen if you tried to take on Ulf Andersson in a game of no-rooks-no-queens?

Back in the Saddle

[NB: Posted by Jonathan B, but written by Jack Rudd]

Unlikely as it may seem, the recent East Devon Congress was my first individual tournament for five months. All the others I might have played in during that time were ones I opted out of for one reason or another: Torquay clashed with the 4NCL, the London Classic and Gibraltar were events where I was on the other side of the desk, and Hastings proved less enticing than a holiday with my girlfriend in Sweden.

a good reason for missing chess tournaments

The omens going into the tournament weren't particularly good. I was in poor form against strong opposition (1½/6 in this season's 4NCL, 1½/3 in the Devon League, 1½/3 for Somerset), my depression was hitting me fairly hard, and last year's performance in this tournament was preying on my mind. I'd had 4/4 going into the last round, needing only a draw with white to win the tournament - and I suffered a horrendous crisis of confidence. I played a passive anti-Marshall line, went completely wrong, and crashed out in 20 moves.

So I went into this tournament with some trepidation, and gradually relaxed into it. My round one game against Meyrick Shaw gave me some early challenges to face, but I rose to them and won pretty convincingly. My two games on the Saturday were bizarre encounters where my opponents went wrong very early on, and I was on 3/3 going into the final day.

My round 4 game was against my fellow leader, Dominic Mackle. It was a topsy-turvy encounter, one in which I kept on missing his tactical ideas, and ended up in a piece-down ending... and yet somehow managed to draw it. It wasn't exactly high-quality chess, but it entertained the spectators, and left me and Dominic joint leaders going into the last round. Dominic would have white against Steve Dilleigh, I would have black against Alistair Hill.

So, in a situation where I needed to win with black, hoping to erase the scars of last year's final round, what approach did I take? Would I play something solid and try to squeeze something out? Would I play something sharp from the off and try to hit him with an attack?

1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 e6 3.c4 c5 4.d5

4...b5!!

Double exclamation marks there not for move quality, but for attitude. I could have approached the game as if it were one with everything at stake; instead, I played a crucial last-round game as if it were one with nothing at stake. Because that's what I needed to do; it got my mind out of the tournament and into the game, and I played with the freedom and expressivity my play demonstrates at its best:

I freely confess I was lucky in that my opponent had no real line against the Blumenfeld; what he chose is hardly theoretically critical. But I wasn't lucky that I gave myself the opportunity to find that out; I made a good call for the situation. I played the opening that Jack Rudd would play... and it won me the game and the tournament.

Meet the New Boss

Yesterday it was all about the Soviet Man. Today, meet the New Boss.

Anand/Gelfand

Nemtsov

Soviets

draw agreed

Yudasin - Osnos, Leningrad 1987

S&BC Blog favourite Nigel Short on Kasparov, circa 1993:-

He’s very Soviet … He’s very much a Soviet man … 

There was one Soviet grandmaster who explained to me what Soviet morality is. It’s very simple. To the Soviet man, "if I fuck your wife that’s good, but if you fuck my wife that’s bad."

Kasparov Short - The Inside Story (Grandmaster Video)

Not that you hear much of that sort of thing nowadays. Clearly if Oceania is mates with Eurasia then Oceania has always been mates with Eurasia. The mate of the moment representing absolute loveliness, it follows that any past or future disagreement with him must be impossible.

Anyhoo, last week (SMA#31) we had Viktor Korchnoi giving GM Joel Benjamin a ticking off viz-a-viz the "ABCs of chess". This week’s king and pawn action continues the theme. As it turns out, not all of them there Russians knew the basics. Although it will take a little bit of that Soviet mentality for us to discover that.

Once again with the 600 million

I think Brett Popplewell's Sportsnet piece on Eric Hansen actually came out last year, but I hadn't seen it until it was linked to on the English Chess Forum late last month.

Hard to miss was the following:

Some 600 million people play chess

They don't, of course.

[605 million index]

Live Long and Prosper

Star Trek

Streatham Strolls to Canada

The series Streatham Strolls offered a virtual tour of the chess history of our locality. It was not exactly "psycho-geography", but after setting out from the Streatham/Tooting/Balham borderlands we found ourselves in some unexpected places, conjuring up some unanticipated heros of chess-times past.

One was Samuel Tinsley (1847-1903), conscientious Victorian chesser, journalist and church-goer, who, as a Lewisham-man, lived but five miles to the east of our patch.

Samuel Tinsley
as portrayed in the account of the 1895 Hastings tournament.  

Back in 2012 his grave had only just been identified by the Friends of Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries after some curiosity about its whereabouts. Upon its (re)discovery we strolled east, hot-foot, to investigate.

But not yet

Chess is to be made a compulsory subject in Spanish schools.

Or rather, "Chess is to be made a compulsory subject in Spanish schools",  as Stephen Moss told us in a Guardian article last week, linking to a piece does indeed make that claim:

chess is to become a compulsory subject for Spanish schoolchildren.

Another authority advancing the same proposition is the World's Worst Chess Correspondent, whose Times column for February 11 declared that

the Spanish Parliament is predicted to vote through measures which will make chess lessons compulsory in all Spanish primary schools.

Sixty Memorable Annotations

#31: Benjamin - Korchnoi, Jerusalem 1986

The game was adjourned here (remember adjournments, anyone?) and I sealed 57 Kd1.

... now I seemed to hold: 57 ... Kd3 58 Ke1 e2 59 g5 fxg5 60 g4 Ke3 leads to a real stalemate, while 60 ... Ke4 61 Kxe2 Kf4 62 Kf2 Kxg4 63 Kg2 gains White the opposition and draws. 

I knew this couldn’t be correct. Korchnoi had played too quickly and confidently and the position didn’t look like it should be a draw. Before leaving the table, Korchnoi looked at me and said, 'I know something about triangles.' I was lost in more ways than one, because I still didn’t see the win. Fortunately Dmitry Gurevich, who was 'classically trained' in the endgame (i.e. he grew up in the Soviet Union) showed me the potential finale ... 

I ran after Korchnoi and resigned, apologising profusely for my ignorance. Quite perplexed, Korchnoi told me, 'It is the ABCs of chess!'

Joel Benjamin, (Liquidation on the chess board, New in Chess 2015)

If you’re reading this then - like me - you’ve probably been playing tournament and/or club chess for quite a while. Decades, most likely. I’ll venture to suggest that - like me - you’ll have spent a few quid on chess books and DVDs along the way.

The ABCs of chess, though? We don’t have them.

Sure, like Larsen we know about opposition and the square. We might be familiar with that mutual zugzwang position ...

... that crops up quite often in king and pawn endgames (in that rather fiendish puzzle from Aagaard’s Grandmaster Preparation: Endgame Play that we had a few weeks ago, for example). I dare say we 'know' about triangulation too. We almost certainly do. Well, know of it.

We don’t know this stuff, though. Not really. Not like we know our actual ABCs.

We’re not fluent in chess. So while we might - with a bit of effort - be able to work out precisely why it’s time for White to resign at move 57 in Benjamin - Korchnoi, we’re not likely to know for sure that ... Rb1 would win at move 47.

47 ... Rb1

-+

So heading for that position would be a bit of a risk which in turn means that we can’t play those late middlegame/early endgame positions properly.

Black to play

And that is why, despite all the time, effort and money we put in we are nevertheless, to a greater or lesser extent, no bloody good at chess at all.

King and Pawn Index

Review copy of Liquidation on the Chess Board supplied by New in Chess 

Newly Discovered Interest II

Oh yeah, there was also this. The photo in New In Chess is, I think, this one (or one very similar).

Now when you see Boris Johnson in a photo like that, what do you see? Do you see what Boris and the promoter want you to see? Or do you remember, for example, this, or this, or this?

So perhaps Boris and chess are a good fit after all. If only because in chess, as in the career of Boris Johnson, you can get away with anything provided nobody asks any awkward questions when the time comes to ask them.

Newly Discovered Interest In Chess

Boris Johnson, a keen chess player.

Such is the claim in the latest New In Chess. Evidence for the contention in the caption is welcomed*. But not, especially, anticipated.

[* Of course Boris used to be Ray's editor while Ray was recycling old material at the Spectator, but I don't think that really counts.]

New plagiarist, old plagiarist

So Rupert Murdoch does sack plagiarists then.

I wonder who's the chess columnist for The Australian?

[Ray Keene index]

[Ray Keene plagiarism index]

10 Types of Chesser II

Lefties and Righties.

In the good old days even the elite GMs mostly stuck to one side of the board or the other.  1 e4 or 1 d4, that was the question. I’m not sure exactly when it happened - perhaps Leko adopting some queen’s pawn openings in 2003 marks the turning point - but some time between now and the turn of  century things changed.

Kasparov was a rarity. He might well play anything against anyone (6 x 1 e4, 3 x 1 d4 against Short in '93; 6 x 1 e4 in 8 games against Anand in ’95 but only trying 1 d4 and 1 Nf3 in his first couple of Whites; 5 x 1 e4, 2 x 1 c4, 1 x 1 d4 against Kramnik in 2000).

His opponents openings in the same matches? 10 x 1 e4; 9 x 1 e4; 6 x 1 d4, 1 x 1 Nf3 respectively. That’s typical of how it was back then. Today the top guys are much more likely to mix it up.

For today I’m pretending that this doesn’t exist

What about us, though? Ordinary club and tournament chessers. We tend to stick to one or the other. Sure, there are the guys who like the Flank Openings, but broadly speaking* we tend to be either king’s pawn or queen’s pawn. Even those of us who - like me - often start 1 Nf3.

My question is not why. It’s fairly obvious why.

Being ready for everything as White would be a massive task. I’m not entirely convinced that it would impact on the results of our games that much actually. It certainly feels like it would, though, and that’s reason enough to stick to one or the other.

No, my question is not why but how. How we come to make the choices that we do.

I play 1 Nf3 and 1 d4 now because I like it that way. Why did I start playing it though? Why did I stick with it. Was it arbitrary? Chance? Honestly, I don’t know.

When I switched from 1 e4 the motivation was lack of desire to take on the various branches of the Sicilian. Today we might add the Petroff or Berlin as reasons to make the change. There’s certainly a tonne of theory for all of those, but more so than the KID, Grunfeld, Nimzo-Indian? The argument doesn’t seem convincing.

So 1 e4 or 1 d4. Which are you? More importantly, how did you end up that way? Answers other than habit are particularly welcome.

* although not entirely. The S&BCB arts correspondent did once utterly batter my French Defence after switching from his customary opening move.

DG XVII: Campaigns

@Kasparov63

So Kasparov has decided to "call out" Bill Clinton. Has made a "campaign" of it, mark you. I imagine that’s about as terrifying as being the target of an S&BCB crusade against the citing of imaginary research studies.

Anyhoo, our man was strolling about London at the weekend. As it happens I was but a few hundred yards north at the time. Such a shame we didn’t bump into each other. We could have gone to one of the many fine cafes in the area - I would have recommended this one - and had a bit of a chin wag. Since our theme for today is delusions of significance, let’s file that one alongside Staunton - Morphy and Fischer - Karpov as one of the great chess meets that never quite happened.

Something else that happened on Saturday that you might have missed: the appearance of Dementia hits women hardest - study on the Guardian website. Amusing reading it is not.

It seems the Graun’s article is based on a "study" from Alzheimer’s Research UK which will not be published until March. Now you might join me in feeling that generating news articles on the back of research that nobody can read yet is very much not cool. Let’s go with it, though, and consider whether the solution suggested - concerted government action - is at least a more plausible response to the problem - devastating health condition combined with long-term underfunding of services and research - than the glib unsubstantiated assertions of somebody who was once rather good at a board game.

Chess and Dementia Index

Bent Larsen’s Best King and Pawn Endgames: The Square

White to play

Larsen - Uhlmann, Candidates’ Quarter-Final match (9) 1971

Here’s a critical decision for Bent Larsen. Black has just played 58 ... Ke5. Does White swap bishop for knight or not?

If our hero gets this decision right he’ll win not just the game but the match too. Balls it up and he’ll have to play the final game needing a draw to go through.

What would you do? For those that want it, the answer  can be found after the jump.

County Counting: 7. Local Derbys - They Also Ran

This series has been exploring the Surrey County Association Match Books, which gave chapter and verse on Surrey's matches against, in the main, other counties. An exception, which we looked at last time (episode 6), was the sequence against "Croydon", which was actually part of Surrey, hence the latter was obliged to present itself as "The Rest". We tracked the matches between these two sides over several decades up to the late 1920s, noting the dominance of the "Rest of Surrey" - which you might expect - and a couple of anomalies, not to say errors, in the way the Match Books recorded them - which you might not.      

By and large the British Chess Magazine (BCM) seemed disinclined to report these contests, so we were left, at the end of episode 6, with a rather bloodless account. Now we have some fulsome reportage of two of them from the BCMs of 1902 and 1903, and from the local Croydon Guardian weekly newspaper (CG), that weren't to hand earlier. They describe what were indeed the first two matches (as we suspected, in spite of their omission in the Match Books), and they give us the atmosphere of those early Local Derbys. They also give an insight into the esteem in which chess, and its local clubs, were held in those far-off days. All this follows in this episode, into which we can also squeeze a game of chess.

10 Types of Chesser

There are 10 types of chesser in the world. Those who understand the binary number system and those that don’t.

That might be my most favourite joke ever*.

As it happens, I’ve often thought that we - chess players - can divide ourselves into two clearly delineated groups in lots of different ways. Here’s one that occurred to me about 10 years ago:-

You can separate out chessers into those who would rather score +4 =0 -2 from six games and those who would rather finish with +2 =4 -0.

Go unbeaten, or notch more wins at the price of picking up a couple of defeats along the way. Back when the thought first came to me, you’d end up with 4 points out of six 6 in both cases. These days where the modern 'three-for-a-win' scoring system in place a Super GM would choose the former because s/he'd end up with 12 points rather than 10, but that doesn’t never applies to us Ordinary Joes, does it? Our choice remains a value judgement rather than an objective decision.

For most of my chess days I would have very much preferred to have 0 in the losses column if it were possible. For the last few years, though, I’ve switched over somewhat. Come to accept that sometimes defeats are the price you pay for the wins you take risks to achieve (see SMA #8, for example).

And yet part of me still dreams of being that guy who is uber-difficult to beat. When Nige recommend that we "adopt a hero" recently, my thoughts immediately went to Bent Larsen, yes, but also to Ulf Andersson as well. Larsen detested draws. Ulf, I suspect, would rather go +1 =15 -0 than +15 =0 -1.

Anyhoo. +4 =0 -2 or +2 =4 -0. Which are you?

* Aside from one by Roy 'Chubby' Brown, perhaps, but that’s far too rude for a family chess blog such as this one.

DG XVI: Not So Brilliant

@Kasparov63

Garry Kasparov is shocked. Shocked, I tells you.

You wonder how the erstwhile World Chess Champion finds the time to lecture the President of the United States of America. What with having to get himself to Oslo to pick up his Nobel Prize for sorting out dementia and all.

It’s not that I disagree with Gazza’s central thesis (that Putin is a bit of a see-you-next-Tuesday) you understand. More that I find it hard to value somebody’s opinion on Topic A if I know that they’re prepared to claim authority on Topic B despite having little knowledge of and even less interest in whatever that other subject may be.

Could it possibly be that Sarah Hurst’s assessment of leading chessers

... chess brilliance has nothing to do with high intelligence in other areas, but tends to give top players a false idea of their own high intelligence. They equate their FIDE rating with their IQ. In fact they have devoted so much time to chess that they may not be so brilliant at other things.

applies here?

Chess and Dementia Index

Bent Larsen's Best King and Pawn Endgames: The Opposition

White to play

Larsen - Gligoric, Moscow Olympiad 1956

If I wasn’t doing pawn endings this year, I might well have spent 2015 looking at the games of Bent Larsen. Partly because Santa brought me a copy of Bent Larsen’s Best Games for Chrimbo, but mostly because I can’t help but feel history has not been kind to Mr L.

What do you know about Larsen? There are two things that will top pretty much everybody’s list: he got bapped 6-0 by Fischer in the Candidates’ semi-final of 1971 and Spassky smashed him up in just 17 moves in the USSR v Rest of the World match that kicked-off the When we were Kings era. If we were looking for a third Larsen factoid we might well go with him being the first GM to lose to a computer in a tournament game back in 1988.

Seems a bit harsh that those should be the most significant footprints that the Danish Grandmaster should leave in the sands of chess history. He could play a bit, after all.

Larsen became a Grandmaster by scoring 14/18 (77.7%) - the highest score on the first board - at the Moscow Olympiad in 1956. Today’s pawn ending came in his game against Gligoric, White trading all the pieces from here ...

White to play

... to reach this winning king and pawn position.

Black to play

In his notes to the game Larsen points out that if Black had done nothing White would win be generating an Outside Passed Pawn with c3, b3 and c4. Gligoric, he said, "does his best to muddy the waters" with by preventing this simple plan.

33 ... b4

Now Black can answer 34 c3 with 34 ... b3. White’s still winning but now he has to be careful because if he just carelessly tries to mop up the e-pawn and head to kingside Black will get to queen his own pawn.

So how’s Larsen going to secure the point? A clue: it will come down to opposition. Specifically, who has it in this position.

Lurid and gratuitous

Good Lord yes. And young men left their curtains open when they were in bed with the light on, since they weren't up to anything they shouldn't have been and nobody was looking besides.

Feedback

And answer, of course, came there none...

To: feedback@thetimes.co.uk
On: 3 January 2015
Re: Your chess correspondent


Dear Sir/Madam

Attached is a large portion of Raymond Keene's chess column in the Times of 12 December 2014.

As you will notice from looking at the other documents attached, much of the column has been copied out directly from a column that appeared in the Times for 15 December 2010. You will also notice that it's not the first time: that column had already been substantially copied out on 29 November 2011 and again on 16 March 2013.

Is it normal Times practice to reuse large chunks of previously-published material without informing the readers?

Yours etc

 [Ray Keene index]

There's a clue in the name

Ryan Gilbey, interviewing David Oyelowo in the Guardian:

He recently told his son about The Queen of Katwe, a new film in which he will play a man who inspires a boy to become a chess grandmaster*.

Really?

[* It says here]

Grandmaster Preparation: (King and pawn) Endgame Play

Black to play

Wang Yue - Liu Qingnan, Xinghua 2012

I do not want to pretend that I can add anything significant to your understanding of pawn endings ... 

My only observation is that a great number of pawn endings are misplayed if they get slightly complicated - even by grandmasters. It is not obvious what the reason for this is, but it could be because pawn endings are primarily about calculation, Most of us find calculation impossible even at the best of times, many grandmasters included. 

Jacob Aagaard, Grandmaster Preparation: Endgame Play (Quality Chess, 2014)

Or as Angus reflected after we’d studied the position at the head of today’s blog (which comes from Aagaard’s excellent book), "There’s nothing you can learn that will help you with this. You just have to work it out."