Sheffield 2011: Big Time Kiddie Chess

It was "a big day" for the British Championships, our old friend Raymond Keene tweeted on Wednesday morning, and he was right too. Rather than hyperbole, of which his jottings have sometimes been accused in the past, if anything RDK was guilty of severe understatement with that one.

Tuesday 2nd August, 2011: England’s #1 playing England’s #2 and, if we take Luke McShane as semi-retired, England’s #3 active player up against the #4. Our top four all playing each other on the same day? A Halley's Comet of a brace of pairings. Other than the first round of Malc Pein's London Chess Classic of 2009 when did that last happen?

My guess is that you'd have to go most of the way back to Blackpool '71 for anything similar. We got it at Sheffield, though. The best playing the best. Exactly what the British Championship should be, but so rarely is.

Given the standing of those involved, it was rather amusing that the games began as if they were being played by the chessers who occupy the lower boards of your club’s second team. "Wtf?" I potty-mouthed to myself as I watched the Championship website spit out the moves on the live feed. "Have they wired up the boards from the under eleven championship by mistake?"

Back in April I was on the wrong end of a total gubbing from Carsten Pedersen in a game that began, 1 e4 e5, 2 Nf3 Nc6, 3 Bc4 Bc5, 4 O-O Nf6, 5 d4 exd4, 6 e5 d5, 7 exf6 dxc4

A little tricky for an ECF 160s to defend, perhaps, but surely nothing for a 2700 Grandmaster to worry about? Was Nigel really going to play this again? Was Mickey really scared of it? Since we’re asking questions,

• after Adams ducked with 4 … d6 why did Nosher not play 5 d4 anyway?
• wasn’t the apparently childish … Ng4 a possibility on move 6 or 7?

I bet one of aforementioned 2nd team board eights would have tempted.

The book our super GMs spent the rest day reading?

Jones – Howell wasn’t so very different to Nosher - Adams. After,

1 e4 e5, 2 Nf3 Nc6, 3 d4 exd4, 4 Bc4 Bc5, 5 c3 Nf6

our 2600s reached a position that your humble scribe has played with both colours for at least twenty years. Back in my racier and younger days – I haven’t always played 1. Nf3, you know – I used to go 6 cxd4 here and hack away with ... Bb4+, 7 Nc3 (7 Bd2 Nxe4 = Webb-Jones, Sheffield 1st round) Nxe4, 8 O-O Bxc3, 9 d5

The Corporal preferred the somewhat less juvenile 6 e5 , but that is hardly at the cutting edge of opening theory either, is it?

"What was the opening in Jones-Howell all about?" IM John Cox asked on the EC Forum. "This 5 c3 kinda threw me - no doubt it's all been well-known theory since Greco's time, has it?" I guess if JC was not IM JC but 1600 elo/120 ECF JC he'd probably be a lot more familiar with Jones' choice than he is!

Anyhoo, after 6 … d5, 7 Bb5 (7 exf6?! dxc4, 8 O-O Qxf6, 9 Re1 Be6, 10 Bg5 Qg6, 11 cxd4 Nxd4, 12 Nxd4 Bxd4, 13 Qxd4 Qxg5, 14 Qxc4 O-O-O -+, a game I played as Black at the British Universities Team Championship circa 1991) Ne4, 8 cxd4 Bb6, 9 Nc3 0-0, 10 Be3

Howell tried 10 ... Ne7 - Mihail Marin suggests ... Bg4 in Beating the Open Games - and went on to lose in 40 moves. Adams, in contrast, eventually managed to draw against Nosher, but only after being on the back foot for much of the game. Aren't these lines supposed to be harmless?

Actually, going back to Short-Adams, I tried to look up the line in Marin and the closest position I could find for comparison was this:-

White to play

If White went h2-h3 here the game would transpose to Short-Adams after White's 12th, but would White play 12 h3 in this position? Marin evidently thinks not and doesn't mention it at all. After all, harassing the bishop with ... Ng4 doesn't make sense because White wants to play Be3xa7 anyway and Black's light-squared bish has already landed on e6 so will at least lose time if it came to g4 now. So why does White need to control his king's knight four square at this point?

To put it another way, White seems to have something more useful to be doing than shoving his rook's pawn forward one square to get into Short-Adams.  To put it another-another way, Nosher seems to have played a harmless line more or less a tempo down and nonetheless put Adams under severe pressure. There's a moral in there somewhere, I'm just not sure what it is.

Kiddie openings that turn out to be surprisingly effective or otherwise, round 8 of Sheffield 2011 was clearly a special day. It's far from obvious that the the financial model and other arrangements for this year's championships will, could or should - I retain my doubts about certain issues - be repeated in the future, but in terms of the British Championships I can't think of a parallel for last Tuesday in my chess lifetime. Hat tips to everyone, not the least of whom, to put it mildly, is CJ de Mooi, who helped bring about the day that big time chess came to town.

Photos of Adams, Short, Howell and Jones taken from the British Championships website
CJ from britishchess.blogspot.com

What Dadd Didn't Do

Richard Dadd (1817-1886), artist and eccentric chesser, did some strange things in his 69 years, as this series has recounted. He painted precociously, becoming a Royal Academician by the age of 20. He did a rather baffling chess picture, The Child's Problem, when he was 40 in 1857 - you can see it at Watercolour in Tate Britain.

Dadd's problem piece

And when he was fancy free he sported a fez, perhaps a minority taste even then. If you get up close, you can spot his stand-out titfer in among the tumult of William Frith’s painting The Derby Day (1856-8, also in the Tate). Frith put him in the picture. Trust me.

He is picked out below in my own furtive snap at the Tate; he's just behind the chap in the green jacket (on the left in the main picture).

Yes, that’s Dadd, fezzing up at the back. Frith (1819-1909) and Dadd were close friends in an artists' sect calling itself "the Clique". Notice the date of The Derby Day - 1856/8 - with its mini-portrait, because Dadd was then already in Bethlem Asylum having, uncommonly, murdered his father in 1843. He spent the rest of his years inside (first Bethlem and, from 1864, Broadmoor). He carried on painting nonetheless, and evidently remained in Frith's affections, appearing as if a Joan for his Darby.

Dadd revealed an unusual take on chess to his Doctor, as we found out here. It was the Over The Board game that he most likely played. As far as is known Dadd didn’t do Correspondence. This is worth a mention because a few decades later, when Dadd was nearing his end in Broadmoor, there was a noteworthy correspondence game at Bethlem. In December 1883 to March 1884 some gentlemen from the Asylum took on Cambridge University Chess Club. And beat them.

I’ll repeat that: some patients from Bethlem Asylum beat Cambridge University at chess. The Cantabs playing white resigned, the exchange down, after 25 moves, in a pretty decent game by the inmates. The Cambridge team chucked in the towel, possibly a tad early, because an upcoming Universities match claimed their attention, or so it was said. Fortunately, and to spare their further embarrassment, they went on to pip Oxford that year 5.5 to 4.5.

Chess history buffs will know that the story was reported in full by Edward Winter in his Chess Notes number 1891. Initially it appeared in The Field of May 10th 1884. Here is the game:

You can see The Field's annotations to the game via the Edward Winter link above.

Mr. Winter’s Chess Note gives a list of possible Cambridge players. The Bethlem consultation team consisted of a “Beta” and possibly a “Mr. C.”

And who was “Beta” (that's a pun on "beater", don't you think)? They say that Hoffer, who first gave the story in The Field, knew but didn’t let on. But after your blogger recently drew the tale to the attention of the Bethlem Archive and Museum, Ms Sarah Chaney, doing research on admissions to Bethlem in the period, kindly checked her notes for references to patients who played chess in the 1880s. She wondered if “Beta” might have been….

“…..Walter Haigh, who was certainly at the asylum at this time. It's often commented that he plays chess, and Haigh also had a B.A. from Oxford, so was perhaps in a position to have had the contacts at Cambridge. He is also published during his time at Bethlem, so might be a likely person to submit the game for publication. The evidence is all circumstantial, of course, but I thought perhaps if his name [comes up] elsewhere it might suggest it was indeed him. There's no mention as to who he is playing chess with when in Bethlem, sadly.

Ref: Walter Abraham Haigh B.A., Tutor from Belsize Park, age 27,

19/10/1882 (discharged well, 18/07/1888) Male Casebook 1882, CB/120, p. 102”

Unfortunately, she was unable to trace whatever he is supposed to have published, and that includes a book; but in view of Sarah's comment: please could anyone out there shed any light on Walter Abraham Haigh B.A., occasional chess-player, born circa. 1855?

I should mention that Dr.Tim Harding counselled us that those chess noms de guerre usually followed the initial letter of the player’s surname. So, the Beta=Haigh hypothesis may be misplaced, but perhaps (if I had my way) only alphabetically.

Dadd, partial to a puzzle himself, would have enjoyed the mystery, and we'll return to The Child's Problem, the Big Daddy of them all, for further scrutiny next time.

Acknowledgments.

Thanks: again to Richard James, this time for the Cambridge/Bethlem tip; and again to Colin Gale, and to Sarah Chaney, at the Bethlem Archive and Museum (follow its blog); and to Dr Tim Harding for his help and advice.

What Dadd Did
What Dadd Did Next
What Dadd Did Later

Two Little Boys

Picture the scene. A skiing holiday circa 1985 or 1986: two little boys, a pair of five-year-old twins, are looking out the window and seeing what can only be described as a complete absence of snow. Skiing is very much off the agenda, so what to do?

The boys' father, a Mr. Pert, comes up with what will prove to be an inspired idea. Would Nick and Richard like to learn how to play chess? It turns out that they would and in the twenty-five years that follow the boys will go on to share trips to the World Junior Championships, assorted international titles and approximately 5,000 elo points between them before meeting in Sheffield for round six of the 2011 British Championships.

What happened,

was hardly in keeping with the fighting chess that we've seen at the Championships so far - witness, to cite just one example, the 76-move draw between Nosher and Howell on Friday - but, in the circumstances, I find it impossible to criticise.

As it happens I was drawn to play my friend and fellow blogger EJH in round seven of the Benasque tournament at the beginning of last month and I can't say I enjoyed the experience very much at all. On the one hand I very much wanted to play: I was in Spain only for the chess tournament after all and I was already one game short after my opponent hadn't turned up in the second round. On the other, though, I was rather troubled by the fact that I could only win if a friend of mine lost.

Obviously, it's always true that someone has to lose, but when it's a stranger, or at least somebody that you don't know that well, that's easy enough to accept. When it's the person who picked you up from the airport, opened his home to you, helped you negotiate a foreign land when your langauge skills are sufficient only to ask for a cheese sandwich (un bocadillo de queso por favor), that's a totally different kettle of pescados. I'd never been in that position before and I didn't like it one little bit.

Well, EJH and I played the game and my dilemma was resolved when after a little over two hours we reached this position,

Black to play
EJH v JMGB, Benasque 2011

and I accepted Justin's offer of a draw. Against any of the locals, peace offer or not, I'd have just played my intended 21 ... Be6 and got on with the game. Against Justin, somewhat weedy though it might have been, I decided simply to end things there and then and bank my half-point.

Part of my consideration, I have to say, was that even if I did manage to go on to win the game - hardly a given - I'd only end up with a stupid pairing in the next round (elo of 2300-2500 not out of the question), a quick loss and a return back to where I started anyway. From both a personal and tournament perspective, then, taking the draw seemed the sensible thing to do and although any way you look at it the JB v JH pairing in Benasque is small beer compared to Pert v Pert in Sheffield, it did at least give me a little bit of hint at what it must have been like for them.

Naturally I've no idea what made the Perts decide that they didn't fancy a proper game with each other, but if it was tournament considerations it seems to have worked out pretty well for them. After beating Adam Hunt yesterday Nick is in 4th-8th on 5/7 and Richard is in the pack only half a point behind. Both still have very good chances of finishing highly placed - Nick could even be joint second by the time the dust clears tonight - whereas if their game had ended with a decisive result one of them would now be out of the running.

So it could well have been all about the competition, but it's pretty likely, don't you think, that they also remembered when they were two little boys. Should anybody have a photograph of the young Pert twins playing on wooden horses, do please feel free to share it with us.





PS:
The story of how the Perts learned how to play chess comes from the Extras section on Nick Pert's Killer Endgames DVD.

Mummy's little prince and the Sheffield rest day

Ian Bell hears he'll be getting a curly wurly if he eats up all his tea

What were you up to yesterday? Me? I was half watching/half listening to the cricket and thus witnessed a world first when Test Match player and alleged adult Ian Bell gave the bigger boys a note from his mum asking whether they'd stop being unkind and let him whack the ball about for a little bit longer. Until now being out has always been considered sufficient grounds for the umpires to actually give you out but Ickle Ian running blubbing to matron has changed all that. This we call the spirit of the game, apparently.

Anyhoo, the point is I would much rather have been third watching/listening to the cricket while devoting the rest of my time to following the British Championships at Sheffield. There being no play on the middle Sunday, however, I ended up spending the day watching Bell score a few runs then stamp his foot and yell about how unfair it all was before getting his own way.

Along with many of our esteemed and valued readers, no doubt, I'm old enough to remember when there used to be no play on Sunday during Test Matches either. Games always started on Thursday and after three days the players took a break and then came back for days four and five on Monday and Tuesday*. In those days practically nothing was open on a Sunday, but then Parliament discovered that allowing people to go to Sainsburys seven days a week would not bring about the end of civilization and it began to dawn on the TCCB (as was) that since the weekend was the time that most people could watch cricket it might be a good idea to sell tickets for both days rather than just one.

Bell snapped just after being sent to field at Deep Fine Leg
and just before he held his breath until he fainted

So cricket has changed over the years, but the British Chess Championships, it seems, has not. When, I wonder, was the practice of no play on the middle Sunday established? That was how it was at the championships that I attended at Plymouth and Eastbourne in 1989 and 1990, but no doubt it dates back much much further than that. Whatever the answer, I'm sure it was quite appropriate at the time, but is it really still the best way to do things today?

It's not that I object to rest days per se, it's having one on the Sunday that I find strange. There was a comment on the EC Forum a couple of days ago to the effect that the absence of sound on the internet commentary feed on Saturday was particularly unfortunate for the poster because he could only follow the games at the weekend and therefore he wouldn't get to hear any at all throughout the whole fortnight. I'm sure he's not alone

If we want to publicise chess in general and the British Championships in particular, surely the obvious plan is to play the games when people can actually watch them? Why, then, is there no play at the British on the Sunday? 'Because that's how it's always been' is the only answer I can come up with, although, clearly, that's far from a satisfactory reason.

As Simon A said in a comment to Thursday's post,

The whole event seems tired and needs an overhaul imo ... I think we can do better.

Agreed and agreed. All the more so since we have a championship worth shouting about this year.

When play resumes this afternoon we have Short - Jones and Adams - Williams amongst much else to look forward to. Good stuff indeed although, the law of sod being in operation, I shall be on a train when it all kicks off and shall probably miss most of it. That's pretty annoying and there's really not much of an upside to my afternoon, but there is one silver lining in that if Iain Bell gets a hurty knee and has to go off to get some Savlon put on it, at least I shall miss that too.








* Unless West Indies were playing in which case the match would have been long since over.

The $151,202.17 chess set you can make at home

Decade upon decade, there is a war being waged in the world of cameras that makes Kasparov v Karpov look like a fleeting squabble between two cuddly old lovers, and that war is Canon versus Nikon. And now just recently camera website LensRental decided to make a chess set out of the respective equipment to illustrate the point:

Every Picture Tells A Story: The Chess Gents of 1885

Number 16 in the series. This one by Martin Smith, with comment from Richard Tillett.

It is a happy coincidence that this episode of our series appears during the British Chess Championship in Sheffield as it focuses on another Congress held in another proud provincial city: Hereford, in 1885.

Thomas Leeming’s 1814 painting of the Gentlemen of Hereford Chess Club put Hereford on the chess map, and as we showed in our last but one episode (where you can also see the painting), it may commemorate one of the first ever provincial chess clubs in the country. Hereford may have had its ups and downs chess-wise ever since, but the Congress of August 1885 was a high point, with such stars as Bird and Blackburne in contention. It was as interesting then as maybe chess is now for goings-on off the board as much as on it.

One intriguing question for us was whether there was any connection between the Gents painted in the 1812 Chess Club and those involved in the Hereford Congress some 73 years later. There is a hint of a link. The second figure from the left in the painting is F. L . Bodenham, and in the list of patrons for the Congress was an F. Bodenham Esq.


You can see his name half-way down in the left hand column. This can’t be Francis Lewis himself, as he died in 1876, but might be his son, also called Francis, who was born in 1820. We can’t be sure, as Hereford was awash with Bodenhams, including a whole village so-named a few miles to the north. The reports of the Congress mention a key gofer (he “devoted himself with his usual zeal and ability”) Thomas Smith, the Secretary of the local Hereford Chess Association. So, in 1885, as in 1812, and as now, Hereford had its chess club.

You can see what an impressive list of patrons lined up to support the 1885 Congress, including the Lord Lieutenant of Hereford, the Mayor, a brace of Earls and a bevy of Lords and Knights. Even Robert Peel, Conservative M.P. for Huntingdon chipped in a £1 subscription. But behind this display of support there was much gentlemanly politicking.

The Congress was organised in the twentieth year of the Counties’ Chess Association, the moving spirit of which was the Reverend Arthur Boland Skipworth, himself a decent chesser.


The CCA aimed to represent and organise amateur chess in the provinces and was very much the Reverend’s creature. He was mightily displeased by the pretensions of the rival, upstart, London-based British Chess Association which proposed also to organise chess meetings in the provinces, being so bold, as it did in October 1885, also to offer federation, as if of equal standing. This impudent suggestion Skipworth swatted away, loftily deeming it unworthy to put before the members of the CCA, let alone discuss.

Over my dead body would your writ run in the counties, he was telling the BCA, and in 1885, his clerical duties notwithstanding, a grand gesture was the order of the day. So, as well as running his 290 acre farm with a staff of ten souls, administrating the CCA, sitting on the Council of the BCA (as a kind of Trojan Horse), and playing quite a bit of chess (e.g. he lost a match +2-5=0 to Bird that same year) and, one supposes, delivering the odd sermon or two, he and the CCA organised the Hereford Congress, playing himself and finishing 7th in a field of 11.

Skipworth’s (sorry, that should read “the CCA’s”) prospectus for the tournament invited “Chess Masters from the different parts of the world” to enter. The “munificence of Mr. Anthony of Hereford” (a local big-wig) would underwrite their prize money. But otherwise individuals and clubs the length and breadth of the land were invited to subscribe to provide prizes for the parallel amateur competitions. To which the Chess Monthly, the organ of the BCA, sniffily declared itself “greatly averse” to these appeals for funds to enable “a few amateurs to exhibit their skills at chess in some provincial town”. Ouch. Sheffield beware.

The venue for the Congress was Green Dragon Hotel in Hereford, which is still there today.


Here the management considerately provided “separate little tables” for the pairs of players, and even an office for writing letters, and a board for displaying results: declared to be “decided improvements” on previous arrangements.

An endearing feature of the Congress was a chess problem setting competition in which the entries were accompanied by “mottos”, the most bizarre of which was this cod French effort: “Pas delle yeux Rhone que nous”, and you are on your tod working out what that means. These bons mots were attached to this three-mover.


The line-up for the Masters tournament was shown in this photograph in the Illustrated London News:

Back row, l. to r. : Gunsberg, Thorold, Bird, Pollock, Smith (Sec. HCA), Schallopp, Owen, Skipworth.

Front row, l. to r. : Mason, Blackburne, Anthony (Pres. HCA), Mackenzie, Ranken.

The eagle-eyed reader will note (a) the absence of Dr Tarrasch, who withdrew at the last moment, claiming that the prize monies were too skewed in favour of the winner and didn’t provide enough for the runners up. But perhaps he just didn’t fancy meeting Blackburne again, having blundered to a 22 move defeat against him in the Hamburg tournament the month before, and (b) no less than three Reverend Gentlemen: Owen, Ranken and Skipworth.

There was evidently a need to make up the numbers in the “international” Masters by inviting a number of home-grown strong amateurs to take part, including the three Reverends, a point the BCA’s Chess Monthly seized on for another snipe at the CCA.

But the number of men of the cloth is interesting in itself. In fact, among the participants in the various competitions of the Congress, and the Patrons and subscribers lists there are no less than twenty-three clerics, of whom seven played in the tournaments. They used to say that the Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer; the Hereford Congress looked like the C of E at play, not heeding the charge that they might be neglecting their pastoral duties. No worries! Giving them his blessing was a most prestigious Patron: the Lord Bishop of Hereford.

As for the chess, the Masters was notable for the christening of 1.f4 as “Bird’s Opening” courtesy of the Hereford Times, which reported, on the 8th August, “Mr. Bird with his own opening” beating Mr. Pollock, and “Mr. Thorold with Bird’s Opening…defeated by Mr Blackburne”. Helping to give the Congress legitimacy as an international tournament was Herr Schallopp of Germany: according to the British Chess Magazine “a very fine player, and withal a very nice man. He won golden opinions during the tourney, and if he had won first prize, his victory would have been hailed with delight”. Alas, he finished second equal with Bird, but was the only player to beat tournament victor Blackburne with this effort.

However, he took his eye off the ball in his game with Mr. Thorold, who flew the flag for the English amateur and defeated him. One wonders what the “very nice man” said to Thorold for depriving him of first prize and his hail of delight. You'll find the game here.

This game and others were annotated in various places, invariably by the amateurs. In the British Chess Magazine the Reverend Ranken offered his thoughts on the Thorold v Schallopp encounter, suggesting that instead of 10…Be6 “we see no objection to taking the QP, which we do not think Mr.Thorold ought to have abandoned”. Hmmm. 10…Qxd4 11. Qb3+ Kg7 12. Qf7+ Kh6 13. Bxf4+ Kh5 14.h3 looks pretty tasty to me, and I’d be pleased if someone’s computer agreed.

We see no objection
to taking the QP.

In 1898 the Reverend Skipworth went to answer to his maker as to whether chess had claimed more of his attention than had his flock, and the Counties’ Chess Association died with him. The field was now left clear for a single national chess body, the British Chess Federation, which arrived in 1904. Chess politics has never been as decorous since.

References
A. B. Skipworth (ed). The Book of the Counties’ Chess Association, Hereford 1885. Originally London 1886. Reprint Moravian Chess Publishing House. Contains reports given by the officers of the CCA.
Hereford Chess Association. Hereford in 1885 . Hereford 1985. Limited Edition. – with extracts from the British Chess Magazine 1885. Edited by Les Collard and Peter Johnston. Thanks to Les for depositing two copies with the Institute of Leeming Studies. Thanks also to Ray Collett for his briefing on the Congress. The Chess Monthly, Vol VI Sept. 1884 - Aug 1885.
P. W. Sergeant. A Century of British Chess (1934)

The ILN photo comes from here.

Every Picture Tells a Story index

Chess in Art Index

Sheffield 2011: four rounds in

The 2011 British Championships only opened a few days ago and yet by the end of today it will already be half over. That's life for you, I suppose. Blink and you've missed it.

I've barely had a chance to keep an eye on what's been going on, and when I scanned the lists of the entrants to Championship tournament, I was surprised to see half-a-dozen people that I'd played before. Most of these - Peter Lalic, Yang-Fan, George Salimbeni and Sarah Hegarty I met when they were much younger, and less strong, than they are now, but there are a couple of exceptions. One is Ravia Haria, who I played at the Gatwick Open just a couple of months ago and the other is Chino Atako.

I first crossed pawns with Chino at the Dutch Opening theme tournament that Simon Williams organised in Hastings at the begining of 2010 to celebrate the launch of his first DVD. As I recall he - Atako - played the Staunton Gambit against me, an eminently appropriate choice for somebody with his name, and gave me a good, if mercifully short, leathering (I mentioned the game in passing here).

The next and only other time our paths crossed was April of this year when we found ourselves on board seven of a Streatham & Brixton v Redhill Surrey League match. Funny to think that at as I write these words the person I played in that mundane club game is busy preparing himself for a clash with last year's British Champion and current world number 28, Mickey Adams. That is, nevertheless, exactly what is happening and Chino richly deserves his chance, having scored an excellent 2.5 points (wins against Ronan Magee and FM Laurence Webb, a draw against IM Andrew Ledger) from the first three rounds.

I'm not a big fan of the current format of the championship tournament, but it's certainly true that one of the strengths of the event is that every now and again it gives (if he will forgive me for the term) 'ordinary' club players like Chino a chance to take a pop and one of the big guns. The problem is that this feature of the tournament comes at a price and ultimately, although not only because of games like Atako-Adams, we risk the title being determined not by games played between the leading contenders, but rather by a comparison of how the top players score against the rest of the field. This wouldn't matter so much if the contenders played similar opposition, but often they do not.

IM Simon Ansell wrote on the EC Forum yesterday morning (as part of a discussion about the Accelerated Pairing rules that are being used),

... any system that, barring an exceptional set of results (there haven't been), results in the top two seeds on the same score playing two opponents 400 points apart, is fundamentally flawed imo

which seems hard to argue against. Similarly, if we're looking at discrepancies in how the pairings turn out, we might also point to the fact that IM Sue Lalic has played four Grandmasters while the GMs themselves have, for the most part, only had to take on one of their brothers thus far. Nosher (Conquest, Summerscale) and Conquest (Short, Jones) have played two each, it's true, but that is more than offset by Williams, Wells and Pert not yet having played any.

As Chris Kreuzer said on that same EC Forum thread,

With 12 GMs in the field, you would hope the leading GMs after 11 rounds would have played at least 7-8 other GMs *

and once again it's impossible to disagree with the sentiment. Once the tournament is over, an analysis of the number of all-GM clashes, the number of times that the people who placed first to tenth played the other top ten finishers and, in particular, the number of games that Adams, Short, Howell and The Corporal play against each other will go a long way to demonstrating how good at selecting a champion the current tournament actually is. Based on previous years, "not especially" is my guess.

Anyhoo, if we have doubts about the nature of the tournament it is perfectly possible to express them while also celebrating Chino Atako's achievement so far and the opportunity to play Mickey Adams that he has secured as a result. It is a huge slice of good fortune for him, perhaps, but certainly no fluke - witness, for example, the unbeaten 3.5/5 (including a draw with Simon Williams) that he scored at the Gatwick tournament mentioned above - and I wish him all the best for the game.

[UPDATE: Thursday pm.

The game has now been played - and, needless to say, with the expected result. Still, I hope that Chino enjoyed his moment in the spotlight nevertheless.]

Photographs from the Championship Website



* Chris continued: "Though that depends on the GMs playing like, well, grandmasters", which is an entirely reasonable addendum.

When will they ever learn?

I was surprised to learn, from his Twitter feed, that Ray Keene had been invited to open the 2011 British Chess Championships.

I was surprised for a number of reasons, most of which I'll not go through here on the assumption that they are long since over-familiar to readers. Still, I might just mention that to my recollection, Ray resigned from what was then the BCF, over twenty years ago, rather than repay money he was accused of acquiring illegitimately. (As I recall he then went on to set up a rival, the English Chess Association, membership not very much more than one.)

So one assumes that this is now all settled and the money has been repaid. Otherwise it's kind of hard to understand how come Ray was standing in front of the competitors before the Championships

[Image: Andrew R. Camp]

giving an opening speech, before heading back to London with great satisfaction

conceivably at having got away with it once again.

What's odder still about this business is the absence of any reference to it on either the Championships website or that of the English Chess Federation. I mean who invites somebody to open their premier event - and then leaves that totally unmentioned? One might as well forget to mention the sponsor's name.

So you'd think we would have a piece saying "the Championships were opened today with speeches from the President, CJ de Mooi, and Raymond Keene OBE, columnist for the Times and the Spectator and author of several hundred chess books". Strangely, though, we don't. They keep it low-key. So low-key, it's basically invisible.

What's all this about? Lord knows, though it's not the first time that Ray has been a great deal more heavily involved with the ECF than CJ de Mooi has been prepared to admit. But the two of them seem to be quite the mutual admiration society, even if on CJ's part it's deemed politic to keep quiet about his half of the admiration. However you describe it, though, it seems clear that the two of them are on very good terms.

It's my view that, at the very best, this shows very poor judgement of the part of CJ de Mooi, since he's the President of the English Chess Federation and Ray Keene has a thirty-year record of ripping off other people in chess, English and otherwise. Put simply, the association, between our President and Ray Keene, is a tawdry one.

Still, y'know, Ray gives a lot of publicity to chess (or at least his Times column does) and he's raised a lot of money in the past though sponsorship and - like Kirsan - he's never been convicted or anything and yadda yadda yadda. I know how that routine goes and I'm not going to engage with it. Partly because I'm not going to engage with an argument that says that ethics don't matter if somebody might wave some money at you or give you some publicity. Partly because I know from long experience that it's just not worth it.

I'll just say two things that I have said before, and which, no doubt, I shall have occasion to say again. The first is that the reason Ray has got away with it for so long is that people have been prepared to let him get away with it. They've done so precisely because of an absence of ethics, a preparedness to look the other way, to pretend and mumble and say well-it's-never-actually-happened-to-me, which is an identifiable feature of English chess. It's been going on too long for any other view to make much sense. English chess accepts Ray Keene because - to an extent, too great an extent - what he is like, is only what English chess is like. Writ large. Writ very large.

The second, of course, is that as long as English chess tolerates Ray Keene, it has no business complaining about Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. Because Kirsan Ilyumzhinov is just Ray Keene. Writ larger. Writ figuratively larger.

[Ray Keene index]
[Thanks to Jonathan and Angus]

Soviet chess grandmaster seeks asylum in Holland after Moscow criticism

Click for a closer look

(click again when you get there for a very close look)

The Times
Wednesday July 28th 1976

Soviet chess grandmaster seeks asylum in Holland after Moscow criticism
From Our Correspondent
The Hague, July 27

Viktor Korchnoi, aged 45, the Soviet chess player, has asked for political asylum in the Netherlands, the Dutch Ministry of Justice said today.

He has been in the country for the past three weeks competing in the annual IBM chess tournament, in which he shared first place with Britain’s Tony Miles. Korchnoi, whose whereabouts are being kept secret, has been granted a temporary residence permit, and a decision on his request will probably be reached within two weeks.

Jan Hein Donner, one of the Dutch competitors in the IBM tournament, said that many of the other competitors knew of Korchnoi’s intention to defect.

“Life has become impossible for him in the Soviet Union since he criticized world champion Anatoly Karpov”, Donner added. “He was subjected to increasing criticism and nuisance from both the Soviet Chess Federation and the authorities in general. He had been thinking about defecting for some time. I told him exactly how to go about it.”

Korchnoi’s family, including his wife and 17-year-old son, are still in the Soviet Union. He has frequently visited Holland, as well as many other Western countries, to play in tournaments.

Harry Golombek writes: The news of Korchnoi’s defection will come as no surprise, since of all the Soviet grandmasters he was the most outspoken in his condemnation and even ridicule of attempts made by Moscow’s ideologists to influence the world of chess.

But his decision represents a serious loss to the Russians. With Bobby Fischer no longer active, Korchnoi ranks as second in the world to the champion Karpov. His style of play reflects his personality – dynamic, independent and to a large extent original.

Tony Miles, the British grandmaster, said that at one stage in Amsterdam, Korchnoi asked him how to pronounce the word “asylum”, which gave him a shrewd idea of what might take place.

Moscow: Korchnoi’s wife Bela said from her home in Leningrad that she was surprised at her husband’s decision. She was awaiting a call from him. – AP

Opening questions

The following passage was written about an opening variation which appeared in the first half of the current Dortmund tournament.

Although he used it four times, drawing all fours games in short order, I still consider this a difficult variation for Black. Smyslov had to display a great deal of resourcefulness in order to equalise, and his opponents did not always exploit their opportunities to the fullest. After this tournament, neither Smyslov nor the other masters made much further use of this defence, so it has disappeared from practice.

a. In which game from Dortmund did it appear?
b. Who wrote the passage?
c. Where was it written?

[Chessbase Dortmund round reports: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Chesserettes

Previously at Benasque 2011:

Upside Down; Talking Blues; Con un Poco de Suerte; Streatham & Brixton Against the Grandmasters

There seemed to be quite a few lady people playing in Benasque. I mention this not because it's a bad thing - it obviously isn't - nor even because it's a good thing - although, for various reasons that shan't detain us today, it seems to me that it is - but simply because I noticed it. Actually, the really noticeable thing was not so much that there were lots of females at the tournament per se, but the fact that for the most part they were adults and not girls.

Women in their twenties and older. It's a constituency of chessers that barely exists in England and yet in Spain it's one that seems to be flourishing. OK, there were over 440 players in Benasque so you'd expect to see more females there than at an event like Gatwick where there were 'only' 156 of us, but it seemed to me that not only were there more in Benasque in absolute terms, there were more proportionally too.

As it happens I played two women during my fortnight in Spain: Leticia Pardo Simon in the fourth round and WIM Roquelina Fandino Reyes in the tenth. By way of comparison, I'd had just one female opponent in more than 140 rated games in England between September 2007 and leaving for Benasque at the beginning of July (Julie Korseva in the first round at Sunningdale in May of this year) and off the top of my head I can only remember facing two other women over the board* going back a decade more.

It's not so unusual to see girls (by which I mean under 12s or thereabouts) at the Richmond Rapidplay, say, or Golders Green (I played Akshaya Kalaiyalahan at Adam Raoof's tournament last February), but adult females in club or tournament chess are a different story. Not completely unheard of, for sure - over the last couple of seasons my own club has received visits from Susan Lalic and Natasha Regan playing for, if I recall correctly, Ashtead and Redhill respectively - but certainly much more of a rarity.

Consider the field in Sheffield, for example. At the time of writing 5 of 85 entrants to the Championship itself (5.88%) are women which, although up from last year's 3 of 78 (3.84%), is hardly substantial and while I haven't checked the subsidiary tournaments my guess is that the proportion of women in those events will be even smaller.

Large numbers of women just aren't playing chess in Britain just now and yet they do seem to be in Spain. Well, larger numbers than here, at least. Either way, it's an interesting discrepancy, don't you think? I don't know how to explain it, and I don't know how to 'fix' it - other than to mention in passing that e2e4 going out of their way to attract women to their events is a praiseworthy initiative - but I can at least notice it. That will have to do for now.





PS:
In both of the games mentioned I drew from a winning position. I seem to remember reading in an Bill Hartston column that when giving a simul Anatoly Karpov would concede draws when playing against a woman because he considered it to be the chivalrous thing to do. I, on the other hand, did it because I'm incompetent.

* Anna Partington and Jane Seymour both of which must have been getting on for ten years ago. I did play Sarah Hegarty in the Coulsden minor back in 2000, but she was only ickle then, so that doesn't count. Incidentally, I could remember all these names without having to look them up which says quite a bit about how infrequently I've had women opponents in the past.

They're Off

The British Chess Championships begin in Sheffield today. You probably already know that. This is just a quick post to let you know that we haven't forgotten.

We'll be starting the week finishing up with our memories of Benasque, and then on Wednesday we'll be celebrating the anniversary of one of the most important events in 20th century chess. Our coverage of the British will kick in as week one comes to an end.

Ray on Rupert

[Ray on Chessgames]
[Ray Keene index]

Every Picture Tells A Story: Ian Greenlees - What A Tease

Number 15. This one by Martin Smith, with ideas and comment by Richard Tillett.

This series has gone on longer, and in more extraordinary directions, than we ever expected when posting the first episode in October last year. It was Mario Praz who kicked off our search for the Gentlemen of Hereford Chess Club with his (reversed) illustration, item 139, in An Illustrated History of Interior Design: From Pompeii to Art Nouveau (1964 reprinted 1982). We then thought we could track the picture down through the Ian Greenlees Collection which Praz gave as the source of his image.
But Greenlees had died in 1988 and his collection dispersed. We hoped that from beyond the grave he might lead us to the picture, but it was not to be. Although we found two more versions of the picture along the way we didn’t get any nearer to the one that once hung on Greenlees’s wall. Instead, we got another picture: that of Ian Greenlees and the company he kept. It’s worth a look, and we crave your indulgence in what follows, because although the Greenlees story is interesting in itself, there’s precious little chess, and not much either of the Gents of Hereford.

Greenlees was born in 1913 into a family with a profitable whisky distillery, whose fortune he later inherited. After a good Catholic education at Ampleforth College he got a First in Italian at Magdalen College, Oxford and in 1934 started teaching English Literature at the University of Rome under our Mario Praz (so they knew each other well ). In 1939 he was appointed Director of the British Institute in Rome, and when Italy entered the war in June 1940, Greenlees, only 27 years old, heroically led his staff across war-torn France to safety in London.

Now in the Army, he was made responsible for Italian-language propaganda broadcasts, took part in the Allied landing in North Africa and, when Fascist Italy conceded an armistice, was despatched across Italy (still infested with German patrols) to take command of a free radio station in Bari, in the heel of Italy, from where anti-fascist broadcasting was organised. By 1943 he had risen to the rank of Major.

Ian Greenlees, on the left, in Naples 1943.

Greenlees crops up in the second world war reminiscences of Alfred de Grazia. Sharing his thoughts on male-bonding and homosexuality among troops in the US and British armies, de Grazia refers to Greenlees as a “gay type”. He never married, and you can speculate, as you look at the beefcake on display in the Gents of Hereford, and the masochistic ectasy of Saint Sebastian on the wall, whether this orientation may have influenced his taste in art.

The object of the male gaze?

Referring to Greenlees’ role in intelligence operations later in the war, his Times obituary says “he was one of the leading lights in the famous intelligence unit at Via Po where all the important Italian politicians…were entertained”. Greenlees went on to represent Britain in negotiations in Italy to establish a new government purged of Fascist influence, and in the immediate post-war period he was well acquainted with the main players vying for influence in a free Italy, including Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist Party.

The only photo we have found of Greenlees is the war-time snap above (or what remains of it), but there is also the suggestive comment by Australian author Shirley Hazzard that, in addition to being a friend of Graham Greene, he was “in appearance, manner, and pallor, a ringer for Sydney Greenstreet” who played Signor Ferrari in the noir-ish 1942 film Casablanca. Chess addicts will know it as the film in which Humphrey Bogart famously played chess, although not with the Greenlees doppelganger.

“A ringer for Sydney Greenstreet”
with Bogey (chess grade estimated at ELO 2100).

Greenlees’ friend Grahame Greene was, as is well-known, also a Catholic and worked sometime for MI6 under Kim Philby (who is usually mentioned in the same breath as the other Cambridge spies Burgess and Maclean).

From 1947 to 1954, Greenlees was working for the British Council in Rome, but we’d like to make clear that any suggestion that the British Council was a front for espionage is, of course, highly fanciful. Highly fanciful. His title was “Assistant Press Attaché”. Perhaps we might have expected that a man mentioned in despatches, and with his knowledge of Italy, would be assigned a more elevated post, so we can only speculate as to his actual role, but with the ominous strength of the Italian Communist Party in the aftermath of the war, what better place to install an Italian speaking one-time Major of the British Army with the ear of leading Italian leftists.

So, for the next seven years Greenlees was rubbing shoulders with the Italian cultural elite, and possibly many others besides. Among them was Mario Praz, still Professor of English Literature at the University of Rome right through to 1966 (he was a staunch Anglophile, made a KBE in 1962).

Mario Praz KBE (1896-1982) at home.
[A dead ringer for Lord Clark of Civilisation]

Let’s spare a thought for the club-footed Mario Praz who was said to be possessed of an “evil eye”, his mere glance causing an Empire vase to erupt or subliminally impelling a chandelier to crash to the floor of a Roman drawing-room, according to art critic John Richardson. Careless of his loose psychic cannon he installed in his palazzo (now a museum) an exquisite collection of furnishings and paintings – which we have scrutunized closely online in the hope of spotting a Leeming or two. But in vain.

The Scrivania at Mario Praz’s Palazzio

Getting back to our subject, Greenlees was also friends in the 50s with Renato Guttuso, a committed anti-Fascist artist who was later to be elected a Senator for the Italian Communist Party. Tantalisingly, in 1950 he painted Greenlees' portrait in army uniform which, frustratingly, we have not been able to trace.

In a career break between 1954 and 1958 Greenlees found time to write several articles, and a booklet on the well-nigh forgotten fugitive English ex-pat novelist and travel writer Norman Douglas, who lived and died in Capri, his memorable death-bed wish being (expletive deleted) “keep those f***ing nuns away from me”. In 1958 Greenlees was appointed Director of the British Institute in Florence, where he remained until 1981, and is credited with expanding its role and influence, assisted ably by none other than Antony Blunt, the other Cambridge spy, who was on its Board of Governors. What a thought: Antony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, connoisseur of French painting and architecture, expert in Italian art, and sometime traitor, taking a wee dram chez Greenlees and casting his discerning eye over Leeming’s Gents of Hereford Chess Club.

During his tenure Greenlees was an occasional letter writer to the Times: appealing for aid to help victims and save artworks during the floods in Italy in 1966, and campaigning to preserve the traditional form of the Catholic Mass in 1971 (with co-signatories Agatha Christie and Graham Greene, among many others). He also helped create the Italian version of the RSPB which eventually won a ban against the slaughter en masse of migrating songbirds.

He dabbled in the London auction houses, with several sales in the 1960s, including 21 lots of Chinese ceramics and nine lots of modern English pictures at Sotheby’s in 1961, of which three were Sickerts.

Somehow or other, probably at an auction house or through a dealer, he came by the Gents of the Hereford Chess Club, which was sold on in 1991, a few years after his death. He accumulated a huge library which, combined with that of his friend Robin Chanter (“a brilliant and dissolute figure” ), totalled 28,000 books. It was housed in the mansion in Bagni di Lucca in Northern Italy which they bought together in 1969, and they wintered in Capri, Douglas’, Greene’s and food-writer Elizabeth David’s watering hole.

Chanter however set up home with Ms Laura Buchan (grand-daughter of John "Thirty-Nine Steps" Buchan) in 1975, though they week-ended with Greenlees, and in the 1980s all three lived together in Bagni di Lucca. After Greenlees died in 1988, the library was donated to the local Commune, and Robin Chanter died in 1999.

Our trawl through the life of Ian Greenlees OBE has disappointingly shed no light on the whereabouts of the version of the Gents of Hereford Chess Club once in his possession. Until we turn it up some other way we will let him tease us no more.

But we have got to know Greenlees quite well. His Who’s Who entry listed his interests as swimming, walking and talking, but not, alas, playing chess. His Times obituary said “He was an unambitious man but he mastered the art of being happy and knew how to impart this gift to others. He hated war, the army, nationalism and public schools.” And was perhaps, in no particular order: tinker, tailor, soldier, spy?


Acknowledgements and Sources

Thanks to Jonathan B., and Richard Rawles for their help with research for this post; and to James Buchan and his sister for answering my query on the Guttuso portrait, albeit in the negative.
Simona Tobia's Advertising America; The United States Information Service in Italy (1945-56) describes Greenlees involvement with Radio Bari.
See Alfred de Grazia’s Autobiography A Taste of War for Greenlees activities in war time Italy, his army liaison with the American forces, and a description of him as a “gay type”. Graza gives the photograph of Greenlees.

Shirley Hazzard's "ringer for Greenstreet" comment is here.

John Richardson's Praz observation comes from here.

Greenlees' booklet on Norman Douglas was published in 1957, No 82 in the Writers and Their Work series by the British Council and Longmans. His "nuns" quote comes from his Wikipedia entry.

Greenlees' obituary by Lord Hastings was in the Times, 2nd August 1988.

Robin Chanter's obituary by James Buchan is here.

Every Picture Tells a Story index

Chess in Art Index