Probably Got Nothing To Do With Chess VII

Only one man stands between a deadly assassin and a mark, a father protecting his child. Ray Keene (John Cusack) and his son embark upon a hiking holiday in order to reconnect after the death of his ex-wife. However, the pair are soon embroiled in a plot involving mercenaries, in this edge-of-the-seat, cat and mouse thriller.

Or so it says here.


Who would have played Raymondo in a film about the Black Queen Murdery Mystery? That's what Superchess asked in the comments box to a previous post. Well now we know.






... to do with chess Index

Ray Keene Index

Definitely Got Something To Do With Chess V

GRANDMASTER

Pilot for a film detective series
by Desmond Lowden
using material by Ray Keene

Or so it says here.


There's a link provided for those of us who want to buy this but sadly all you get when you follow it is ...

info
This listing (360050669566) has been removed, or this item is not available.

• Please check that you've entered the correct item number
  
• Listings that have ended 90 or more days ago will not be available for viewing.
  

Fortunately there's a copy in the British Library.





1. TITLES (COMPUTER GENERATED)

A chessboard. MOVE IN until we are in the centre of the game. Chess pieces, knights, kings, queens are tall around us.

The figures change. They become human, stiff in armour or royal robes. And they’re menacing too, glancing sidelong at each other, weighing each other up.

A fat bishop makes a move. Pawns are muddy peasants, afraid as he comes to rest. While royals and courtiers are suspicious, trying to work out the move. The menace grows.

Another move. A black knight jumps his horse to land on a peasant. He slices off his head. But there’s no blood. The wound is clean, sanitised.

White moves follow, a queen, a pawn, a bishop. But each time black’s reply comes quick as a whip.

CLOSE IN on the white king’s eyes. He’s frightened.

PULL BACK. The white king is now a man in a good suit, mobile phone in hand. He glances at his queen, another power player of the 90’s. The bishop is a media boss. A rook, a property developer.

There are glances, weighings up. And again, white moves which are tentative. And whiplash black replies.

Until the final move. A black knight, hell’s angel on a bike, leaps through the air, lands … and with a machete slices a bejeaned, tee-shirted pawn.

And now there’s blood. The square a pawn is dying on is red. And it spreads out, shiny and menacing, across the board.









... to do with chess Index

Ray Keene Index

Times chess man cracks 'missing woman' riddle

The Times
Monday 23rd July 1990
Page 1

Times chess man cracks ‘missing woman’ riddle

Two police forces were today examining an analysis by The Times chess correspondent of a complex puzzle which they believe could disclose the whereabouts of a missing woman, who disappeared from her home near Preston, Lancashire, in January.

The only clued the police had was a diagram which looked like a chess puzzle, drawn by a man arrested on fraud charges who they believe knows what happened to her.

The police called in Raymond Keene, the chess correspondent, who explains here how he cracked the suspect’s code.

Keene: called in by police to solve complex puzzle*

I was contacted at the end of last week by Detective Superintendent Roy Fletcher of the Lancashire constabulary with the most bizarre request I had ever encountered. Superintendent Fletcher had arrested a man, a computer expert from Seaford, East Sussex, who was suspected not only of having defrauded his girlfriend of her substantial life savings amounting to £27,000, but also of having disposed of her body sometime in January this year at an unknown location in Southern Ireland. The suspect refused to indicate to the police where the body was concealed, although he did admit freely to having buried the woman. The only clue he would give the constabulary as to the victim’s whereabouts was, as Superintendent Fletcher put it do me, a chess diagram and a sequence of chess moves. Superintendent Fletcher knew of me through my chess contributions to The Times and asked if I would help to crack the deadly code. I asked him to fax the chess diagram and the moves, which he promptly did.

I had expected the fax to consist of a chess diagram and moves similar to the daily winning move position which I publish in The Times. I had expected that a conventional chess diagram with recognisable chess moves would probably represent the co-ordinates of some point on a map and that the chess pieces in the diagram would stand for the players in this legal endgame. What came through on the fax lines did not justify my initial optimism. It consisted of two pages, one with a crudely drawn map entitled “Area for Game” while the other page consisted mainly of a very obscure series of unconventional chess moves with the heading “Timescale for game”. Initially, these two sheets made about as much sense to me as if they had been written in Babylonian cuneiform. The “Area for game” sheet consisted of three amorphous blobs (one of which had even been crossed out) which could have represented anything, from a pond, a lake or a farm or an estate

[article continues on page 2, column 3]

‘I was beginning to thing it was going to be insoluble, but I drew heart from Holmes’


to a country. The sole connection with chess, apart from the title, was the word “Black” scrawled in the left hand corner. The other page was almost as bad. References to a Black king, queen and pawn and a White king and pawns were again the sole chess connection immediately apparent.

I was beginning to think that it was going to be insoluble, but at this point I drew heart from my recollection of a Sherlock Holmes story, “The Dancing Men”, in which Holmes breaks a singularly barbaric and recondite code which utilises little figures of dancing men. This case was redolent of that fictional forerunner. Confronted with the dancing men Holmes said: “These hieroglyphics have evidently a meaning. If it is a purely arbitrary one, it may be impossible for us to solve it. If, on the other hand, it is systematic, I have no doubt that we shall get to the bottom of it.” These words acted as an inspiration as I embarked on cracking the chess move code late on Friday night.

There appeared to be yet one more literary reference, whether by accident or design, in this curious conundrum. Looking at the sequence of moves, all of them above the line across the centre of the page appeared to be made by black. As is well known, in chess black and white, the two opposing forces, must move alternately. This curious monopoly of moves by one side reminded me of the chess problem at the start of Lewis Carroll’s book Alice through the Looking Glass. In this the heroine Alice enters a looking glass world of reflections and mirror images peopled almost entirely by chess pieces. The mirror image motif is an important one, and will recur with great significance. As Lewis Carroll observed in his preface, “the alternation of black and white is perhaps not so strictly observed …”

Now, fortified by literary allusions, which I am sure were also not a million miles from the mind of the suspect who had created this bizarre document, was the time to attack the code and extract what meaning, if any, could be obtained. Let us look at the page “Timescale for game”. In the left hand column at the top we evidently see a series of days of the week with dates attached. They start with Saturday 13th January 1990 and run through from top to bottom to Wednesday 24th January. This is the period in which the action clearly takes place. Next, obviously there is a reference to chess pieces. Without knowing what these pieces refer to there was no hope of further progress. I deduced that the black king should refer to the suspect, that the black queen signified the victim while the black pawn was, in all probability, the suspect’s brother who, as the police had told me, has been in Ireland accompanying the duo. The game is initiated by the arrow indicating that the black king writes to the lady-in-waiting. There is no such chess piece and never has been. I deduced that the lady-in-waiting must refer to the status of the victim before the game begins, i.e. she is waiting for the game to start and once it has started she appears as the black queen. I operated on this assumption throughout the remainder of my analysis.

The next thing to establish was the identity of the white king and the white pawns. Since white opposes black in chess one has to seek a possible opponent for the suspect and it can only be the police. It is psychologically interesting to note that the suspect has symbolically chosen the black pieces for himself and that he has decided that in this case, contrary to all the rules, that black will move first. I now turned my attention to trying to understand the section “White king – all pawns”. Here, I had to enter the realm of speculation but this seemed to me to be a scarcely veiled insult to the suspect’s assessment of the competence of the police force. There has to be a white king, without kings on both sides there can be no chess game, but it seemed to me here that the suspect was dismissing the police force (perhaps the white king refers specifically to the chief investigating officer) as no better than a collection of pawns, menial foot soldiers with no directing strategy.

The “board” and moves supplied to the Lancashire police with suggested explanations by Raymond Keene

[Click on the map for a closer look: JMGB]

If true this gives an essential clue to the suspect’s psychology, one of tremendous intellectual arrogance, allied with a perverted ingenuity and rooted in the belief that he can dangle all sorts of intellectual clues in front of the police’s nose without their being able to solve them. In this case, I earnestly hope that he will have been proved to have underestimated the resourcefulness of the force.

Now I looked at the game moves. In discussion of the document, Superintendent Fletcher had suggested to me that the first line opposite Saturday 13th read “BK17VI”. On this assumption the code is uncrackable. I came to the conclusion, upon which all the rest of my work is based, that the symbol which appears to resemble a seven is in fact a vector sign indicating movement from one place to another. Treating all apparent sevens as vectors in this fashion means that we can start read off some of the lines of moves. Thus the line opposite Saturday 13th, following this interpretation would appear read “Black king moves from 1 to 6”. This is all well and good, but what on earth do the figures 1 and 6 represent? To determine this I had to shift back the focus of attention to the sheet labelled “Area for Game”, consisting of the three hideously anonymous blobs.

At this point there was a sudden flash of inspiration caused more or less by looking at The Times’ British Isles weather map on the back page of the paper. What if the triangular blob on the right were to represent the UK mainland while the crossed out round blob on the left were to be a crudely drawn representation of Ireland which the suspect had then crossed out and rejected as inadequately detailed for his purposes of taunting the police with the conundrum of locating the victim’s body? In that case the large blob which dominates the centre of the page suddenly becomes a representation of the section of Southern Ireland in which the drama took place, replacing the crossed out circle to the left of the triangle which shows the UK mainland. It should be noted that the UK mainland indication is, as one would normally expect, on a north/south axis. The map of Ireland, however, has been revolved so that east is at the top and west is at the bottom. By carrying out this rotation the map begins to make sense.

Having identified the outlines as countries, the number fits into place. We know that the suspect lived in East Sussex, that the victim lived in Preston and that Dublin, Cork and Limerick figured in their journey. I now deduced that I on the “Area for Game” page represents London, III is Preston, IV is Dublin, V is Cork and VI is Limerick.

A serious problem now arises, namely on the map as to why are there two IVs and two Vs? As is well known, there is only one Dublin in Ireland and only one Cork. I attacked this problem by treating the map of Ireland as a chessboard. The line drawn from London to Limerick in this case not only acts as the trajectory of a journey but also as a dividing line between the two halves of a chessboard which are mirror images of each other. In modern chess notation, the algebraic variety as used in The Times, a grid reference system gives one name only to each square of the total of 64, be it a1, c4, e5, g8 or whatever. Nevertheless, in the old fashioned descriptive chess notation, which The Times abandoned in 1986, each square had two names, depending on which side of the board one was situated. There were two King Five squares, there two Queen Four squares and so on. It seemed to me therefore that the suspect had taken a large section of the map of Ireland and reduced it to a chessboard with black playing on the left adopting the principles of the old descriptive notation.

Armed with this information I now tried to decipher the game. The game proper starts after Wednesday 17th January when a black line is drawn across the page. The arrow pointing upwards above that indicates a preparatory phase for the game when the suspect may even have travelled to Limerick or arranged for someone to do so on his behalf, indicating premeditation of the dark events which were to follow.

Using my insight into the code, and the identity of the particular pieces I now offer my translation of the events of the next six days on the page “Timescale for Game.”

Thursday 18th January: Suspect’s brother travels from London to Dublin, victim travels from Preston to London, suspect travels from Seaford to London.

Friday 19th January: Suspect and victim travel from London to Dublin (victim makes a telephone call to say ‘we are in Dublin’).

Saturday 20th January: Suspect and victim use victim’s credit card both to obtain cash and in some way to enable them to hire a car. I identified circles as indicating some sort of financial transaction while V appeared to relate to a credit card transaction. The police later confirmed that there were six Visa card transactions during this period. I believe the C referred to the hiring of a car.

Sunday 21st January: The suspect and his brother inflict grievous harm (GH) on the victim. The words “do this” seem particularly sinister in this context. The brackets with V34 indicates two further uses of the Visa credit cards to obtain cash.

Monday 22nd January: Suspect and brother use Visa card for the fifth time to obtain cash. Suspect and victim (who may now be dead) travel to Limerick or its environs.

Tuesday 23rd January: The suspect returns to Dublin and uses the Visa credit card for the sixth time. The suspect considers himself safe or successful. The hired car is sent back and the suspect and his brother return from Dublin to London.

Wednesday 24th January: The macabre game is at an end.

What has white been doing all the time? If you look at the “Timescale for Game” sheet it seems to me that the notation at the bottom of the page reads as follows “Move 1, white king and white pawns search back and forth between Dublin and Limerick. [Sic re: absence of closing “] This confirms the suspect’s dismissive attitude towards the British police and the Irish Garda as he sees them fruitlessly thrashing around between two conurbations.

There are of course aspects of this deciphering, in spite of the internal consistency of much of it, with which I am not totally happy. On the page “Timescale for Game” page the curious compass-like symbol at the upper right is not clear to me. The arrows emanating from the sentence “We are here” may conceal some deeper meaning while the circled H on Monday 22nd could refer to many things, perhaps a hotel.

On the “Area for Game” page, figure 1 in a circle with EOT after it could be the Eire Officer of Tourism, not the exact title for the organisation but possibly one established in the suspect’s mind. It is known that he used the tourist office to aid the hiring of a car. The capital letters EEC may simply refer to the obvious to set the game in its overall geographical context but the letters NPS prefaced by a 2 in a circle are still opaque to me.

Where does this place us in locating the body? It is my firm belief that the body is located at HG some miles probably to the north-west of Limerick. The initials HG are a grotesque mirror image reflection of GH grievous harm on Sunday 21st January. They may also refer to a small isolated location, such as a farm, bog or even landmark with such initials. There is also an indication so simple it can be overlooked namely “her grave”. Finally Superintendent Fletcher tells me that both suspect and victim are devout catholics, so in this sense HG may refer to “hallowed ground”. If the suspect’s psychology is as I read it, his bizarre sense of humour and sense of intellectual superiority may well have led him to inter his victim at night in the grounds of a local church. I wish the Garda and the police well in their task of locating this lonely grave and Times readers will be kept informed of any further progress in cracking the recalcitrant code. Superintendent Fletcher seemed delighted with the advances made over the weekend and armed with this new information his men should receive a fresh boost in their morale. I am reminded of one more Sherlock Holmes story “The Retired Colourman” in which the great man says “Amberley excelled at chess – one mark, Watson of a scheming mind.” I hope in this case that the schemes of the suspect will be duly frustrated.”





Ray Keene Index







* I couldn't find the photo of Raymondo that The Times used on the net. This one is close enough [photo from chessgames.com].

No thank you, CJ

Dear CJ...

I wrote to our President last week.

You'll recall my surprise that a Karpov fundraising event appeared to be disguising itself as a Ray Keene publicity drive and my concern as to whether this was entirely wise.


So having read the following in Chessbase:

For more information and tickets please contact CJ de Mooi, the President of the English Chess Federation. The email address is president@englishchess.org.uk.

and having seen a similar ad on the ECF website, complete with that same official email address, I sent CJ a message via that address. Just to ask.

...as an ECF member (membership number 4166) I wondered if I could ask you about the extent of Ray Keene's involvement in the Staunton Memorial Dinner, which the ECF is promoting.

ejh

Imagine my surprise, when CJ's commendably swift reply (from his private email address) arrived, to be informed:

May I just say that this dinner has nothing at all to do with the ECF other than the fact the President is organising it? It is a purely independent nature that I myself am undertaking.....this is a private venture free of the ECF auspices.

CJ

Uh huh.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I were to organise something in a private capacity, entirely separate from the organisation of which I was President:

• I would not use my official email address to sell tickets
• I would not advertise the event on the organisation's website
• I would not describe myself as President of the organisation in advertising for the event, nor on the invitations.

Or, to put it another way, if I did do these things, I wouldn't expect anybody to believe me when I said I was acting in a private capacity. Not least because, whatever my intentions, I very obviously wouldn't be. Which point I made:

Dear CJ

...if the president of an organisation advertises an event on that organisation's website and personally offers to sell tickets, he is patently acting in his capacity as president of that organisation and not privately.

ejh

This may all seem very obvious. But let us hear the man's defence:

Thank you for your comments, they'll be taken under consideration.

However, I'm sure you've realised I can't advertise my personal email due to my public position.

CJ

That's surely fair enough as far as it goes. But I wonder if there may be an obvious solution?

Dear CJ

Thanks for yours.

As somebody who also likes to keep his email address private I can understand that you might wish to do the same, but unfortunately that's not a justification for using the ECF address, as it were, privately. If you're really intent on selling tickets for Ray's event can I propose the creation of a bespoke email address for the purpose? It takes only a few minutes and I imagine something like penguineventcash@yahoo.co.uk may still be available.

ejh

CJ replied:

Thank you, I'll look into it.

Glad to be of service. I look forward to seeing the ads amended accordingly.

He continued:

This is not Ray's event though, it is mine!

CJ

Now let us do CJ the favour of accepting that he, at any rate, believes that. But we, at least, may have our doubts. Among other things:

• Does CJ really have the contacts that Ray has got?
• Would CJ really have thought of the name "Staunton Memorial Dinner"?
• Would CJ really have thought of inviting long-term Penguin crony Barry Martin?

I think the answers to to those questions are "no", "no" and "no", where "no" means "very obviously not".

CJ's event? It's a bit like a child's birthday party. It's their party all right. It's their big day. But it isn't entirely them who organised it. And it isn't really them in charge.

In truth it is, in some part, a networking and publicity event for Ray. For which CJ, in his stated capacity as ECF President, is selling tickets.

Which means in practice that the ECF is working for the Penguin.

[FOOTNOTE, 22 July: the invitation here refers to Event Organiser - Raymond Keene. Does CJ know?]

[passages quoted are excerpts from emails, which are not generally given in their entirety]

[Ray Keene index]

Like: something rolling about at random on the keyboard, possibly in pain

Dennis Monokroussos writes like Arthur Conan Doyle. Arne Moll, like Isaac Asimov. The Kenilworthian, Dan Brown.

How do I know? Science: I used a "statistical analysis tool, which analyzes ... word choice and writing style and compares them to those of the famous writers." In other words, the internet told me.

And for me? Depends what text I put in. Sometimes James Joyce, it seems; sometimes Shakespeare; but - never Homer. Never Homer.

I found an excerpt from How Life Imitates Chess by Kasparov: written in the style of George Orwell, apparently. But who writes in Rowson's special style? What about Ray Keene?

More questions than answers: more copying and pasting than one blogger alone can perform . . .

Short - Kasparov, Brussels 1986

Heads up:

The British Championships is nearly upon us; just eight days away according to the official site. To celebrate the tournament, between Saturday 24th July and Saturday 7th August (Sunday 8th if there's a play-off) we'll be binning our usual Monday-Wednesday-Friday-Saturday schedule and posting something every day.

In the meantime, back to regular blogging ...

With thanks to Morgan for the find.

Why didn't Topalov play 3.Nc3?

Topalov v Anand, world championship match 2010, Sofia, game 12.

Position after 2...e6.

It seems strange to be writing about the last game of the world championship two months after the event, but I was waiting for New In Chess, hoping that it might shed some light on something that puzzled me about the final game. Alas, no such enlightenment was forthcoming and so I'll ask the question myself, here: why did Topalov play 3.Nf3?

To understand this question at all, you probably need to be an advocate of 1.d4, or at least somebody who plays 1.Nf3 and 2.d4 as I very often do. This would put you, and me, in a minority at club level and even among that minority, I would guess that not quite everybody is aware of all the merits and demerits of either choice. So I hope the following digression will merit either your attention or your forgiveness.

You'll appreciate that the question is not which move is better, but which options are retained, or lost, for either player, if one or other is selected. 3.Nc3 abandons some possibilities which 3.Nf3 retains, and we'll get on to these, but let us begin with what it gives White (and threatens to impose on Black) that 3.Nf3 does not, which is two different kinds of exchange variation, both of them a little uncomfortable for Black. These are:

3.Nc3 Be7 4.cxd5 exd5

and

3.Nc3 Nf6 4.cxd5 exd5, as per the diagram below.


This is a position which has been seen thousands of times in grandmaster play, but which has not been much seen at the highest level in recent years. We can probably assume that Anand would not have gone in for it, and certainly that this position would not have constituted a reason for Topalov avoiding 3.Nc3 rather than choosing it.

What difference, here, does it make that the b1-knight is out and the g1-knight remains at home? The first point is that because the knight is still on g1, White can still move the f-pawn: so we may well get something like 5.Bg5 c6 6.Qc2 Be7 7.e3 O-O 8.Bd3 Nbd7 9.Nge2 Re8 10.O-O Nf8 11.f3 giving us this position.


This is of course perfectly playable for Black at most levels and has been played by all sorts of top-rank players, but the very best seem to feel that White's edge is a little too clear. Anand is most unlikely to have intended this: Topalov most unlikely to have wished to avoid it.

3.Nf3 obviously deprived White of this, the most dangerous option. That's easily understood, though it may be less obvious that it also deprived him of the second most dangerous line: that is, the best possible version of the Exchange Variation with Nf3. How so? Because if the development of the g1-knight is delayed, White can obtain the best possible arrangement of the other pieces first, notably the Queen and white-squared bishop. Hence after, say, 5.Bg5 Be7 6.e3 c6 (not 6...Bf5? 7.Bxf6 Bxf6 8.Qb3!) 7.Qc2 Nbd7 8.Bd3 O-O 9.Nf3


and you will have realised that the sequence has been designed to prevent Black's bishop coming to f5. Black is OK, but passive. White has the formation he or she has played for.

However, if we try and get in Nf3 earlier, say 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 Be7 5.cxd5 exd5 6.Bg5


then White can't get that ideal arrangement of queen and bishop because Black has 6...c6 and now either 7.e3 Bf5


which is job done, as far as Black's concerned, or if White tries to keep the bishop away from f5 with 7.Qc2 there is 7...g6! and it will get there after all.


The resulting position isn't lifeless - I've lost on the Black side of it - but it isn't troublesome for a good player. Black should not struggle to equalise and White would not aim for this position if he or she were looking for a win.

Please be aware that there are various tricks and complications that I've not gone into here for fear of inducing excessive boredom in the reader - a still-useful guide is Sadler, Queen's Gambit Declined, Everyman, 2000 - but the basic point should be clear enough, which is that if you want to play the dangerous lines of the Exchange Variation, you have to play 3.Nc3*.

If you do, Black has one further trick already mentioned above, which is to play Alatortsev's 3...Be7


which prevents the bishop coming to g5 for the moment, and thereby proposes that play proceeds 4.Nf3 Nf6 5.Bg5, or 5.Bf4, which sequences bring about mainline Queen's Gambit Declined positions, but with the Exchange Variation nicely sidestepped.

However, it's not all good news for Black, since White's not obliged to accept these transpositions and may instead prefer, as mentioned above, 4.cxd5 exd5 5.Bf4. The bishop doesn't go to f4 in the Exchange Variation with 3...Nf6, for a couple of reasons - one of which is that after 4.cxd5 exd5 5.Bf4 Black would have 5...Bd6


swapping off black-squared bishops, almost always a desirable objective for Black in the QGD where he or she is a little cramped and wishes to ease the problem with exchanges. But after 3...Be7 4.cxd5 exd5 5.Bf4 the option isn't available


not so much because Black would lose a tempo, but because 5...Bd6?? drops the d-pawn.

That doesn't make the position above at all terrifying for Black - Karpov, for instance, played this variation very successfully against Kasparov on several occasions - but again, it cannot have been for fear of this that Topalov played the g1-knight out first. Two reasons:

(a) current theory does seem to consider White a little better and it's not presently being seen much at high level;

(b) possibly more to the point, White has, as mentioned, the option of transposing to the very line which was actually played in the game. 3.Nc3 Be7 does not prevent what he was willing to play.

So from what we have above, everything seems to be in favour of 3.Nc3. So why didn't Topalov play it? It's not so simple, of course, but as far as I can see, there are two major reasons for preferring 3.Nf3 (which, to tell the truth, is the present writer's choice) of which one wasn't Topalov's intention - leaving the other, which is the puzzle.

The first reason for preferring 3.Nf3 is that it permits White to play the Catalan with 3...Nf6 4.g3


which is probably White's normal preference at super-grandmaster level these days, but which wasn't Topalov's intention, because he didn't play it. So we have one other major possibility - that Topalov didn't like the sequence 3.Nc3 c6.


This is kind of an accelerated Semi-Slav: the position above is sometimes referred to as the Triangle Variation, of which there are two versions, this being one and the other occurring after, of course, 3.Nf3 c6.


This joins the considerable number of variations mentioned in this article which can be filed under Playable But A Little Inferior: the problem for Black is that while after 3.Nc3 c6 there's an awkward threat to take on c4, after 3.Nf3 c6 White can play simply 4.Qc2


and Black has committed to the Semi-Slav formation perhaps just a touch too early, giving White the chance to select a flexible formation that normally, because both knights have been developed (e.g. after 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 e6) is not available.

The version after 3.Nc3 c6, however, is a different game entirely. White has to think about the threat to c4 and can either choose 4.e3 - when Black normally plays 4...Nf6


and gets a Semi-Slav in which the most dangerous line with 5.Bg5 is no longer available - or 4.Nf3 in which case Black can either play back into a Semi-Slav with 4..Nf6 (with 5.Bg5 now possible, of course) or can accept the dare with 4...dxc4 reaching the incredibly complicated Abrahams-Noteboom Variation


which Black on current assessments has no reason to avoid.

So Topalov avoided 3.Nc3 in order to retain the option of 5.Bg5 in a potential Semi-Slav? Well that's possible - and in fact, given that the game proceeded 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 Be7, I think that's probably what happened. But there's still a puzzle! Because if White was afraid of Black's extra options after 3.Nc3 c6, why didn't he think Black would be afraid of White's extra option? Because if 3.Nc3 c6 White can play Marshall's Other Gambit with the very dangerous 4.e4!


Very dangerous, that is, for both sides - but surely more dangerous for Black than White.

This is what's been puzzling me. Because after 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6, if White chooses to develop the b1-knight first, Black is either obliged** to allow one of the exchange variations investigated above, either of which would give White a slight edge - or he can take a punt on the Marshall Gambit, which many White players choose not to play, for fear of being out-prepared in the complications, but which scores well for White. When White has the nerve and the preparation to go in for it.

Do you see the puzzle now? Nerve - that's Veselin Topalov. Preparation - that's Veselin Topalov. Fear of any kind - that's not Veselin Topalov, let alone fear of being out-prepared, or fear of complications. But on this day of days, the last game of a world championship match, he didn't play like that. He didn't call the bluff. I wonder why?



[* but not 3.cxd5 exd5 4.Nc3, after which Black is not obliged to play 4...Nf6 or 4...Be7 but can pick something stronger and more flexible like 4...c6!]

[** for the purpose of this article I've not gone into the Tarrasch Variation with 3...c5, but I don't believe for a moment that Anand intended it or that Topalov feared it.]

Ray Could Play VI

After a brief interplanetary interlude and a long overdue chat with Eric Holt I want to get back [previously here and here] to exchange sacrifices today. It’s an aspect of chess that I find both fascinating and almost completely incomprehensible.

T.C. tells me that Jonathan Rowson once suggested that a willingness to give up rook for minor piece is the thing that really separates the very best chessers from the rest of us. If so the following position seems to be a case in point; in any event it certainly demonstrates on which side of the divide Raymond Dennis Keene belongs.

White to play
Keene - Wirthensohn, Hannover 1976

For Raymondo it’s simple. 22 Rxd5, he says, is an “opportunity too good to miss. Black becomes hopelessly exposed on the lights squares”. After 22 … cxd5, 33 Nc3 Nac7, 24 Nxd5 Rf5




he adds, “In addition to his positional compensation White will soon possess a material equivalent. The exchange sacrifice has been a complete success.”

This may all be run-of-the-mill for RDK but it’s most definitely not for me. I can see that White is going to swing his rook over to d1 so in effect he has swapped his least useful piece for Black’s best one, that all of White’s pieces are now in play and that Black’s knights and queen’s rook are not well placed to defend a rather shaky looking king. What I have trouble with is judging whether that adds up to a sufficient return for the required material investment.

If I were considering my 22nd move, in the unlikely event that I’d have considered taking on d5 in the first place, my thought process would be something like,

OK I can give up 5 in exchange for 3 …
… and I can easily get 1 more back too …
... umm ...
… what now?

An unopposed bishop, weak light squares, active pieces – these factors are too abstract for me to be able assess properly. Actually I originally wrote “too abstract to be able to quantify properly” there and I wonder if that’s the problem; I need (believe I need?/want?) something tangible to be able to judge the merits of a chess position. 5 is bigger than 4 and always will be; that’s something I can readily grasp and since the numbers are something I can understand it’s the numbers that drive my thinking.

Ray Keene:
Dressing like you're in Life on Mars is
"an opportunity too good to miss"

For my occasional fellow blogger unsurprisingly playing chess was a very different experience. Keene was at the top of his game in 1976 and, probably not coincidentally, a short time after his encounter with Wirthensohn he became England’s second ever Grandmaster. Whether or not exchange sacrifices really do mark the borders of chessboard competence as Rowson believes, games like this one that show beyond any doubt that Ray could definitely play.

Ray Keene Index







PS:
RDK's comments taken from his book Becoming a Grandmaster, Batsford 1977

Photo taken from Wikipedia

More questions than answers?

1. Could Simon Williams do for chess what Jamie Oliver did for food? "That video was hysterical," commented PG last month, about Simon Williams's latest. "Get that man on TV now! Seriously." I completely agree. It's no surprise Simon's blog is picking up readers and comments - but this man deserves a bigger stage, if anyone in British chess does.
   
   
2. I have 6221 Cubits to spend at ChessCube. What should I buy? They sell videos by one FM, five IMs and nine GMs, but currently the only videos in my price range are those by Andrew Martin: nine volumes of his "general guide to the opening", and forty-nine of his shows. Decisions, decisions . . .
   
   
3. . . . indecisions. I could, of course save them and try to earn more. After all, I got them for free: one day, out of the blue, I had thirty; the next three thousand. Then the option came along to play for more, and I won another three thousand or so. But the excitement is rather wearing off. Perhaps I should forget all about them, and give up online chess altogether?
   
   
4. Scifi fans out there will have no doubt already be wondering whether chesscube Cubits are named after the historical currency, or the currency in the Battlestar Galactica franchise. Good question.
   
   
5. And on the subject of scifi chess crossovers, if my Cubits could buy me this t-shirt, would they not be spent already?
   

Chess in Art Postscript: A Game At Chesse - Fourthe and Finale Parte

The first three parts of this post (here, here, and here) explored the chessic aspects of Women Beware Women, Thomas Middleton's Jacobean "tragedy", revived recently at the National Theatre, and well-known now for its chess scene. In these posts we found ourselves unexpectedly sucked into some head-spinning semantics concerning a piece of C17th chess board slang. The arcane "Blinde-mate" was the case in point. But you can skip most of it. To cut a long story short, the term remains in use today only to round off such occasional felicitations as "You must be......." when you fork some patzer's Queen. Just remember, next time, to give a nod to Middleton.

The NT show was of special interest because chessers from S&BCC and GLCC had helped the production team with moves for their on-stage chess game. Rather than our unorthodox Reversed French, the NT went with the slash and burn Bishop's Opening suggested by Nigel Blades at GLCC. Maybe they liked the clerical reference, because a major protagonist in the WBW intrigue was The Lord Cardinal. He was responsible, as a consequence of his professed piety, for much of the bloodshed that disposed of most of the cast, but yet was granted the honour of delivering the play's final (self-serving, and somewhat hypocritical) closing homily: "So where lust reigns, that prince cannot reign long". Unless, my dear Cardy, it suits your unholy purposes to have that prince reign, and reigneth everyday.

To be fair, nota bene that some Cardinals can play with a straight bat, and even know their way round a chess board: look again at the post that kicked all this off two years ago; ejh's very first Chess in Art pic.

La partida de ajedrez. José Gallegos y Arnosa. Early C20th. Private collection.

At least it keeps them out of mischief, or worse. And that's definitely a reason not to hate chess. Certain commentators with an interest in these things (and you know who you are) will spot that they wear really cool hats (they are called zucchetti - award yourself bonus points for that).

Back at WBW, our particular interest is in made-up games. Which is what prompted, unlikely though it might seem, Streatham and Brixton's celebrated hacker-in-chief and tactical wizard, Robin Haldane, to tell all concerning an experience of his some years back.

Working in the London Borough of Wandsworth's Finance Department at the time, he regularly helped run a we-take-on-all-comers chess simul. at the annual Wandsworth Weekend festival. One year the enterprising Parks Department also wished to display their skills, horticultural, using a chess theme: a floral board, with flowery pieces; and could he compose a chess problem for them, please; oh, and by the way, the management have cut back (typical Wandsworth) on plants, so we've only got WK, Q, N and 2Ps v BK, Q, R and 2Ps. "No worries" one can almost hear Robin reply, "being down on material never bothered me before", and composed away.


On the day, our man, not blessed with green fingers and psyched-up to field questions on knight manoeuvres, queen sacrifices and the like, found himself ambushed by queries on deadheading and the finer points of companion planting. As ever, Robin had a resourceful riposte, even if sometimes a little unsound on closer analysis.

At packing-up time he unwisely took his eye off the board, returning to find that the good citizens of the Borough had stripped the underplanting from files a to h and run off with the pieces, grabbing the chance to pretty-up their gardens, even with fading blooms, and get some payback for their Council Tax. Robin, from the Finance Department remember, and now exercised by the impending audit of the Council assets entrusted to him, 'fessed up. "They robbed me blind, mate". At least, I think that's what he said. And Thomas Middleton nodded back.

Happily, there was also a happy ending for Robin: he was mightily relieved when Parks said he'd done them a favour. No, they were not going to put that half-dead stuff back on Municipal display. No, not even in Wandsworth.

The problem follows, with White to play and win. Can you do as well as the Borough's six successful solvers? But before you begin: you are an advanced chesser, so we ought to try and level the playing field. Give yourself a handicap and imagine the diagram below decked-out with festive bunting....

....sorry, festive bunting ....

....and camouflaged with municipal bedding.

So, now that you can't see the wood for the trees, solve away (and, mind, no computers).

And if it's too much for you, do some pruning.

Postscript.
Beware the hubris of "take-on-all-comers". I did one or two of those Wandsworth simuls., along with other S&BCC guys, before our beloved Council cancelled these celebrations of local community pride alleging that they cost too much. Once, after disposing hordes of schoolkids who relied on 1.h4 and 2.Rh3, some geezer sits down, plays 1.e4 and a classic Lopez, and procedes to duff me up. Afterwards he confessed to being a "snake in the grass" and a member of the Hong Kong International Correspondence Chess Team. Robin would surely have nipped him in the bud.


With special thanks to Robin Haldane for the story.
The municipal bedding photo is by Phil Clements. The others are from Wikipedia.
Chess in Art Index

"In the end I did OK": What Happened to Eric Holt

Regular S&BC blog readers may recall that back in February we published an article - Whatever Happened to Eric Holt? - about a promising junior player who disappeared from the game after competing at the British in 1971. With apologies for the delay, it's time I explained what happened next.

To bring more recent visitors up to speed as quickly as possible, I had stumbled upon Eric's chess career quite by accident while in the process of writing an earlier post about Ray Keene's 128 move win against him at that Blackpool Championship - Ray Could Play IV - but quickly realised that there must be quite a story to uncover if only I track Eric down. After all he was reigning Scottish Champion, had finished 7th= in his first (and as it turned out only) British Championship and had previously competed successfully in European junior events facing such names as Romanishin, Ljubojevic, Ribli and Beliavsky and yet all of a sudden he just dropped off the face of the chess world. I was determined to find out more.

An Eric Holt ... but not chesser Eric

Since Eric pushed his pawns a long time before I began playing the game I began by making an appeal for information about him on the English Chess Forum. Fortunately Alex McFarlane reposted my request to Chess Scotland and that led to a number of helpful replies:-

• Craig Pritchett and Alan McGowan responded on the original thread, Craig saying that he believed Eric would have been a candidate for the 1972 Scottish Olympiad team had he continued playing.

• John/Chris Linskaill emailed me with his memories

I was at Boroughmuir Senior Secondary 1968-1974, and latterly captained the chess team. Eric was the team’s star turn ...

• Geoff Chandler kindly took a photo of the Edinburgh Chess Club Honours Board where Eric's name can still be seen

Click on the image for a closer look

Clearly Eric was well remembered by those who were around the Scottish chess scene back then but as pleased as I was to hear from everybody it was nothing to the feeling I got when the following email popped into my inbox.

Dear Jonathan Bryant,

Hello! This is Eric Holt. I took a look at your blog piece and it is accurate. I would be delighted to talk or email any time.

Best wishes,
Eric Holt

An Eric Holt ... but not chesser Eric

I had sent a speculative message to a website that appeared to have a connection with an Eric Holt and luckily enough the webmaster forwarded it to somebody else who passed it on to a chap who did indeed turn out to be our man. Eric was very generous with his time and we swapped emails for a couple of months, a correspondence which I've edited into the interview which appears below.

So thanks to Geoff Chandler, Alex McFarlane, Craig Pritchett, Alan McGowan, John (Chris) Linskaill and most of all thanks to Eric himself. I'm not sure I'd be quite so keen to talk to anybody about what I was up to in my late teens but then I wasn't doing anything to match Eric's achievements. Mind you, Eric was very modest about it all; in talking to him I got the impression that he didn't think that he'd accomplished anything particularly exceptional at all ...

THE ERIC HOLT INTERVIEW

Jonathan Bryant:
You had an exceptional British Championship in 1971, finishing in 7th place at your first attempt, but then you stopped playing. What happened?

Eric Holt:
I had already decided to quit chess before I played in the British. In 1971, after I turned 19, I decided to stop in order to spend more time with my studies. At that time I had been doing pretty well and I could see that chess would occupy an increasing amount of my time. I made a drastic decision to stop playing altogether.

JB:
And then you left Scotland?

EH:
In 1973 I was invited to the US to participate in a missionary seminar and program. I ended up staying a little longer working for many years as a missionary and later as a minister. For the past 15 years I have been mostly involved in financial and administrative work.

These days I live with my wife and three children in Tarrytown, New York. I work for a non-profit organization which has its headquarters in New York City; currently I serve as the organization’s treasurer. The recent photo of me that you found is from a seminary website where I serve on the board of directors. Occasionally, I teach a course there in non-profit financial management.

An Eric Holt ... but not chesser Eric

JB:
These days I imagine it would be tricky to just up sticks and move to America as you did.

EH:
Back then it was a piece of cake to obtain permanent residency – it took only a few weeks.

JB:
So you’re American now? Scottish?

EH:
Several years ago, I became a US citizen while retaining my UK/EU passport. I guess I’m a dual-national [it is perhaps of interest that Eric, as he himself pointed out, often favoured US English spelling of words in his emails to me – JMGB ]

JB:
Do you ever make it back over here?

EH:
My daughter was over in London a few months ago for a high school band performance. Once in a while I visit my ailing mum in Edinburgh.

JB:
So what about chess now? I saw the review of a chess book that you wrote on Amazon …

EH:
A couple of years ago a friend and I decided to start a small chess club, meeting twice a month in Tarrytown. We have around 30 members and perhaps 15 show up at any one meeting. We have all ages from 5 to 60 although on any given evening the players are mostly under 15 with a few adults and university students.

We have occasional tournaments among ourselves. Once in a while we invite a team from a neighbouring town for a competition. Whenever we meet the last 40 minutes or so is coaching from myself, usually in the form of quizzes (puzzle solving).

JB:
Do you play any ‘serious’ chess these days?

EH:
From time to time I think about playing in a tournament in the US but I haven’t done that yet - it is very time consuming. Once in a while I play online using Yahoo! Chess.

An Eric Holt ... but not chesser Eric

JB:
So you’ve not been involved in tournament chess for many years. Were you aware of what became of the people you were competing against?

EH:
From time to time over the years I searched online and saw, as you point out, that some of the players I played against had become some of the world’s best players and when I bought some chess books for the chess club I noticed some familiar names in them – people that I had played against many years ago.

JB:
What do you remember of your chess years?

EH:
The chess world in the late 1960s and early 70s, at least in Scotland and England, was quite different from today. The competition did not seem so severe; there were no computers; less chess books and other resources; things were less institutionalised etc.

In middle school I played in simuls against Smyslov and Gligoric, scoring a draw each time. I had Smyslov totally beaten but in the end, when all the other players had finished, it was just him and me. A 14-year-old versus the ex-world champion – so he eked out a draw!

JB:
You seem to have had a very aggressive playing style.

EH:
I tended to adopt ideas from the best players of the time. Petrosian when I was younger – English opening, Queen’s pawn etc. Later Fischer was all the rage, and I pretty much copied whatever he did – hence the Bc4 Sicilian, Najdorf Poison Pawn, King’s Indian Attack against the French etc. In the Bc4 Sicilian the Rxf7 sacrifice was my invention and it worked for me in a host of games.

Eric Holt's patented Rxf7!
[For the whole game and another example click here]

JB:
And you were a pretty successful junior.

EH:
I was lucky because my trips to all over the UK and Europe were largely sponsored (I forget by whom). One thing led to another and before I knew it I was competing in pretty high level tournaments. Penrose and Keene were my heroes and here I was suddenly playing them in the British Championship in Blackpool in 1971. I really had no idea whether I would do well or poorly. In the end I did OK.



… which is where we came in although I should remind you that “In the end I did OK” refers to a tournament finish of 7th= including victories over Markland (then 2510), Pritchett (future IM) and Evil Uncle Ernie (future British Champion amongst other things) and defeats only to RDK, Penrose and Cafferty; like I said - very modest.

Bingo!

This has been a rather long post but I hope some of our esteemed readership have made it to the end. These have been three of my favourite posts to write and it was a pleasure to meet Eric, if only electronically, and to discover he's still one of us. I wish him and his family well.