Adams Wins

They think it's all over ... it is now.

A big plus score, some great chess, games full of incident and if not the tournament of a life time then certainly a most excellent result with a TPR well above an already high elo rating. I refer, of course, to S&BCC's own Angus French who gave the Major Open a good tonking and finished 2nd on 8/11, just half a point behind the winner. Mickey Adams didn't do badly either and became the 2010 British Champion.

As well as his excellent finish, Angus will be bringing home quite an anecdote relating to his battles with Francis Rayner. EJH will be here tomorrow with an account of the whole shebang but suffice to say for now that the pair played two games (sort of), shared 2.5 points between them from those games (definitely) and generated pages of comment over at the EC Forum.

I hope Angus will send us some games to publish in due course. For today though we'll focus on what happened in the British Championship. Here's the top of the final table:-

9.5
Adams

8.0
Pert (N)

7.5
Conquest, Greet, Hawkins, Hunt, Pert (R), Slavin

So Adams, probably to the surprise of nobody, won and Nick Pert finished second. Pert was the last of all the top guys to enter the championship so it was fitting that he was the last to finish, his 11th round game going to 86 moves before he finally took the point from Stephen Gordon. The extra effort was definitely worth it; had our tardy but determined GM not won that B+N+3P v R+3P ending he'd have left Canterbury over £1000 the lighter.

Unfortunately neither of our recent interviewees had spectacularly good tournaments. Keith Arkell finished 9th-14th on 7/11 and Simon Williams 15th-21st on 6.5/11. Keith may, at least, have the satisfaction of setting a new record for the most moves played in a single Championship tournament - around 700 I believe.

The Salimbeni game is noteworthy, incidentally, not just because it was the longest of Keith's many long games but also for the fact that just two short years ago George was defending this very line against your humble scribe. Would it shock you, dear reader, to learn that I gave him considerably less trouble?

Of the remainder we should give an honourable mention to Adam Hunt who had a tougher tournament than anybody but, despite facing 7 GMs and 3 IMs, finished equal third. Hunt's 7.5/11 secured him a GM norm and about £850. Curiously, IM Andrew Greet earned the same amount of prize money even though he faced no GMs at all, just 3 IMs, 2 FMs and only three opponents rated over 2249. This sort of thing is what happens when the Championship Tournament gets bigger and bigger and in the process is allowed to get rather bottom heavy I suppose.

Enough. I want to finish with my favourite game from the Championship - Mickey Adams' smooth crushing of Stuart Conquest. I read somewhere that Mickey has now beaten The Conq twelve games running. Random unsourced internet posts are not the most pukka of references I grant you but if this is true then the 2008 British Champion obviously needs to find a new strategy the next time he gets to play the 2010 Champion. Perhaps he should try turning up after the default time then claiming he deserves a half-point anyway?

And with that our coverage of Canterbury 2010 is almost at an end. EJH will be here tomorrow and thereafter we return to our usual Monday-Wednesday-Friday-Saturday schedule ... until Sheffield 2011.

Style Wars

Style wars at the British Chess Championships: grinders versus slashers; pythons against piranhas; "silky smooth" (Jonathan Speelman in the Indy on GM Adams in Round 2) v. rough and tumble.

I'll leave it to my fellow Streatham and Brixton Chess bloggers to comment on playing style, pugnacious or otherwise. This post is about style wars in another place, a parallel universe, where you'll also find an annual outpouring of popular enthusiasm in the cause of competitive display, aesthetic enrichment, conceptual engagement and, nice when it happens, financial reward. Go to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

The RA Summer Expo. and the British: both held in the summer, can get hot and stuffy, and make a nice day out. And there's more: both have a democratic dividend where amateurs and professionals rub shoulders and find themselves hanging (out) together; and both thrive on rivalry and contestation, in public view and behind the scenes.

But in this year's space-time conjuncture there's a worm hole between the two, and a chess set has made it through. Yes, a chess set has appeared at the RA Summer Exhibition. It is in the Architecture Room where it fights for its place in a mêlée of exhibits, no buildings as such for obvious reasons, but designs in gestation, thought experiments taking shape, concepts half-built, models of possibilities, and small-scale replicas of some realised things.

Spot the set competition at the RA Summer Expo.

The set is the size of a pretty decent Staunton, presented in a glass (well, perspex) case, and it is exhibit number 1064 (the curator had a sense of humour).

Found it!

In this buzz a chess set must pack a meaningful punch to get your attention, and in the grand tradition of chess sets with attitudes, this one is "Style Wars: Modernists versus Traditionalists", produced by The Mobile Studio.

Exhibit 1064

STYLE WARS (CHESS SET): MODERNISTS VERSUS TRADITIONALISTS.

selective laser sintering nylon and acrylic.

Mobile Studio. £1,500.

The Mobile Studio has happily let us use their photos, and has given us a link to Iconeye, an online design/architecture magazine, where a piece by Manijeh Verghese explains what Style Wars is all about (links added):

[Style Wars]...... took the debate over the Chelsea Barracks as its subject. A variety of infamous modernist and traditionalist buildings became the chess pieces: Foster’s Gherkin was the modernist king with Clarence House as its traditionalist counterpart. The pawns on each side were the opposing proposals for the Chelsea Barracks by Rogers and Quinlan Terry respectively.... The Mobile Studio took the game and elevated it to a platform for the discussion of architecture and politics....[They] made us question the relevance of style in architecture; explaining that good architecture arises not from modernist or traditionalist schools of thought but rather out of discussion, collaboration and game-playing.

Of course, you don't have to be an architect, or a chess enthusiast for that matter, to realise that the éminence grise in this debate is Charles Windsor; not mentioned explicitly in the article, he is the elephant in the exhibition. Perhaps, though, there is an implied criticism - each side should contend on a level chess board, and not via back channels from the elevated bastion of royal privilege.

As chessed-up readers will know, the ancestry of Style Wars is a long one. Sets with a dialectical disposition go back to the Collective Farm v Town, and Capitalists v Communists creations of the 1920s, and further. This is a welcome addition of direct relevance today.

It also visually alludes to Yoko Ono's Play it by Trust (White Chess Set) conceived in 1966/7.

Yoko plays a new move.

With everything one colour, you have to trust your opponent not to move your bits, you'll probably get confused as to which side you're on and who won; and does it matter anyway - Yoko wants us to "imagine peace". There's a foretaste here of "good architecture arises.....out of discussion, collaboration and game-playing"; everyone's a winner.

At the risk of blundering in this particular game, I'll ask, as the Chessman on the Clapham Omnibus, whether having all the pieces, and the board, rendered white, as in Style Wars, is making an architectural-aesthetic point, rather than a conceptual-cum-ludic one as in the White Chess Set.

I think it must be, because if you were playing a side with all its buildings painted black you'd be at a serious disadvantage, and not just because white moves first. To find out why you only need stay on the bus a few more stops further south until it reaches Colliers Wood.

The Brown and Root Tower, Colliers Wood.

Voted "the ugliest building in London in 2006."

Black does not become her. But it would look lovely in white. Wouldn't it?

Whatever. It's brilliant that a chess set makes it to the RA Summer Exhibition, and that our favourite game can once again assist as a vehicle for representing the play of thesis and antithesis in contemporary debates. Maybe the next one will be Republicans v Monarchists. And I know which side I'd like to play.

Note.
The edition of Style Wars [© July 2010] in the exhibition has been snapped up already, but you can commission yours from The Mobile Studio; Directors, Chee-Kit Lai and Max Dewdney. http://www.themobilestudio.co.uk/
Photography: Mobile Studio © June 2010

Chess in Art Index

Camera Kent Lie

On Tuesday I travelled down to Kent to watch round 8 of the British Championships. In the finest Chessbase (hack, spit) tradition, I have produced a lazy 'photo report' of my day, below. (Note: this post was scheduled for yesterday, but I missed the last train back and was stranded in bloody Canterbury.)

















"Where the right wing go to die"























On campus: bland shit.


















From the balcony.



















S&BCC President Angus French in his rightful place on board one in the Major Open...



















...and at the other end of the table, just a few boards down, Stephen Ledger (right), another S&BCC member.



















A closer look at that bowman visible in the background of the previous picture. Looming large over every single participant in this year's British Championships, I like to think of him as a sort of modern-day Caissa, and a more aggressive one, constantly threatening to shoot down the weak-willed. I call him 'Archie'.



















Match of the day: British no. 1 versus the last-but-one British champion.



















Danny Gormally versus Donald Mason. Insert your own 'fruit punch' gags.























Blog reader Simon Williams (left) on the Guinness.























IM Tom Rendle.























GM Aaron Summerscale.























Silver-haired epitome of cool: S&BCC's very own Alan Hayward.























Chappers.



















Foreground: Felix Jose Ynojosa-Aponte (right) versus IM Andrew Greet. Background: FM Peter Constantinou (right) versus IM Richard Pert.























Mike Surtees shaping up to make one of his wacky moves.



















A view from the back of the commentary room, where IMs Andrew Martin and Malcolm Pein were doing their thing. Foreground: the back of Chappers' head.























The chess player's lot.

Fighting Spirit

[Major Open Update:

S&BCC's own Angus French is still top of the Major Open and he's already played a couple of his closest challengers.

Go Angus!!]

Things are heating up down in Canterbury. Yesterday's top four boards gave us three decisive games and the only draw, Williams-Pert (Nick), lasted 48 moves. Obviously there were a lot of chessers up for a scrap yesterday. Not literally, mind. I mean, you'd never get actual fisticuffs at the British Championships would you?

For my money Adams - Conquest was Round 8's Game of the Day. It was one of those 'all-these-moves-look-like-anybody-could-play-them' jobs and perhaps akin to Keith Arkell's crushes of David Eggleston from Torquay and Liverpool which we featured on these pages last year.

I imagine Conquest felt throughly duffed up after running into Mickey. That's metaphorically speaking of course; as we know, there's never any real argy-bargy at the British. Well not often anyway.

The Times
7th August 1990
Author: Michael Horsnell

CHESS PLAYER ACCUSED OF WOUNDING

A CHESS player was remanded on bail yesterday after allegedly wounding another competitor in the neck with a broken table lamp in a restaurant at Eastbourne, East Sussex, where the British chess championships are taking place.

Conor Bracken, aged 22, of Reading, Berkshire, was charged with maliciously wounding Philip Hughes, aged 21, with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. Mr Bracken has been barred from the open championship, which is running parallel with the British championships at the town's Winter Gardens. Mr Hughes, who had not played Mr Bracken, is recovering from the attack in hospital and is said to be comfortable.

George Smith, secretary of the chess congress, said: "This incident is to the detriment of the chess congress. We have never had anything like this before."

In the seventh round of the British championship, grandmaster Jonathan Mestel, a former British champion, beat grandmaster David Norwood in 22 moves. Mestel now leads the championship with six points from seven games. Jon Speelman, Michael Adams and Daniel King all beat their opponents to achieve 5 1/2 points each.

Rest assured that if we ever find out that DCI Mondo was assisting the police on this one you'll be the first to know. In the meantime, enjoy this afternoon's 9th round and let's keep the fighting confined to the chessboard if at all possible.

Thesis hypothesis

In 2001 the British Championships were held in Scarborough, the second of three times in six years that they took place there. On the third occasion, I went for a week and played in a side-tournament: the second time I only visited, having neither the time nor the money to take part. My deficit in these two qualities had a common root - I was a postgraduate student, trying to eke out both his remaining cash and his remaining weeks of the summer vacation to try and finish his thesis. And, of course, to start it.

Originally I had proposed to write on a subject nothing to do with chess. Having on at least one occasion, when working in a library on an issue desk, issued Mein Kampf to a reader, I'd thought of investigating the ethical and legal problems involved in libraries holding and issuing - or not - that book. I dropped the idea, though, since on reflection it seemed to me that this turf must have been trodden many times before.

So rather than regurgitate other people's research in a project anybody else could do, I preferred to find something to research that nobody else had touched before and nobody else was likely to be doing. Librarianship having, not with my approval, long since morphed into something called Information And Library Management, the possible range of topics was much widened, given that almost everything involves Information at one level or another. Thus it was that a librarian's thesis involving the issue of library books became an information professional's thesis involving opening theory in chess.

Having said so much, I don't propose to say very much more about it here. I might do so some other time. It's not a brilliant thesis. It's OK, it's not entirely pedestrian and it's as original as I'd intended it to be, since in researching the thesis I could find almost no other academic work relating to my particular field. But it's a thesis for a vocational MA, it took a few weeks to write and it fell short (one percentage point short, as it goes) of gaining a Distinction. It's not one of those PhD theses which is years in the creation and which forms the basis for a brilliant intellectual career. (It is also, to tell the truth, poorly produced, with several errors in the text that would have been spotted and removed had I had more time to spot them and more than three quid left in the world, by the time I handed it in, to divide between reprinting and eating.)

It's the fact of the thesis, more than the thesis itself, that may be of interest during this fortnight. Because, in order to research the impact of the information revolution on chessplayers, I needed some real, actual players to tell me how it had affected them and whether or not they thought this was for the better. So, as the Championships were in Scarborough that year and as that town is relatively close to Newcastle, where I was studying, I went down to Yorkshire, with a very large number of envelopes in my bag, each containing a questionnaire and a stamped addressed envelope, and I left them on the Championship boards before the start of play, with an explanatory note.

It was packed, honest

Thankfully, I received a number of responses, for which I will always be grateful, and without which I could not have written any thesis. The sample wasn't huge - thirteen responses, if I recall, though a few more arrived a little too late for inclusion. Then again I wasn't carrying out a medical trial, I was beginning some provisional research in a sociological field, and the size of the sample wasn't very important provided it was recognised. It was enough, and it was interesting.

So interesting, that I'm not going to tell you much more about it. Well, perhaps I may do so in the future, here or in another place. I've meant to do so for years. In truth I meant to do so ever since the questionnaire was first conceived of, by which time I was already writing for Kingpin. As with so many other things, I have never got around to it. It was not the least turbulent period of my life and I changed address sufficiently often that much of my stuff, including the questionnaires and all the other documentation pertaining to the thesis, never left my packing-boxes. (I would want to refer to them, rather than just the thesis itself, not least because of the questionnaires that arrived late. They were no less interesting and valuable for that.)

I don't think the nine years that have passed are so important. Certainly it seems to me that much more changed between, say, 1991 and 2001 than it has between 2001 and 2010. The materials we use today to study developments in opening theory are not very different to those which we were using then, nor is the torrent of fresh information much more overwhelming now. Though I'd be interested in contrary opinions, I think the fundamental changes mostly happened in the decade before 2001, not the one after - from card indexes to computer files, from human analysis to computer-led analysis, from individual research in chess magazines to sortable and downloadable game scores available to all and hence from information scarcity to information overload.

Another day. A lot of interesting things were said. But what I can tell you, in brief, is that the amateurs who responded were a lot more fond of the information revolution than were the professionals. For the former, it meant access to information that they'd never had before. For the latter, those for whom chess is primarily work, it meant the need to access more information, since all their rivals had access to it as well - and hence more work, just to stay in the same place vis-à-vis their peers.

Which, I suggested, might be true of information technology in the wider world. It's wonderful as a tool. It's life-enhancing where we are in control of it. But in the world of work, its major effect is to make the treadmill turn faster than it did before.

Ironically, having written this thesis, I probably understand less about information technology in chess than most other chessplayers. I can just about click on Analyse and that's your lot. I downloaded ChessBaseLight a few months ago. I still have no idea how to use it.

In that, I'm far from unique. But - and this is really the point of today's piece - am I the only person who has ever written a university thesis using the British Chess Championships as the basis for their research? Am I unique in that?

[Thaks to Sean and Jonathan for their help with this.]

Ray Could Play VII

British Championship Special Edition

With the championships in full swing, now seems the perfect time to remind ourselves that should whoever wins Canterbury take a leaf out of Kasparov’s book and pen a tome on their Great British Predecessors* it will be necessary to include a chapter on one Raymond Dennis Keene. Raymondo’s triumph may be four decades old now but neither the time that has passed since his victory nor Tony Miles’ disdainful response to RDK's claim of "14 separate British championship titles" – “That's twelve more than are generally known about” - should blind us to what Keene achieved in his day.

Blackpool 1971** is the championship that will forever be associated with Keene. It was, as we will see, very much a tournament of two halves for my occasional fellow blogger. After decimating the field in the early rounds he finished with either an unseemly stagger over the finish line or a triumphant coast home depending on your point of view.

That RDK emerged victorious is only half the tale though. Perhaps an even bigger story is his crucial game with Jonathan Penrose on the second Monday of the championship which proved to be of critical importance in deciding not just who would win that year but also the outcome of the battle between Ray’s generation and chessers of the old guard. The truth is, Raymondo didn't just win the British Championship he ended an era - and that makes Blackpool 1971 worth a closer look I hope you'll agree.

Whoever takes home the trophy this year will find that the name R.D. Keene is already on it.

The relatively quiet draw (Bonner, 41) with which he began his campaign gave no hint of what was to come. From the second round Keene began a blistering run, his next six games including that marathon with recent S&BC Blog interviewee Eric Holt, a brace of wins with the Black pieces (Sugden 0-1, 29; Ludgate 0-1, 63 – the latter containing what RDK considered to be one of the better combinations of the whole tournament), an easy victory over regular victim Andrew Whiteley, the defeat of Penrose and just a solitary dropped half-point (Knox, 25).

By the time the dust had settled our man was sitting comfortably on 6/7 a point clear of his nearest challenger (Whiteley) and a further half-point beyond everybody else. It's hard to imagine that Raymondo's confidence could have been any higher but instead of continuing to machete his way through the field his tournament suddenly took a radically different course. It seems that he had a quick look at the standings, calculated that 8/11 would be enough to finish on top of the pile and decided that for the remainder of the proceedings he would spend as little time as possible at the board.

RDK’s new halving-out strategy did not receive a serious challenge from John Littlewood (½, 38) and still less so from Bill Hartston (½, 14) but Bob Wade was an entirely different kettle of fish. The defending champion wanted nothing to do with Keene’s early doors peace offer and a double-edged game developed; Wade had the bishop pair and chances to menace on the kingside while Ray had given White doubled pawns and had his own protected passer on d4.

On move 24 Keene dramatically sacrificed an exchange with opinions divided as to whether he had sufficient compensation. Ritson Morry felt Black had a “promising position” but Raymondo himself later disputed this assessment. He felt he had been losing and had been lucky that Wade’s time shortage had forced him to agree a draw half a dozen moves later.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Keene entered the last round knowing that while beating Williams would guarantee him the title outright another draw would mean that Whiteley alone could catch up - and he'd have to defeat Wade to do so. Cue a very firm shutting-up of the Raymondo shop; a blink-and-you-missed-it final game where the queens left the board on move seven and the players followed them shortly afterwards.

White to play ... or head to the bar?
Keene - Williams, Blackpool 1971 (11)

I like to imagine Ray immediately repairing to the nearest bar for a celebratory tipple. If he did his supping would not have been in the least bit disturbed by the prospect of a play-off. Whiteley was Keene’s whipping boy throughout their careers; he had lost every one of their seven most recent games and by 1976 had amassed a lifetime score of +1 =5 -13 against his nemesis. That he had no chance in a match between them was as apparent to Whiteley, it seems, as it was to Raymondo; his last round game went only one move longer than Keene-Williams before he gave up and agreed a draw.

Busy quaffing or otherwise, Ray Keene was the new British Champion ...




... but let's take a step back for a moment; what about that encounter with Penrose? It seems to me that with the benefit of hindsight we can see it as one of the most significant games between two British players of the whole decade and no less meaningful than the two Short-Speelman Candidates matches that would be fought twenty years later.

Why so important? Well for a start Penrose had dominated British chess for more than a decade winning an unmatched ten titles between 1958 and 1969 so Ray, having shared second place with him in Coventry the year before and come second to him at Bristol in 1968, would have known from the off that to realise his ambition to be British Champion he would have to take Penrose down at some point. Their 7th round clash was about so much more than who was going to win that one tournament though: it was a fight for the right to be considered the country's undisputed Number One Chesser and perhaps even a struggle for the very future of British chess.

After being head and shoulders above everybody else for so long, in 1971 Penrose suddenly had a genuine contender snapping at his heels. It wasn't just that Keene had already beaten the old champion twice - in the London League (playing for Streatham!) in 1967 and in a County match in 1970 - he'd also temporarily taken possession of England's top board on more than one occasion - initially for a couple of isolated matches in which his rival had not played and then for the entire final stage of the 1970 Siegen Olympiad after Penrose fainted in the middle of a match from the preliminaries. By the time Blackpool came around Keene was even about to replace his rival at the head of the new grading list, albeit only by a single point.

When they sat down to play both men must have known that Penrose's position was under threat like no other time before but if Keene had seen the game as an opportunity to end a long reign and seize the throne himself he must also have seen it as the chance to turn the entire British chess scene around. Raymondo considered the Penrose years to be a time of stagnation and decline which had left England as a third-rate chess power; more than that he blamed Penrose personally for the sorry state of English chess because his rival's annexation of the British championship together with his famous victory over Tal in 1960 meant that he was the only home player that organisers of foreign chess events wanted at their tournaments.

Penrose playing that game against Tal at the Leipzig Olympiad

So for Keene the long-term dominance of the British game by one man was limiting the opportunities available to young up-and-coming players, not least RDK himself, and to rub salt into the wound this man wasn't really interested in playing abroad anyway and consistently turned his invitations down. The extent to which this irked Raymondo can be seen from his explanation of why he agreed to play at Palma de Mallorca at the end of the year in the midst of an already heavy schedule,

"it seemed a pity to waste one of the international invitations received in England – so many have been wasted or ignored in the past"

not to mention the entire chapter he devoted to the theme in his 1977 book Becoming a Grandmaster and his contribution to Revolution in the Seventies in which he gave the argument another airing some 35 years later.

In Raymondo's eyes, then, if he could only defeat Penrose he would at a stroke secure a virtually unassailable position in the race for the 1971 championship, get top-dog status and bring a new dawn for British chess. The stakes could hardly have been higher.

And the result of this momentous encounter? A “crushing defeat for Penrose at the hands of Keene” (Ritson Morry).

The king is dead long live the kings. After this game, a 2nd= finish in 1972 notwithstanding, Penrose never returned to his former heights and eventually he switched - with a good deal of success it has to be said - to correspondence chess. In his place younger men such as Keene, Evil Uncle Ernie, Hartston, Basman and later Tony Miles became the leading over-the-board players of the day.

At some point we will return to the significance of this tournament for British chess in general and Ray in particular but for today let us end with thoughts of that final round at Blackpool. Keene was British champion and had won the tournament without losing a single game. The number of titles that Keene possesses may later have become a point of conflict between him and Miles but nevertheless Blackpool 1971 provides absolute proof that Ray could most definitely play.










* or get an underling to do it for them at least

** the other title that is beyond dispute is the under-18 championship that RDK won in 1964







CREDIT:

• Photo of the British Championship trophy from Atticus Chess Club

SOURCES:

• Peter Clarke The Anglo-Dutch Match, BCM 1/69



• Ray Keene & David Levy Siegen Chess Olympiad, Chess Ltd 1970



• Harry Golombek The 17th Clare Benedict International Team Tournament, Paignton, April 6-10, BCM 5/70



• Peter Clarke The XIXth Olympiad, BCM 11/70



• Ritson Morry The British Chess Federation Congress Blackpool 1971, BCM 8/71



• Letters to the Editor, BCM 11/71



• Ray Keene Palma de Mallorca 1971, BCM 1/72



• Ray Keene Becoming a Grandmaster, Batsford 1977



• Ray Keene's contribution to Revolution in the Seventies, Everyman 2007

Something to try if you're bored on the rest day

After 160 moves on Friday and 78 yesterday, I imagine Keith Arkell might be feeling at a bit of a loose end today. For him, and for anybody else (player or spectator) who finds themselves in an absence-of-chess induced bout of thumb twiddling, here's something to occupy the long hours until 2:15pm tomorrow afternoon ...

[Major Open Update:

S&BCC's own Angus French leads with an unbeaten 5/6. Go Angus!!]

Click the image for a closer look
(recommended!)

Dear Jonathan,

Here's the picture of the Great Chess Pile as promised. The history of it is as follows:

It all started with a conversation when I was still at school with a lovely fellow, and fine player, called KW Lloyd who told me that he'd wasted much of his time at Cambridge trying to pile an entire chess set on one white rook, but had never succeeded. I didn't know whether he was just making it up, or how hard he'd tried if he wasn't, or how close he'd come, but when I got to Cambridge and needed a way to waste my own time, I remembered the idea and started trying it myself.

The standard cheap set of the time, which I had with me, was made of French boxwood and had knights with ears that pointed upwards. That's very important.The first stage was designing the architecture.

Just trying to balance pieces on top of each other is clearly never going to work, and I quickly realised that they key was to come up with a design that comprised a number of storeys, each with a top that allowed the next storey to rest on top. I soon came up with the following plan:

1) You can hang a couple of knights by their noses over the top of a rook. The knight's ears then form a four-pointed base for the next level top balance on.

1a) Furthermore, two bishops can be tucked under the knights' paunches, held in place by the weight of the knight. Two rooks with knight-and-bishop accompaniment thus gets rid of all the minor pieces.

2) Three pawns may be hung around the Queen's crown to provide a three-point base made of the pawns' bobbles for the next level.

3) The kings' crosses can be used to attach the kings to the top of a rook.

4) That leaves only a large handful pawns to get rid of. Four of these can hang around the top of the rook at the base of the pile, kept in place by the weight of a rook/knight/bishop or queen-and-pawns combo above it. Two more pawns can sit between the ears of the knights. Two more pawns can be right at the top, where the kings' crosses are. Which leaves, I think, only two more pawns to be balanced on a couple of bishops that are already in the pile.

Easy! Only it took me most of my undergraduate career to get it to work, and my rooms was constantly echoing to the sound of clattering chess piles.

You can see why Islam banned representative images in their chessmen in the Middle Ages - flat draughts-like pieces are so much easier to pile.


Regards

Bill Hartston

Chess in Art Postscript: Canterbury Tail Piece

It's not quite halfway, but it's never too early to have a tailpiece. So, are you sitting comfortably?

And if so, on what, dear reader, on what? A pertinent question, perhaps even a sore point, if you remain, maybe for some time, at a chess board. Where, in short, do you park your fundament, your hunkers, your sit-me-down, you know, your tail?

Over there at the British Chess Championships at Canterbury they have to spend several hours a day on one of these:

Parking Space.

Photo by Angus French

One can sympathise. But it must be more comfortable than being shoe-horned into Rodchenko's revolutionary play-station circa 1925:

What's the Party line?

This murky image shows his all-in-one table/chairs/storage/colour co-ordinated chess set designed for a workers' club back in the USSR. The seat is bolted down and, without wiggle room, looks like an extremely tight sit. It casually tosses aside left-inclined principles of comfy chair design - which dictate a bottom-up approach.

But, Comrades. Beat False Medievalism with the Red Wedge!

Down with Right-Deviation, New Age-Escapist, Celtic-Fringed Revisionism!

Big chess table with medieval design by Victoria Kijiji.

These days an ensemble such as above might do for some unfocussed wannabe Druid who prefers to watch TV while they adjust their set, but seven-hundred years ago in the real days of genuine yore they put their backs into their chess. And chess into their backs - as in this 14th-century hunk of seat (below), that your blogger chanced upon earlier this year in a delightful corner of Mallorca.

In la casa at the Jardines de Alfabia. Bunyola, Mallorca.

Hitherto it has been unclocked by the Chess in Art community. And so we use the occasion of the British chess-fest to reveal it to all and sundry. Remember, you saw it, and we blogged it, here first. This is the chess in close-up:

Photos by Observer on Flickr

Now, the Big Question is why on earth would any furniture maker think it was 14th-century cool to have a bas-relief chess board impaling the lower vertebrae of their client, and a tree-trunk wedged between their shoulder blades?

It helps to know that the characters are drugged up to the eyeballs with a love potion that today would get you arrested. They are Tristan and Isolde. Young Tristan, as the much-told yarn has it, was entrusted by Uncle Mark with a philtre d'amour, and he was supposed to drop Isolde such a Mickey Finn as to make her compliant with the old goat's entreaties. But he disobeyed orders and the two youngsters convivially egged each other on to knock back more than the recommended dose.

As for the chair: any 14th-century admirer prepared to plonk their tender parts into its oaken embrace might hope to be rewarded with an uplift in their libido: that the ectasy represented on the chair's upright might be absorbed by contagion, transporting the plonker to his own seventh heaven via the back of beyond.

Which is fair enough, and the up-side. But what is thoroughly perplexing, and the down-side, is that our loved-up couple should spend their happy hour playing chess, of all things, and as a consequence the over-optimistic punter might rise possessed only of a depressing compulsion to try and improve his grade.

Tristan et Iseult buvant le philtre d'amour.

Tristan de Léonois. C14th or C15th. Bibliothèque nationale, Paris.

This ancient image, contemporary maybe with Chess in Art XII, and the Alfabia chair as well, give or take the odd century or two, also shows the dipsy pair, alive on the ocean waves, hitting the bottle in the early middle-game. Note that chaperones are on duty to make sure they play the board and not the man (or woman, obviously).

Actually, in the furniture scene, Uncle Mark is up in the tree spying on the playful couple. You can see him bird-like top right (detail below). So in this version of the story the chess is nothing but an artful ruse to put him off the scent.

He has perched himself on the branch, not just to note Trist & Issy's TNs, but to check that they are behaving in the approved manner, that there is no hanky-panky and, as befits a game of chess properly pursued, everything is above board. Alert to the danger they'll not reveal their preparation and just play down the main line.

There are many modern uses of the same story, even without mentioning Wagner. The one below has Uncle (behind you!) out of his tree and on the prowl. It is chessless. My goodness, it also shameless. Just look at that blatant brand placement.

Tristan and Isolde. 1902.

Edmund Blair Leighton (1853-1922). Private Collection.

So: the travails of the regal heart and the play of the royal game; their bygone standards of courtly chivalry; our bearpit of dog-eat-dog chess politics. We can put it all in a nutshell, thus. Bona fide then, but not so FIDE now. Boom, boom!

And with that, we end this Canterbury Tale (but just mention, en passant, that Chaucer in The Book of the Duchess has an episode on a game of ches (sic) in which the loss of it betokens losing a Lady; so beware) and return you, sitting comfortably, to the British Championships...

Thanks to ejh for the Chaucer reference, of which more, maybe, sometime. Rodchenko's chess table was reconstructed recently at Tate Modern.

Chess in Art Index

Just Kent get enough

The Championships have only twice before been held in Kent, perhaps surprisingly given that they go to a seaside resort more often than not and Kent claims to have more miles of coastline than any other county in England. In fact, only one of the three trips to Kent has been a seaside job, that being the tournament held in Ramsgate in 1929.

Ramsgate, what memories. I stayed in that town once, before getting a ferry in the early morning: there was a parrot in our guest house, up on the cliffs directly above the lorry park, which had learned to imitate the lorries' high-pitched and repeated beep and the message "this lorry is now reversing". It was, as I recall, a much-interrupted sleep.

The 1929 Championship - the contestants' photo can be seen here - was not in fact the strongest chess tournament to take place in the town that year, the unlikely title of Kent County Congress disguising a British v Foreigners seven-board Scheveningen tournament held in March and April (games here). The locals were soundly beaten by a line-up of, in order of their scores, Capablanca, Rubinstein, Menchik, Koltanowski, Maroczy, Soultanbeieff and Znosko-Borovski, to give the spellings you can see in the tournament crosstable (with the BCF crosstable just above it) by scrolling down here.

Only the last-placed Foreigner scored fewer points than the highest-placed of the British, Thomas: and he was absent from the British Championship later in the year, as was the second-placed Yates, and for that matter Sergeant too. Present, however, was Sultan Khan, who played in and won his first ever Championship.

Perhaps because it has been overshadowed by the international tournament, games from the 1929 Championship seem to be hard to locate on the internet - I could find none on Chessgames - but John Saunders was kind enough to send me a number of them, which have helped enormously in the writing of this piece. Two of these are given in their entirety below.

Sultan Khan actually lost in the first round, something few champions can claim, and drew in the second. This may not have given Gerald Abrahams, his third round opponent, the impression that the newcomer was anyone to fear. Nor, perhaps, did the opening: it was an Interesting French Exchange in which the combative Abrahams castled queenside. After White's 20.b5


Black decided not to take on b5, an error as his king position was opened up all the same without any material compensation to show for it. Everything then fell apart surprisngly swiftly.

Sultan Khan won a tense game in the fourth round against Fairhurst and then took two and a half from the next three rounds to reach 5/7. He then played, consecutively and both with Black, Price and Michell, who were to finish sharing second place, albeit Price had to win the last three games to do so.

The game against Price opened 1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.e5 e6?! and soon became an Advance French with White a tempo up, an advantage Price soon squandered with 6.Ne2 combined with 8.dxc5, possibly under the impression that he was getting himself Nimzowitsch-Salwe with a move up, which he was not. Sultan Khan may have known very little theory but he soon demonstrated that he understood how to play the French, answering White's unobservant 19.a3?


with 19...Nxe5! recovering the piece with an extra pawn after 20.fxe5 f4 21.Qd1 Bxc2 22.Qxc2 fxe3.

The game against Michell began, remarkably enough, 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 a6 and after they had settled down into an Exchange Slav, Sultan Khan was very much outplayed and found himself with his king uncastled in the middle of the board.

When the centre was subsequently opened that might have been enough to see off the stranger but Michell unwittingly exchanged off most of his advantage when he exchanged queens. While he was still working out how to try and win the game he lost it, overlooking 38...Re5 after which his f5-pawn fell off.

One of those games where, looking at if afterwards, you can never quite see either where you could have won it, or why you did not.

A win would have put Michell in the lead, with two rounds to go: as it was, he trailed Sultan Khan by a point and a half, as did Drewitt and Tylor, both of whom lost in round ten. As should Sultan Khan have done, after reaching this position with White against William Winter


but being obliged with a helpful stalemate when Winter thoughtlessly put his king on e3. He needed just a draw in the last round, against the back-marker Eva, to win the title, and he got it.

Lucky? Quite likely. The winner is almost always lucky. But he was also alert and stubborn at the crisis of his games, and more so, perhaps, than the opponents he overcame.

Michell, for his part, was 56 when their ninth round game was played. He would never finish higher than second in the Championship.

He was the only player in the 1929 line-up who had played in Tunbridge Wells when the Championships went there in 1908, although Sergeant, who played the international tournament in 1929 but not the British Championship, had also been in Kent twenty-one years before. Both tournaments were, of course, all-play-alls, not the Swisses we know today, although the number of rounds remains the same.

Henry Atkins won the tournament, a point and a half ahead of the field. It was the fourth of his seven consecutive victories, a streak which might very well have been longer had he not retired from competitive chess for a number of years after his seventh win. Being aware of this, and having read in Tim Harding's review of the year 1908 in chess that

at Tunbridge Wells in August, he retained his British Champion title with a point to spare

I was expecting it to be a procession. Which it was, in the end. But looking at the games, it wasn't as simple as that. The very part of the tournament in which he pulled away from the field - the four consecutive games he won between rounds five and eight - was when it might very well have gone wrong for him.

If I read the games right, his was a cautious approach, waiting for his opponents to make errors allowing him to gradually ratchet up his positional advantage. (Michael Adams would perhaps appreciate that.) But a couple of times in the middle of the tournament, it very nearly failed to work out as planned.

After the first four rounds, in which he'd won twice and drawn twice, he was in joint second place, half a point behind Streatham resident and former world championship challenger Isidor Gunsberg. In round five, Gunsberg lost, his opponent, as it happens, being our friend Reginald Michell. Atkins took the lead by defeating RE Lean - who stood last, and would finish last, in the 1908 Championship. (He was twice champion of Sussex according to Brian Denman's history of chess in Brighton.)

Winner of the Championship v winner of the wooden spoon: a one-sided game? Perhaps it ought to have been, with Black controlling the centre early on and letting White's queen chase after a sacrificed pawn on the edge of the board. Black castled, then on the next move prevented White from castling. He looked forward to kicking open the centre with a view to an early finish. But after 21.Kxd2, Atkins slipped up, choosing, in the diagram position, 21...c5?! rather than the better 21...Nc5!.



The difference would have been the removal of White's white-squared bishop, which began to play a threatening role after 22.h4! c6?! (perhaps Black suddenly realised that on 22...cxb4? 23.axb4 Rxb4?? the bishop skewers one rook to win the other) 23.Qh5 g6 24.Qh6 f5


and now 25.h5! is trouble for Black. 25...Be8 is his best - 25...g5 and 25...Qe8 can be met with 26.g4! while if queens are exchanged on g5 Black is simply a pawn down with a horrid position - but then White has 26.hxg6 Bxg6 27.Rag1!


and White, with everything lined up against the King, is winning. (Again, if Black eases the pressure by exchanging queens, he's a pawn down with less than nothing to show for it.)

Even after 25.f4 as played, Lean was very much in the game, but after 25...Qe7 26.h5 g5!


he blundered with 27.g4? which no longer works now that ...g5 is in, because the f4 pawn is hanging. Atkins recaptured his pawn, beat off the attack and organised one of his own with 27...Nxf4. Instead, after 27.fxg5 there would have been a complicated game, which at very least is better than losing in short order.

Atkins' win put him in the lead by a half a point from Gunsberg, who would lose again in round six and fade out of the running, and by a point from both Ward and Michell, who was his sixth-round opponent. As was to be the case twenty-one years later, Michell was, in retrospect, the champion's key opponent, the tough game that really should have been lost. As he would again in 1929, Michell lost a long, difficult game in which for a fair stretch he was close to winning.

I am not a chess historian - something which will become even more apparent and perhaps more important when we look at the seventh round - and I don't know to what extent the Michell game has been analysed. There are very brief notes, scarcely more than "good move" or "bad move", in Britbase - game 31 is our game - and I do not know from what source these are drawn. Moreover, some of them are in my opinion wrong. If a thorough analysis does exist somewhere - I do have the vague feeling that I have seen the game annotated before - then I'd be glad to know of it. The notes that follow don't pretend to be anything other than shallow, and particularly in its exciting climax, this rich Ruy Lopez is a game that deserves to be analysed in depth.

It began a little better for White than Black, who lost a tempo in the opening by playing Bc8-g4-c8 - only one, since White played d2-d3-d4 and perhaps not an important one given the reasonably closed position. (For what it is worth, in the position after Black's fourteenth, Michell was a tempo down on the position after Ivkov's thirteenth here.) It certainly didn't turn out to be important as Atkins gave two tempi back with Nf3-h2-f3 and perhaps feeling - correctly - that while he was treading water, his opponent had been getting on with improving his position, he lashed out unwisely with 24.g4?


after which Michell hopped into f4 with 24...Nf4 and after 25.Bxf4 exf4 White's dark squares and his king position in general were looking most unhappy.

Michell pointed his bishop at the dark squares with 26.Nh2 Bd6 and from that point Atkins was scrambling to stay in the game. Except, that is, for a brief moment immediately after 27.Nf3 Bd7?! (several other moves are better including 27...f6) when Atkins continued 28.c4?! missing the tactical shot 28.e5!


the point of which is that the pawn sacrifice is followed after 28...Bxe5 with the piece sacrifice 29.Bxg6! which is followed after 29...hxg6 with the exchange sacrifice 30.Rxe5! which is followed after 30...Rxe5 with 31.d6 getting back the rook that is by now the sum of his investment.

It's very far from fatal for Black since after 31...Re2! 32.dxc7 Rxd2 33.Nxd2 Rc8 34.Rf1 Rxc7 35.Rxf4 I would have thought him a little better in the ending, but still, that would have been satisfactory for White compared with the game continuation.

Michell now played 28...f6 cutting off the danger and solidifying the centre ready for a flank assault on White's king. Whether any actual breakthrough exists, if White plays the right moves, is a moot point. There continued 29.Kf2 Kg7 30.b3 g5 - committing to the ...h5 route, though I can't see that ...f5 is ever likely to be on - and then 31.Rg1 h5, which last our Britbase notes give an exclamation mark to, while my computer does not.


It doesn't give a winning alternative, though, as opposed to just marking time and enjoying Black's edge without doing anything with it. That being so, perhaps ...h5 was indeed the best winning chance - and Michell, a point behind, surely wanted to win. However, it does seem that 32.gxh5! is clearly best here and that after, say, 32...bxc4 33.bxc4 Bxh3 34.Qc3 Black is probably forced to play 34...Be5. Now after 35.Nxe5 Rxe5 and then say 36.Be2 Bd7 37.Bf3 I think White is safe enough: Black can probe on the queenside but I do not see that a breakthrough can be organised.

Atkins, however, chose to sit tight, and this was his error, one that should have been fatal for him. He played 32.Rg2? surrendering the h-file, which Michell grabbed with 32...hxg4 33.hxg4 Rh8. (What else was Atkins expecting? I confess I do not understand his choice.)

Atkins tried 34.Rc1 perhaps hoping for something with b4 but 34...b4 put a stop to that and after 35.Re1 White was very, very close to defeat. Black played 35...Rh3. I would love to know what the players' clocks were saying here. The position, at least, was saying - shouting - "now or never!"


Black is going to play ...Rh8 and ...Be5 and win as he pleases, perhaps by threatening the g4 pawn, perhaps with a sacrifice on f3. White can lose like that or he can play a move that loses - but gives him a chance of winning. Sensing, surely, that the time for sitting tight was past, that there was nowhere left for him to sit, Atkins played 36.e5! and after 36...Bxe5 followed up with the exchange sacrifice 37.Rxe5! dxe5 38.Nxg5.


On Britbase, Michell's 35th is given a question mark and 35...Be5! preferred, presumably because it would have prevented Atkins' break. In practical terms I think this is right, and I also think that Michell probably missed it - had he seen the exchange sacrifice, he would very likely have preferred 35...Be5. He was probably winning nonetheless, although I have not yet been able to find a clear, watertight, certain win, or not one, anyway, on behalf of which I would swear an affidavit.

One wonders again about the state of the clocks. Besides, two moves before the time control, possibly in a time scramble, Black suddenly found himself attacked, sacrificed against, when for the previous twenty moves the initiative had been exclusively his. Even if he was not in time pressure, this was real pressure nonetheless, a change in circumstances to which he may have found it difficult to adapt.

He took a step back, playing safe 38...Rh6, perhaps watching the e6 square where a knight fork might take place. It's difficult. At first 38...Re3 looks strongest, not fearing 39.Bf5 because 39...Qd8! wins, but in fact 39.Rh2! forces a draw! 39...Rh8! 40.Rxh8 Kxh8 41.Qd1! and Black - check it! - has to allow a perpetual, hoping that White, with all his pieces swarming around an unprotected king, can find no better. Michell's choice may well have been best.

But now Atkins came forward, with 39.Bf5 and suddenly he was inside Black's position. Two moves for Michell to find before the time control. What should he do? All of a sudden there are all sorts of ideas for White, not just the knight fork but Ne4 threatening the c5-pawn and maybe g5, there is the possibility of d6 and a queen invasion on the light squares, maybe threatening the e5 pawn.

What should he do? Possibly 39...Rd8, buying time because the d5 pawn will be pinned if White exchanges bishops with a view to the fork on e6, and deciding that the fork can subsequently be allowed because Black will win the ending (e.g. 40.Bxd7? Qxd7 41.Qe2 Qe7 42.Ne6 Rxe6 and wins). Or possibly 39...Rah8 which can lead to the remarkable variation 40.Qe1 Rh1 41.Bxd7? (though it looks good at first) 41...Rxe1 42.Nf6+ Kf6 43.Nxd7 Rhh1!


which wins. But 41.Qe4, for instance, is much better, with the game remaining up in the air.

A rook move may well win, or may lead to a win, which is not necessarily the same thing. But I cannot find it for sure and neither could Michell. He tried 39...Qd8?! (question mark on Britbase - I shall be kinder) chasing off the knight. The problem was that it didn't have to go to e4, allowing 40...Qh4+. It went 40.Nf3, allowing no such thing, and menacing the e5 pawn which Black's queen had just abandoned.


This position is now reversing. If there was a win on move 38 or 39, it was surely gone by move 40. Michell played 40...Bxf5?! - perhaps not seeing that after 40...Qe7 41.Bxd7? Qxd7 42.Nxe5 Black has 42...Qe7 and then either 43.Nf3 Rae8 or 43.Qb2 Qh4+ 44.Kf1 Rae8, in either instance with attack.

After the better 41.d6, 41...Rd6 is struggling against 42.Qc2 Bf5 43.Qxf5 Rae8 44.Qe4 Rh8 45.Rg4! with Nh4-f5 to come but either 41...Rhh8 or 41...Rh1 seem to draw, e.g. 41...Rh1 42.d6 f7 43.Bxd7 Qxd7 44.Qd5 Qf5 45.Qxe5+ Qxe5 46.Nxe5 Rf8 47.Kf3


and I think that's a draw unless either side tries too hard to win it.

Atkins of course recaptured with 41.gxf5 and now, with the time control reached and the win no longer there, it may be that the draw was no longer available either. 41...Kf8 receives a question mark on Britbase but is 41..Kf6 actually better? White continues 42.d6 Qd7 43.Qd5 Re8 44.Ng5!


threatening 45.Ne4+ Kxf5 46.Rg5 mate. If 44...Kxf5 45.Nf7 and now if 45...Rh1 46.Qd3+ e4 47.Qd5+ Kf6 48.Qg5+ Kxf7 and White has a selection of mates in two. Hence "better" is 45...Rh5 after which the same manoeuvre is merely winning easily.

Really Black's only try appears to be 44...e4 after which 45.Ne6 and Black is on the precipice. I can find nothing better than 45...e3+ 46.Kf3 (not forced, but I don't think 46.Ke2 comes to anything different) 46...Rxe6+ 47.fxe6 Rh3+ 48.Kxf4 Rh4+ 49.Kxe3 Qxe6+ 50.Qxe6+ Kxe6 51.Rd2


and I think White is winning this ending. It's not at all clear that moving the king to f8 was worse than putting it on f6: both may lose. Be that as it may, White's next, 42.Qb2 was not the best, and seems to have handed back a draw that Michell didn't take.


42.Nxe5! was right, daring Black to come in with 42...Qh4+ 43.Kf3 Qh3+ 44.Kxf4 and now I think that White is probably winning after either 44...Rh5 45.Rg4 or 44...Rh4+ 45.Rg4 (not 45.Ng4?! Re8! and Black will get a draw by taking on g4 with the rook and checking with the queen) but I cannot claim to have an analysis which proves it.

The move played, though, was met by 42....Qf6 and now 43.Nxe5?! would run into 43...Ra7! preventing 44.Nd7+ and embarrassing the knight as 44.Nd3? loses to 44...Qh4+ as White can no longer interpose on g4 at the right moment. Hence 44.Rg6 Rxg6 45.Nxg6+ Kg7 46.Qxf6+ Kxf6 47.Nxf4 Kxf5


and despite White getting a second pawn for the exchange with 48.Ne6 Ke5 49.Nxc5 this looks fine for Black. (While a lot of these knight-against-rook endings are good for White, in this one the absence of an extra rook apiece tends to work against him as the rook is much swifter round the board than the knight and Black's king is better placed than its counterpart.)

So 43.Qxe5


and now Black's 43...Qxe5?! was a clear error with 43...Re8! easily holding the draw. 44.Qxf6+ (44.Qxf4 Rh3! and ...Qb2+ will draw) 44...Rxf6 45.Ng5 Rxf5 46.Ne6+ Rxe6 47.dxe6 Ke7 48.Rg6 Re5


and that's the handshake.

Instead Michell, perhaps a little tired, perhaps a touch demoralised, took off the queens and then met 44.Nxe5 with 44...Ra7? losing outright. I'm not necessarily convinced that 44...Re8 or 44...Rh5 wouldn't have given him some slight chances (and certainly some practical chances) to save the game, though investigating that really would be an analysis too far for this particular writer.

It is however obvious that the move played gave him absolutely no chance, with a worse version of the knight-against-rook than any we've so far seen: two passed pawns for the exchange, the White king active and Black king otherwise, Black's pawns utterly harmless, Black's rooks unable to threaten either knight or king or even any of White's pawns.

White's king, pawns and pieces just walked towards the other side of the board until Black resigned, having no more obvious motive for playing on the last couple of moves than a very understandable sense of disbelief. But, like Sultan Khan in 1929, it was the man who coped best in the crisis who prevailed.

If that game was strange, round seven, for completely different reasons, was even stranger. Atkins' opponent was Ward, who had led the tournament early on with three straight wins and who was still, like Michell in the previous round, only one point behind the leader. They met on Monday 17 August, the previous day, a Sunday, having been a rest day. After White's 19.g3 had followed eighteen other uninspiring moves apiece, they reached the following position with White standing a little better


when, Britbase (game 42) tells us, White lost on time.

This is not quite as extraordinary as it sounds, once you learn that the time control at move forty was not the first, but the second of the game, the time limit being twenty moves in an hour. Even so it is a startling outcome, the game not really having started in earnest before it was over - and that not because of anything dramatic on the board itself.

It makes you wonder whether there is a story behind the game - whether Ward arrived late, or forgot about his clock, or even whether he never actually lost on time and there has been some kind of transcription error. As I wrote above, I am not a chess historian. I know no more about the game than I have written here and although I have enquired elsewhere I have not been able to add to this paucity of information. But on the face of it, a bizarre and disappointing outcome to what must have been a much-anticipated game, probably the last realistic chance anybody had to reel in Atkins even though the second week had only just begun.

That was it, essentially, as Ward and the rest of the field were two points behind with only four rounds to play. Atkins' three lucky days in the middle of the tournament had rendered the last part of it no more than a battle for second, which was eventually won by Ward on six and a half points ahead of four other players on six.

Atkins, who had an easy win in round eight, lost his ninth round game to Blake, but if his luck had run out his lead had not: a tenth-round draw with Palmer (game 55) clinched him the title with, as mentioned above, a round to spare. In truth a more ambitious Black might have tried harder to hurt Atkins after his passive opening. In the last round Gunsberg tried to make something of the Exchange Lopez, but having played for two results, soon settled for the one that split the point two ways.

I've concentrated, to some degree, on Atkins' fortune during three consecutive crucial games in the middle of the tournament, if only because they go some way to contradict the initial view I had of the tournament. There is, I think, another way to look at it, which is that only two players found themselves swapping tactical punches with Atkins (his loss to Blake was a different sort of game, in which he was squashed without a fight) and both of those mini-brawls were decided quickly, and one-sidedly, in Atkins' favour. If players feared complications when they sat at the other side of the board from him, it may not have been without reason and it may not have been unwise of them to draw back from the prospect.

Two Championships in Kent, two clear winners, Atkins by a point and a half and Sultan Khan by a point. At the time of writing that a third one-man show seems more likely than not, and perhaps this time, one just as real as apparent. If it is, then people will remember Mickey Adams at Canterbury, as they always remember winners: Sultan Khan at Ramsgate, Henry Atkins at Tunbridge Wells. But I prefer to remember Reginald Michell. Who was so close. Who like so many of us, was nearly. But never quite.

[Many thanks to John Saunders for his quite invaluable help.]