Ray Could Play IX

White to play

JMGB v Red Hill Chap, April 2011

Tuesday the 5th of April was an extremely unusual day for me. A first, a long wait ended and chessboard achievement: along they came all in a row and all of them, students of coincidence might be interested to know, were in some way connected to S&BC Blog favourite Raymond Dennis Keene.

It started in the afternoon. Although I am very fond of RDK, our previous communication had consisted of the one word (“hello”) that we had exchanged at the Staunton Memorial a couple of years ago.  At 16:47 I received my first ever email from the famous RDKOBE address. It wasn’t completely out of the blue – Raymondo was kindly answering a question that I’d raised concerning his involvement with Anti Chess – but it was most welcome nonetheless.

A little bit later, I strolled down to the club for the Streatham v Red Hill Surrey League match and found myself on the White side of a Leningrad Dutch. Remarkably, just a couple of hours after receiving his email I finally got the chance to play an opening idea of Keene’s that I’d been waiting more than twenty years to get on the board. This happy coincidence would have been enough to make last Tuesday a bit of a red letter day.  There's more, though:  I won and set a new personal best for ‘highest-rated-player-that-I’ve-ever-beaten’.

That I won the game is clearly of importance to nobody but me. Of more general interest, perhaps, is That Move. 7. d5 in the main line of the Leningrad certainly wasn’t Keene’s invention, but he played it frequently in the early 1970s and remained an enthusiastic advocate of the idea well into the 1980s (e.g. see An Opening Repertoire for White, Batsford 1984).

I was pleased that Keene’s recommendation could still bring me a practical success all these years later. In the days after the game was played, though, I began to wonder about the theoretical status of that decades-old preparation. In today’s database + engine riddled chess world could it really still stand up? The answer to that question, I discovered, is yes. That old analysis has turned out to be exceedingly durable and, forty years of theoretical advances notwithstanding, it seems that 7. d5 is still worth a look even today.

So, it's the Streatham v Red Hill match.  My game quickly reaches the basic starting point of the Leningrad variation and I am pondering my move. 7. Nc3 - the main line and clearly the most natural choice - would have copied T.C. v GM Neil McDonald, the game being played just behind me on the match's top-board. What about 7. d5, an old favourite of Ray Keene's, instead? The move I had been waiting more than twenty years to play.

In pushing the queen's pawn, White opens up the diagonal of Black's dark-squared bishop. He also reduces his options against some of Black's choices since after 7. ... c6 (or 7. ... Qe8) 8. Nc3 we are back in the main lines but with White already committed to d4-d5 (e.g. Keene-Wirthensohn, Hannover 1976: see RCP VI). In practice that's only a problem if you don't want to advance in the centre anyway, but on principle it is preferable to 'reserve the greater option' [now, who coined that term?] unless there is a specific reason not to, so what's the benefit to Keene's move?

Raymondo's justification was that after the 'normal' 7. Nc3 Black could try ... Nc6, 8. d5 Ne5, 9. Nxe5 dxe5 reaching a position where s/he has a threatening phalanx of pawns in the centre. Thirty or forty years of theory later, the line might have been defanged - in Starting Out 1. d4! (Everyman 2008), for example, John Cox considers it to be "teetering on the verge of refutation" - but the pawns still looked intimidating to me and there was also 7. Nc3 Nc6, 8. d5 Na5 to consider, an idea which the aforementioned GM McDonald had suggested in a book published just six months ago.

All in all, then, reducing Black's options and avoiding ... Nc6 if I could seemed like a pretty good idea.  I was also mindful of the fact that many of Keene's opponents had responded to 7. d5 with 7. ... c5 aiming for a kind of Yugoslav King's Indian (with ... Na6-c7, ...Rb8, ... a6, ... b5 etc) but with the extra move ... f5 thrown in. My occasional fellow blogger, I knew, had scored particularly well against this set-up. 3.5/4, in fact, and against decent opposition too: Keene-Matulovic, Nice Olympiad 1970; Keene-Hindle, County Match 1970; Keene-Jansa, Nice Olympiad 1974 and the following game against a man who, several years afterwards, he would replace as second to Viktor Korchnoi.

So, 7. d5 it was, then, and, happily enough, I subsequently won the game. A couple of days afterwards I asked the Chess Pub folk how they felt the idea had aged.

The first response I received went,

... if Black is normally a 7.Nc3 Qe8 player, he should be able to meet 7.d5 with 7...Na6 or 7...a5 (according to preference) and his position is more flexible than in the main lines, since he can decide when to insert ...Qe8, or whether to play it at all ...

This is just armchair reasoning (and how I would think if confronted with 7.d5 in a game), so please correct me if I'm wrong!

which, as it happens, is exactly how my game had proceeded! I'd hoped that 7. d5 would give my opponent a small surprise, but he played ... Na6 and ... Nc5 without batting an eye.

Where does all this leave us with 7. d5? I suspect that the ChessPubber who described it as theoretically irrelevant is almost certainly right. Still, it's not a bad move and it is perhaps deserving a little more attention than it gets these days. It definitely has some practical value despite, or perhaps precisely because, not being mentioned in McDonald's Starting Out: The Dutch, or Stefan Pedersen's book on the Leningrad from back in 1996 (nor Beim either, according to the ChessPub thread).  McDonald's latest book, I discovered, describes 7. d5 as "annoying".  Reason enough to play it, I would have thought.

Anyhoo, I will retain some affection for the move just as long as the current game remains my highest-rated opponent beaten. Not that the opening had anything to do the with the result, of course. As you can see, I didn't play particularly well, just well enough to be hanging in there when, in time trouble, the other guy went for a mating attack that didn't quite work. Still, they all count.

Which brings me to the diagram at the head of today's blog. The game ended up finishing on move 42, but had Black sealed 42. ... Ba6 instead of ... Kg5 I might well have ended up having to travel to Red Hill to win a rook, bishop, knight and pawn against queen ending. Not that that should have been too tricky, but it would have been a drag and, moreover, it would not have been in the least bit necessary had I finished the game immediately from move 36.

White to play and win. I'm sure the man who gave me the idea of playing 7. d5 would have found the solution without any difficulty whatsoever, but then both as a theorist and at the board, Ray could play. I, however, cannot.





Ray Keene Index

Invisible Anti Chess

The Times

11th April 1980

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

Viktor Korchnoi was quite the celeb thirty years ago. Not exactly the Wayne Rooney of his day, perhaps, but certainly a frequent guest on the pages of our national newspapers. He first hit the headlines when he defected from the USSR in 1976 (e.g. "Soviet chess grandmaster seeks asylum in Holland after Moscow criticism" The Times front page 28/7/1976, and seven follow-up articles within two months in The Times alone) and  there he stayed for a good five years. As Viktor transformed himself from Renegade Grandmaster to World Championship Challenger the press were watching his every move.  The media's interest was such that his matches against Spassky in Belgrade, 1977/78 (WwwK II, III, IV, V, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI) and Karpov in Baguio, 1978 are probably still the second and third most publicised chess events of all time.

No surprise, then, that on April the 11th 1980, the simple fact that Korchnoi was about to play in a tournament in London was considered sufficient justification for The Times to publish a picture of him at the chessboard on their front page.

One of many - and very much not invisible

Amateur chessers were no less infatuated with Viktor the Terrible than were Fleet Street's editors. The first impression of Korchnoi's biography, Chess is My Life (B.T. Batsford, 1977), quickly sold out and three different games collections - Viktor Korchnoi’s Best Games (Philidor Press, 1977), Korchnoi’s 400 Best Games (B.T. Batsford, 1978) and Korchnoi’s Chess Games (Oxford University Press, 1979) appeared within the blink of an eye. To these tomes the avid fan could add Korchnoi vs Spassky: Chess Crisis (B.T. Batsford, 1978), Karpov-Korchnoi 1978: The inside story of the match (B.T. Batsford, 1978)* and, indeed, a brace of books on the World Championship match from authors who weren't directly involved - Karpov-Korchnoi 1978 - The Battle of Baguio City (Bill Hartston, Hutchinson & Co Ltd, 1978) and Karpov vs. Korchnoi World Chess Championship 1978 (Bent Larsen, Unwin, 1978). The British chess community, as it wouldn't have been called then, seems to have had an insatiable appetite for all things Korchnoi.

No surprise, then, that in the Aug-Sep 1980 edition of CHESS (vol 45, nos. 841-842), Tim Harding writes,

"Korchnoi has recently written a book called Anti Chess which he hopes will soon be available in an English translation."

Well yes, actually, I rather think it is.

Think about it for a moment. When books about Viktor Korchnoi were all but literally flying off the shelves, and any Tom, Dick or Harry (Ray, Bill or Bent, if you prefer) could see their name on the cover of a book if they included the words "Baguio" and "1978" in the title, wouldn't you expect publishers to be forming an orderly queue at the merest hint of a suggestion from Viktor that he wanted to tell the story in his own words? So why is Korchnoi only hopeful that the book will appear?

Perhaps he was just being realistic. The book, as we now know, never did make it into print in this country. It was published in England (although not in English) and it was published in English (although not in England), but as far as Blighty was concerned, to all intents and purposes, Anti Chess simply didn't exist. British chessers just had to make do without it.

Why? Why did the publishers of chess literature in the early 1980s turn their backs on what would surely have been a commercial success?

We'll get back to that next week (sneak preview: the Anti-Chess story involves a remarkable cameo from Raymond Dennis Keene and, possibly, the KGB). For now, let's just give thanks for the internet and the great service it does for those of us who want to read about our favourite game. Dear old Gidders might not like it, but, at least now, should somebody here think that it's not a good idea for us to read something, we can choose to ignore them and go buy it there, regardless of where 'there' might happen to be.







* by far the best of Raymondo's 'instants' in your author's humble opinion.

See also:-
WwwK XVIII ... we kept schtum

Every Picture Tells A Story: Hereford Ho Ho!

Number 8 in a series of collaborative posts. This one by Martin Smith with comment by Richard Tillett.

This is another in our series of blogs about this 1815 picture, The Hereford Chess Club by Thomas Leeming:

Reproduced courtesy of the Hereford Heritage and Museum Service ©

In the last two episodes Richard told the life-story of the artist, based on research in online databases and local history archives. It is more than we imagined we would unearth when we looked at a reproduction of the picture for the first time in December 2009. In fact our quest seems to have a life of its own, with new avenues of enquiry opening up at every turn.

The first surprise was the discovery that there were two versions, and in the Autumn of 2010 we went to Hereford to see the one illustrated above, held by the local Museum and Art Gallery. With a spare half hour we pottered around the handsome Norman Cathedral hoping we might chance upon Leeming’s portrait of Canon Russell. It had been shown at the Royal Academy in 1816. We guessed the picture might have ended up in the Cathedral but, alas, it was nowhere to be seen.
 
Back in London we tried again - by the simple expedient of phoning the Cathedral: “Oh yes, you mean the one of Canon Russell holding the reliquary”. So it was there all the time, not decorating the walls but hidden in the archives.

Now it's late January 2011, and here we are once again in the Cathedral. The helpful and enthusiastic Kirsty Clarke unwraps the picture but, as we already knew, this is not Leeming’s original but a contemporaneous copy. It’s a larger-than-usual portrait miniature and not as well painted as the original would have been, but hey, it’s the next best thing. It has a fetching maple frame dating from later in the 19th century (somewhat eccentrically, the picture doesn’t fit the frame, hence the black strips around the edges of the picture).

Copy, by an unknown hand, of Leeming's 1816 portrait of Canon Russell.

© The Dean and Chapter of Hereford Cathedral.

We tell Ms Clarke the story of the Gents, including John Allen Junior (first on the left in the Chess Club), the compiler of Bibliotheca Herefordiensis published in 1821 of which only 25 copies were printed. “So,” she says, “would you like to see our copy?” Would we? “Not half” we splutter, and out comes this incredibly rare leather-bound, vellum-paged volume in pristine condition. We browse through it hoping for mentions of the Gents. But we find something better – a mention of Thomas Leeming himself.

On page 96 Allen refers to an etching by Leeming of the Reverend William Hollings of Hereford of 1820 – the first we knew that Leeming had etching in his skills portfolio. As it happens there’s a pen-and-watercolour sketch of the same man by Leeming in the city art collection. This may have been the sketch from which the etching was made, but in spite of scouring the internet since our visit we have so far failed to track down a copy of the etching.

Ms Clarke later retrieved from the Archive a reference to another Leeming picture, a miniature of Canon John Napleton done in 1814, although the Cathedral no longer has the painting itself. The Napleton portrait now joins the Hollings etching in our ever-longer List of Lost Leemings.
 
All in all a richly productive visit to the Cathedral. We cross the road to the local resources section of Hereford Library to see once again the bound volumes of the Hereford Journal, edited in Leeming’s time by Edwin Goode Wright (seated third from right).

We head straight to the pages for May 1822, the time of Leeming’s demise. Is there an obituary? Yes, as revealed in our last blog, and very exciting it is too, as it’s the first comment about him by a contemporary that we’ve discovered. It contains much that we didn’t know, with references to some of his pictures including an altarpiece for the Cathedral. What’s that? Another Leeming in the Cathedral? Funny that Ms Clarke didn’t mention it, but we’ll check that out when we get back home.

We also look up the Journal's reports of the Hereford Chess Congress of 1885. We were put onto this by the present day Gents of Hereford (and Worcester) Chess, Alan Leary, Les Collard and Ray Collett, with whom we’ve been in contact almost from the off, and who constitute a kind of semi-detached outpost of the Institute of Thomas Leeming Studies. There’s a lot to be said about the 1885 Congress – a whole blog’s worth in fact. For now, here are the Gents of the Hereford Congress.

 

The participants in the 1885 Hereford Congress, including Bird (standing third from left) and Blackburne (seated second from left), but not Tarrasch who, at the last moment and amid some controversy, declined to attend.

Now in full cry, we go to the Herefordshire County Record Office for a little more rummaging. We turn up one or two tit-bits, but nothing quite as significant as the day’s earlier discoveries, or the one waiting for us...
Leeming’s altarpiece was, according to the obituary, a copy of a painting of Christ Carrying His Cross. The original was, and still is, in Magdalen College Chapel in Oxford, and there’s even a photo on Flickr where it appears in the background.

The Original Christ Carrying His Cross in Magdalen College Chapel, Oxford.

Back in London we contact the Cathedral again and yes, they have a picture just like it and a record from 1817 that confirms it to be a copy by our man: ‘Mr Leeming for picture over the altar 52.10.0 and for frame 15.0.0’ (that's £sd, by the way). An expensive picture, and the frame wasn’t cheap either. It is hanging high on a wall in the North East Transept. If we needed another reason to go back to Hereford yet again, here it is.
Leeming and his contemporaries believed that the original picture was by the Spanish 17th century artist Francisco Ribalta. Except that it almost certainly wasn’t – and we’ll have more to say about the attribution in our 30 April blog, when we tell the story of our third visit to Hereford. But we have one more blog before that, on the 16 April, when we look at the chess at The Hereford Chess Club.

A footnote on reliquaries. The Russell Reliquary was bequeathed to the Cathedral by Canon Thomas Russell the Younger (the subject of Leeming’s portrait) in 1831. It is a casket made c1200-10 to preserve a revered piece, maybe a finger bone, of St. Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was assassinated by followers of King Henry II in 1170. The dastardly deed is depicted in enamel on the casket’s main panel.

Not the Hereford Reliquary, but another like it, in Limoges enamel, with assassination in full swing.

Photo: British Museum.

A locking door at the back opens to reveal a chamber for the relic itself, though that has long since disappeared from the Russell Reliquary, which was displayed in 1999 at an exhibition in Limoges. 14 others from the four corners of Christendom were also on view. Not since 1170 had so much Becket been assembled in one place.

Acknowledgements.

With thanks to Kirsty Clarke, Library and Archives Assistant, Hereford Cathedral.

The Hereford Congress picture originates in the Illustrated London News, but was sourced from here .

Every Picture Tells A Story Index

Chess in Art Index

Strike two

Name Withheld v Horton, Benasque, July 2010. Position after 18...fxe4

White wrote down the move 19.fxe4, which loses swiftly. He did not play it. He then thought about it, crossed it out and wrote down the move 19.Re3*, which he subsequently played.

This is illegal.

In fact, simply writing the move down before playing it is illegal. The possibility that one might then change it is the whole reason for the law.

Name Withheld v Horton, club match, March 2011. Position after 32...Rc4-c5.

White wrote down the move 33.Rb4, which loses swiftly. He did not play it. He then thought about it, crossed it out and wrote down the move 33.h4, which he subsequently played.

This is illegal.

In fact, simply writing the move down before playing it is illegal. The possibility that one might then change it is the whole reason for the law.

As it happens, the first game was won by Black: the second ended in a draw which did not affect the match result. But let's have a look at the Laws Of Chess: specifically, at article 8, "The recording of the moves".

8.1

In the course of play each player is required to record his own moves and those of his opponent in the correct manner, move after move, as clearly and legibily as possible, in the algebraic notation (See Appendix C), on the scoresheet prescribed for the competition.

It is forbidden to write the moves in advance, unless the player is claiming a draw according to Article 9.2, or 9.3 or adjourning a game according to the Guidelines of Adjourned Games point 1.a.

This is plain enough: "forbidden", save for some clearly-defined exceptions. It should not happen. It is not permitted.

Except that it does happen, and is permitted. Because there is nothing in the rules to say what penalty is applied to those who transgress that rule.

At least, this is true at club level, though it can work differently in tournaments. In the first of the two instances cited above, which took place in an international tournament, I called an arbiter, who applied no penalty but did inform the other player that the action was illegal, which I understand is a generally applied procedure (a second infraction resulting in, I think, a warning, and a third in loss of the game).

Which is OK as far as it goes, though it is at very least strange to have an infracton of the rules for which there is no penalty. But in the second instance, there was no arbiter to whom I could appeal, and had to point out the infraction to my team captain - who was unaware the rule existed. My opponent, who said he was aware, was apologetic, though he continued to do the same thing, to transgress the same rule, until the end of the game.

As you may gather, I am not entirely happy about this. I don't like being in a position where I am playing to one version of the rules and my opponent is playing to another. I also don't like being in a position where drawing attention to those rules is not effective, and hence causes more inconvenience to the player who complains about a breach of the rules than is caused to the player who commits it.

It's a relatively new rule, of course, and one that goes directly against what many of us learned and practised, which was to write down the move first and play it only after some further thought. I learned that from Simon Webb, and also, I think, from Kotov, and followed their advice for perhaps twenty years.

So when the rule was made, on the grounds that writing the move in advance constituted the making and consulting of notes, it required took a certain amount of unlearning of well-establish habits, a process a lot of players have never undergone. Which may explain why, in my experience, it's one of the most-ignored rules in the book (along with, for instance, adjusting the pieces with the opponent's clock running and not recording draw offers). It's difficult for people to change. I appreciate that. But it is either a rule or it is not. And if there is no penalty for breaking that rule and doing the very thing the rule is supposed to prevent, what purpose has the rule?

I think there are two issues here. One is that the Laws of Chess make great deal of reference to arbiters, and yet are meant to apply in many situations where there are no arbiters present. This renders a little problematic the preamble, in the Laws, which states:

the Laws of Chess cannot cover all possible situations that may arise during a game, nor can they regulate all administrative questions. Where cases are not precisely regulated by an Article of the Laws, it should be possible to reach a correct decision by studying analogous situations which are discussed in the Laws. The Laws assume that arbiters have the necessary competence, sound judgement and absolute objectivity. Too detailed a rule might deprive the arbiter of his freedom of judgement and thus prevent him from finding the solution to a problem dictated by fairness, logic and special factors.

Perfectly reasonable, but the problem is that the Laws frequently need to be interpreted and applied by people who do not "have the necessary competence, sound judgement and absolute objectivity". And this seems to me to require a slightly different, tighter approach.

The second is the rule itself. I've never liked it much. When it was introduced I thought it an over-pedantic interpretation of what constituted a note, although there are many others who think it a good rule and a necessary one. Either way, if you're going to have a rule, then players should abide by it, and if they don't, then either set out clearly what should happen, or don't have the rule at all.

As it goes, there's a very close analogy elsewhere in the Laws, and one with which we're all familiar, in which the player who has clearly made a selection is prevented from changing it. It's in Article 4, "The act of moving the pieces".

4.3

Except as provided in Article 4.2, if the player having the move deliberately touches on the chessboard:

a.
one or more of his own pieces, he must move the first piece touched which can be moved.

It's analogous to touching a piece. Everybody knows that if you touch a piece, you have to move it: it requires no arbiter to say so.

So all right. Suppose we looked at 8.1 the same way? We might amend it as follows:

It is forbidden to write the moves in advance, unless the player is claiming a draw according to Article 9.2, or 9.3 or adjourning a game according to the Guidelines of Adjourned Games point 1.a. If a move is written in advance, the player who has done so shall be obliged to play it.

Too draconian? Probably. All right, how about this?

It is forbidden to write the moves in advance, unless the player is claiming a draw according to Article 9.2, or 9.3 or adjourning a game according to the Guidelines of Adjourned Games point 1.a. If a player does write a move in advance of playing it, and subsequently plays another, they should be warned on the first occasion, and on the second, required to play the move originally written.

Or similar. I'm up for alternative suggestions. What I'm not up for is playing to rules that other people aren't expected to play to.

Yes, of course I can see objections to this - suppose for instance that the original move has been scrubbed out so thoroughly as to be impossible to reconstruct? - and yes, of course I can see how people might feel it's taking a small point too seriously. (Then again, I thought that when the rule was created.) But people playing by different rules is something to take seriously. As is having rules which you don't enforce.

If this was just a one-off, it'd be a different story. But that's twice in less than a year, and only the two most recent occurrences of several in my games: and if it's repeatedly happening to me, my guess is that it is happening all the time. I think it's stupid to have rules that in practice are not applied, and wrong to put players in the position where they can't expect them to apply. So let us either enforce it, or let us not have the rule at all. For having laws which are not enforced brings the law itself into disrepute.



[* actually 19.Te3, the Spanish for rook being torre.]

Once upon a chessgame

There is a chess book that does not exist, the dimensions of a big old wooden chess board, its cover plated with gold, and on some distant desert island the thick parchmenty pages waft past with a slow, comforting wump; a hand-drawn diagram here on the left, delightful and original prose descriptions on the right, the occasional letter endowed, even, with a calligraphical flourish.

Here is one such position. White to play and win.

No doubt you solve this one yourself, but you are not reading this book just to solve puzzles. Instead your eye turns from the diagram and you begin to read:

I was a teenage Mars Bar thief

“Eighteen years on Feller, Marzolo and Hauchard are surely not the last to follow in von Neumann’s footsteps, just the latest.”

Or so I wrote last Tuesday, anyway. I was wrong, though. A new case had already come to light – and right here in England too – so La Farce Olympienne (© Seani the Invisible Blogger) had already lost its position as the most recent example of silicon-based cheating in chess.

Another chesser being caught cheating in this way is hardly to be welcomed, but at least the ECF has now been spurred into action (see yesterday’s post). If we’re lucky the fact that it happened to involve a junior* might also bring to an end calls for those who have been caught cheating to be handed automatic life bans.

It’s not difficult to imagine circumstances in which it might be appropriate to permanently exclude somebody from the game. To instigate such a punitive measure without any regard to the context of the incident, though? That’s patently unjust. All of us – even the police officers and tabloid journalists amongst us – would do well to remember that youthful folly is not the exclusive preserve of those who are currently young.

Since I am talking about other people’s juvenile indiscretions today, it is only right that I tell you about my own. I was once, you see, a stealer of Mars Bars. Literally just the once: one otherwise completely unremarkable day - I would have been about 13 - I helped myself to some chocolate as I left WH Smiths. I didn’t even want any particularly, and yet I slipped a Mars Bar into my jacket pocket and walked out of the door.

It was an impulsive act, and I haven’t the faintest clue why I did it. I had money in my pocket to pay, but nevertheless I stole from a shop in my local high street. However, in the thirty years that have since passed I’ve yet to do it again, and neither have I done anything else that might attract the attention of the local constabulary for that matter, so consider me fully rehabilitated. “Bloody Hell! That’s extortionate”, I think when I see the price of Mars Bars these days. I don’t pinch them, though.

The peak offending age being between 14 and 18**, it would seem that my story is far from unique. This is not to say that all teenagers commit crimes, just that people who do offend are very much inclined to start early and stop pretty soon afterwards. I suspect that this also true, more so probably, for those (like me) who don’t appear in the official crime statistics for the simple reason that their stupidity went unobserved.

The moral of the story for the chess world is, I think, rather obvious. People do boneheaded things when they are young and whether in the tournament room or outside in the world at large, they are usually acting like morons rather than Moriartys. An automatic indefinite ban for adolescent cheats would be manifestly ridiculous and, moreover, deeply unfair.

It is unjust to ban juniors for life? Certainly. Aside from the fact it is far from obvious that a cheating teenager will continue to dupe his/her opponents once s/he’s matured a bit, consider how long a punishment we’d be talking about here. A swift googling leads me to believe that life expectancy in Britain is currently a shade under 80. A life ban for 17 year old, then, could mean something like 63 years being prevented from playing chess. This is what we want? Really?

As well as the need for us to give a proportionate response, there is the question of the wrong-doer's culpability too. Imagine, for example, if Gata Kamsky was a junior today. If any parent is going to encourage their child to cheat it’s going to be somebody like his father isn’t it? Were we to catch the child of that sort of man cheating would it really be right to say, “you can never play again”? Who would really be guilty there? The adolescent encouraged (forced might be a better word) into cheating or the bully they had the misfortune to have as a parent?

To be honest, I don’t think automatic life bans would help us tackle the problem of cheating in chess anyway, and I tend to feel they would make the chess world worse rather than better.  That’s a blog for another time, though. For today let's just say that while the arguments against them don’t only apply to juniors, the absurdity of permanent removal from the game regardless of the circumstances is certainly highlighted when a child is involved. Let us condemn the behaviour for sure, and agree a punishment too where appropriate, but let’s not forget that people – even chessers – do grow up. That they can, and do, change.

As it happens, last weekend I was nosing around one of the seedier corners of the internet (not that sort of website is all that I’ll tell you) when I came across something that rather shocked me. Not the thing itself, but the fact that somebody that I knew appeared to be involved.

Was it really my friend? It turned out that it was. He was 17 at the time, he told me, and now deeply ashamed of what he had done. I asked if he’d object to me using his story as an example of how a person can get up to something that would generally be regarded as reprehensible in their younger days and yet still go on to become a fully-respectable member of society later in life.

“I think I kinda would mind. At the moment, anyway. I mean, there's no hiding from it -- it's there for all to see -- but I'm in the process of trying to forge a relatively serious career at the moment.”

So there we leave it. In life, as in chess, sometimes it’s right that we allow people to forget and move on, don’t you think?








* with thanks to Kevin Thurlow and Andrew Farthing for bringing the matter to my attention.


** Oxford Handbook of Criminology, ed. Maguire, Morgan & Reiner: OUP 2007.  This was true throughout the second half of the 20th Century in both England and America. The figure for females, I mention as a by-the-by, is slightly lower than it is for males. 

von Neuman Ree visited

Today I want to return [What Happened Next? XVI; What Happened Next XVI] to John von Neumann. More specifically, I want to take another look at Hans Ree’s account of what happened at the 1993 World Open.

The most interesting thing about Shoes on Fire (reprinted in The Human Comedy of Chess, Russell Enterprises 1999) is not so much the facts of the case per se. As Richard James’ comment to last Monday’s post shows, you can find these, albeit with variations, all over the internet. No, what really stands out to the modern eye is Ree’s insight that von Neumann would come to be seen as just the tip of an iceberg towards which the good ship Chess World was steaming. Allowing ourselves the benefit of the eighteen years’ worth of hindsight unavailable to the Dutchman, we can see that he was entirely right, albeit perhaps in a way that he had not intended.

In the years since Ree’s article, cases of cheating with computers have surfaced with ever-increasing frequency. If von Neumann was a warning then so was the introduction of Pocket PCs running cut down versions of Fritz, and so is the emerging possibility of running the strongest engines on nothing more than a common or garden mobile phone. The alarms have gone unheeded, though, and we find ourselves no better prepared to deal with the spread of the silicon menace than we were in 1993.

With the recent decision in the French Olympiad case and the emergence of a British example of computer cheating (more on that tomorrow), another look at Ree’s two-decade old prophesy seemed more than timely. After reviewing what has happened since Shoes on Fire and the extent (or lack thereof) of the chess world’s readiness to deal with computer cheating, perhaps, like me, you'll be left feeling both concerned and optimistic: troubled at the situation in which we find ourselves, hopeful that the problem can be tackled and yet worried about where we’ll end up if it isn’t.

A superb book -

and Big Malc will flog it to you for a mere £7.50

Revisiting Ree's article to discover how he came to the conclusion that cheating by computer had a big future, we see that his starting point is the rank incompetence of the attempted fraud. von Neumann was so inept – his use of technology so ham-fisted, his choice of pseudonym so transparent – that Ree finds it impossible to take him seriously. von Neumann, he concludes, must have had a bigger plan in mind than the simple attempt to grab a few dollars away from some gullible amateur chessers.

If there was more to von Neumann than met the eye, what could he have been up to? Was he a decoy designed to attract attention away from a colleague who was using equally dubious methods to secure an even bigger prize? (The ‘smokescreen theory’ that David Sedgwick and I briefly discussed at Golden Lane last Monday night.) Was he an agent provocateur? Hoping to clean up in the libel courts after goading somebody into saying something that couldn’t be proved?

Ree’s ‘fiendish plot’ hypothesis could be true, I suppose, but I doubt it. As an erstwhile magician and one-time student of criminology, I can say with some confidence that the methods employed by those who make their living by deception are typically much less intricate than those imagined by the folk left trying to explain what they have seen. In the absence of any further evidence, then, I don’t particularly feel the need to consider von Neumann to be anything other than he appeared to be.

Where Ree was on the money was spotting the future significance of electronic cheating. He was right for the wrong reasons, perhaps - he thought that the ’93 World Open was a trial run for a group of organised criminals who wanted to know whether setting up shop in the chess world was worth their while - but he knew full well that there were many more John von Neumanns around the corner.

“It will probably be quite a while before someone knowing nothing about chess except for its notation will manage to penetrate into the ranks of elite players ...”, Ree said. I wonder if he has been surprised at the rate of change since the late 1990s. If it wasn’t the case that the best of humanity ceased to be a match for Stean’s Bloody Iron Monsters when Kasparov lost to Deep(er) Blue in 1997, it’s certainly true now.

Chess engines have become stronger and computer technology has become more portable and affordable. At the same time those, like von Neumann and the three Frenchies, who require communication with a third-party to enact their dirty deeds find mobile phones ubiquitous in a way that was unimaginable back in 1993. As a result cheating at chess has become democratised. Once restricted to people who were in contact with somebody who could both play the game and be trusted to co-operate/stay quiet, underhand methods to win games of chess are now available to anybody willing to make use of them. No surprise, then, that since Shoes on Fire was written silicon-powered cheating has expanded exponentially.

Consider this roll of ‘honour’: a list of cases in which it is either proven or strongly suspected that cheating by computer took place:-

• 1993 John von Neuman at the World Open
• 1998 Clemens Allwermann at the Boblinger Open [Chessbase]
• 2003 Unnamed adult (W.S) at Lampertsheim Open, Holland [Chessbase]
• 2006 DP Singh [Chessbase; RHP Forum]
• 2006 Umakant Sharma [Chess Vibes; Chessbase]
• 2006 Steve Rosenberg/World Open [Chessbase; Chessbase II]
• 2007 Unnamed adult, Holland [Chess Vibes; Chessbase; S&BC Blog]
• 2008 M. Sadatnajafi at the Dubai Open [Chessbase]
• 2009 Unnamed 14-year-old, Australia [Chess Vibes]
• 2009 Jean-Michel Mondoloni at the Paris Open [Echecs & Strategie]
• 2010 Feller, Marzolo and Hauchard at the Khanty-Mansyik Olympiad [Chess Vibes]
• 2011 Unnamed UK junior [EC Forum]

In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that unfounded allegations -  the best known examples being Nigel Short at the 2008 Commonwealth Championship and Mamedyarov at the Aeroflot Open 2009 - are on the increase too. To these we should also add the incidents that are difficult to categorise: Topalov at San Luis 2005, Elista 2006 and Wijk aan Zee 2007 for example. What do we call these? Cynical attempts to smear an opponent? Unwarranted suspicions? Unproven suspicions? A player caught, but getting away Scot free? Your guess is as good as mine.

Anyhoo, the increasing frequency of computer-based cheating over the last five years in particular is glaringly apparent. Nevertheless, chess authorities at all levels - international, national and local - are still completely unprepared to handle these incidents.


FIDE
FIDE’s website includes a page dedicated to news and announcements from our favourite game's governing body. Recent articles include things like “Congratulations to Vasily Filipenko” - “Dear Vasily Aleksandrovich! On behalf of the World Chess Federation and me personally, I cordially congratulate you on your election as Chairman of the Duma and the Head of Khanty-Mansiysk city!” - and “Caution” - “This is to inform all chess players / organisers / officials that any chess event organized under the banner of "Amateur Chess Association" is not recognized by FIDE." - but, even though the Frenchmen were caught cheating at FIDE’s own world team championship, you will search in vain for any comment on either their actions our how FIDE intend to respond. There’s not even so much as a “Do you know, on the whole we kind of tend to feel that secretly using computers to help you play a game of chess is sort of a little bit naughty”. Nada.

As long ago as 2007, the Association of Chess Professionals contacted FIDE to request that something be done about cheating in chess. Unfortunately Kirsan and his chums must have been busy with other matters for the past four years because, clearly, nothing happened as a result of that intervention.


ECF
I’m surely not the only one to have been surprised and somewhat concerned at Andrew Farthing’s response to a question posed on the EC Forum:

“The formal advice that I have received indicates that "the ECF does not have any legal mechanism" to punish players for cheating. Sanctions are possible within the specific event (in accordance with the laws of chess), but more far-reaching sanctions - such as a fine or a ban - appear to be problematic.”

Actually, I know I’m not because Andrew continues,

“Speaking for myself, without the benefit of discussion with the Board, this situation is unsatisfactory and needs to be clarified.”

Credit is due to the ECF’s Chief Executive Officer, both for engaging in the debate in the first place, and for acknowledging a poor state of affairs and setting himself about the task of putting matters right. That we are in a far from ideal situation is not Andrew Farthing’s fault. His responses thus far do at least give some cause for optimism that, as far as English chess goes, things will change for the better in the coming months.


LOCAL LEAGUES FOR LOCAL PEOPLE

Finally, what of your local league? How confident are you that procedures are in place to deal with an occurrence of cheating in your area? To be fair to our league and club officials – who do a fairly thankless job after all – this kind of incident would be very difficult and unpleasant to handle, especially when we factor in the observation that (suspected) cheating is often accompanied by threats of legal action from those accused. All the more reason, I would suggest, for each league/club/chess association to lay down in advance a clear process to be followed as and when the need arises.

Hans Ree

Chess Visionary and first-rate karaoke singer

Photograph from Chess Vibes

Hans Ree closed Shoes on Fire with this conclusion:

“I think it was a test.”

We can see now that he was absolutely right. It wasn’t some Sopranos-like bunch of ne’er-do-wells being examined, though. It was us. Twenty years ago the chess world coped with John von Neumann’s attempts to swindle himself a few bucks. Ree asked if we were prepared for a future when cheating with computers was a considerably less amateurish affair. I’m not sure that we were back then; I don't know that we are now.

Is all this a lot of fuss over nothing? Even with the escalation of cases in the last five years, we're still only talking about an average of one instance anywhere in the world every six months or so after all. That's certainly true, but consider this: these are just the ones that we (or I, anyway) know about. They are the most egregious examples; the ones where the person concerned got caught.

When you examine the details, you can also see that they are, like von Neumann, cases that often involve a fair degree of incompetence from those concerned - absurd tournament performances; multiple unexplained absences from the board; 100s of points of rating increases within a few months; layers of clothing worn in hot weather. Even the French Connection, a cheating ring with a sophisticated coding system, was rumbled because they used a mobile phone that belonged to the French Chess Federation's Vice President. As little as £20 spent on a pay-as-you-go mobile instead and they could still be up and running.

The idea that the dozen or so instances listed here are the only cases of chess cheating beggars belief. There are, I'm quite sure, people out there who were and are getting away with it.  Bearing that in mind, imagine the rapidly-increasing rate of known cheating by computer going on for another 18 years. If nothing at all is done, chess could end up somewhere rather unpleasant indeed. Probably just as well, then, that the ECF, if not FIDE, are starting to give the matter some serious consideration.




PS:
Shoes from here.

A Literary Reference : Einstein's Dreams

Then there are those who think their bodies don't exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o'clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock. They make love between eight and ten at night. They work forty hours a week, read the Sunday paper on Sunday, play chess on Tuesday nights. When their stomach growls, they look at their watch to see if it is time to eat. When they begin to lose themselves in a concert, they look at the clock above the stage to see when it will be time to go home. They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection of chemicals, tissues and nerve impulses. .... It is graduation day at Agassiz Gymnasium. One hundred twenty-nine boys in white shirts and brown ties stand on marble steps and fidget in the sun while the headmaster reads out their names. One the front lawn, parents and relatives listen halfheartedly, stare at the ground, doze in their chairs. The valedictorian delivers his address in a monotone. He smiles weakly when handed his medal and drops it in a bush after the ceremony. No one congratulates him. The boys, their mothers, fathers, sisters walk listlessly to houses on Amthausgasse and Aarstraase, or to the waiting benches near the Bahnhofplatz, sit after the noon meal, play cards to pass time, nap. Dress clothes are folded and put away for another occasion. At the end of the summer, some of the boys go to university in Berne or in Zürich, some work in their fathers' businesses, some travel to Germany or France in search of a job. These passages take place indifferently, like the back-and-forth swing of a pendulum, like a chess game in which each move is forced. For in this world, the future is fixed.

Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams, Warner, 1994, p.25, p.158-9. (Original date of publication 1993.)

[A Literary Reference index]

[Thanks to Tom]

A brilliant idea?

There's been a few controversial changes, in recent years, in how FIDE expects chess, and chess tournaments, to be run. Faster time-limits, zero default times, proposals for drug testing. I've been sceptical about all of these, albeit perhaps less so than some others. However, the latest proposal - to eliminate opening preparation by having the opening few moves selected by computer, just before the game - strikes me as gimmicky, counter-productive, and wrong.

I understand that, as with all FIDE's questionable initiatives, there are justifications for the idea. Yes, players spend too much time and energy preparing for individual opponents, and they might play better chess if they are relieved of this burden, and therefore arrive at the board fresher. Yes, the public might like to see the players struggling with unfamiliar positions rather than starting the game twenty-five moves down the track - if, indeed, they don't shake hands at that point and go back to their rooms for the next bout of preparation. Yes, there are lines - the Petroff, say, or the Berlin Wall - that a lot of chess fans don't like to see, and if chess is to entertain then perhaps there ought to be more Sicilians and Semi-Slavs. Yes, I know that a similar system operates in Draughts. Come to that, I know that there are such things as theme tournaments.

Next thing they'll probably take away the board altogether

But for all that, it's unnecessary, against the best of our traditions and subject to all sorts of other objections. Who is really going to select these openings? The computer? Would you trust a computer appointed by FIDE?

Can we really be confident that players close to Kirsan and his cronies won't find themselves coincidentally playing openings that they just happen to have studied the night before, while those identified with the Karpov/Kasparov faction find themselves playing crucial games in totally new territory? Even if this doesn't happen, won't all the players be so suspicious of one another - particularly in the present climate - that they'll all be sure that their rivals are getting inside information?

Besides, on what basis are the potential openings going to be selected? It's still not entirely clear to me. Are we always going to select variations generally agreed to be equal, generally agreed to give a small White advantage, or what? Are some people going to sit down to find themselves already holding a losing hand? Are we only going to choose from recently-popular variations, or the whole of chess history? From grandmaster practice or from all levels of chess? From variations that are perceived to be exciting rather than variations perceived to be dull?

Whichever way you do it, there will have to be some kind of weighting, and where there is weighting there is human input, and where there is human input there is the possibility of favouritism and cheating. It seems to me a disaster waiting to happen.

No to the Najdorf

Besides, do we really want a surfeit of Najdorfs? Some of us actually like the Berlin Wall. And the Petroff. And I'd rather see players defending openings on which they've expended hundreds of hours of their own research and experience, rather than swimming around in unfamiliar waters like the rest of us.

Talking of the rest of us - is it what we want? What happens when this idea becomes standard, and we have to sit down at board 350 of some tournament that happens to be FIDE-rated, and play something that we've deliberately spent thirty years avoiding, just because some computer tells us to?

I say no to this nonsense, and I would urge other people to do likewise. Please write (email webmaster@fide.com) to the FIDE President - you can also contact FIDE through Twitter - urging that this proposal be abandoned.

Today the Najdorf - but tomorrow, what next? The Sokolsky? The Portuguese Gambit? Fool's Mate?

Rounded with a sleep

Like most patzers suffering yet another slump in form, I dream of quick fixes, of slaying Masters with off-beat openings, oh so cunning psychological ploys, and strategical simplicities.

In this latest slump, I mean the word dream quite literally however. I woke up this morning with the sequence 1. g3 d5 2. Bg2 Bf5 3. c4 e6 4. Nc3 d4 5. Bxb7 dxc3 6. Bxa8 marching through my mind like a victorious army, fanfares streaming, trumpets blaring, the final position held aloft on fluttering banners, my kingly emerging consciousness reveling in imaginary victory.

But it turns out that even when I play against myself, I pick the losing side. Take a quick snooze, and see if you can fail to wake up fully aware of what I had missed. No luck? Try instead using your conscious mind to see why white loses - it should take about two seconds. Still no idea? Then set up a board, play through the sequence, and see for yourself. (Wait: still shrugging your shoulders? We should play.)

Solution after the jump.

What happened next XVI

[Today's post was written before yesterday's comments came in. As you may already have seen, Davee got the right next move while T.C. and David Sedgwick identified What Happened Next.

As chance would have it, I bumped into David (S) at Golden Lane last night. We got talking about von Neumann and David mentioned the "smokescreen theory", something that I intended to come back to in a later post. For the meantime, just remember that some folk believe that there could be more to von Neumann's shenanigans than meets the eye.]

White to play

John von Neumann v A.N. Other, World Open 1993

Yesterday we left John von Neumann considering the ninth move of a game he was playing at the 1993 World Open. Given that he had just three legal moves to chose from, and only one that was even remotely plausible, you might think that what he did was was play 9. bxc3 pretty sharpish. In fact that was the move that White chose, but it wasn't What Happened Next. When faced with the position at the head of today's blog what von Neuman did first was nothing whatsoever for forty minutes.

How did he come to take so long over an absolutely forced move? Did he get drunk and fall asleep at the board a la Tkachiev? Did he nip to the toilet and get himself locked in a cubicle? According to 'Shoes on Fire', Hans Ree's excellent article on the case (republished in The Human Comedy of Chess, Russell Enterprises Inc. 1999), von Neumann did neither of these things. During that extended pause he didn't leave the board at all. He just sat there staring at the ceiling.

Jigger-all might have been what the man behind the White pieces was doing, but there was some activity at his board nonetheless. At some point a spectator approached the table, took a note of the position and then scurried away. It was only some time after this had happened that von Neumann roused himself and managed to make move.

So, what actually was going on during von Neumann's long think? With the benefit of hindsight it seems he was probably starting the chess world off on a ride that would lead directly to the French team's shenanigans at the Olympiad last year. I say "probably" because precisely what it was that von Neumann was up to in Philadelphia has never been proved for sure. Most likely, though, he was using a computer to help him win chess games. If he was, I believe that would make his case the earliest recorded instance of such behaviour at a chess tournament.

Should we accept von Neumann's - presumably unintended - claim to a place in chess history? Let's review the rest of the evidence.

Being dead is usually a pretty good alibi

von Neumann's catatonic episode alone would be enough to get noses twitching. As it happens, though, it was not the first time during the tournament that his behaviour had aroused the curiosity of his fellow competitors. In the fourth round, for example, he lost on time after 9 moves. In the second, though unrated and unknown, he managed to draw with a Grandmaster - Iceland's Helgi Olafsson.

According to Ree (who was quoting John Watson's report in Inside Chess) Olafsson said of that game,

"I was sure I was playing a complete patzer, he had no idea what he was doing and I even thought he was on drugs. He took way too much time to reply to obvious moves and he was very strange. But I made a bad mistake in the opening and I was punished with a draw."

Still, the odd spanner in the works not withstanding, von Neumann's World Open was successful enough that he secured $800 by sharing first place in the unrated section. The Tournament Director had become suspicious, however, and suggested to our man that he both prove his identity and take part in an independent test to demonstrate his chessing skills. At this point von Neumann took to his heels never to return, the prize money that he'd 'won' left uncollected.

If we deduce from this strange behaviour that von Neumann must have been cheating in some way, what is there to suggest that the employment of silicon-based assistance was his method? Well there's the taking of several minutes per move over even forced recaptures (Ree speculates that the mega-long think in the eighth round was the result of a transmission error and von Neumann playing 8. Bxc3 instead of the machine's recommendation of 8. bxc3) for a start, but most telling of all is his name.

John von Neumann was a mathematician who'd made important contributions in the field of computer science amongst other areas. Not the guy at the '93 World Open, another J vN. The chess tournament von Neumann was a "black American with a Rastafarian hairdo" (Ree); the computer geek was born in Hungary. As biographical details go, being black and being Hungarian are not necessarily mutually exclusive, I suppose, but being dead and playing in chess tournaments definitely don't go together [although ...].

Since the Hungarian computer bod John von Neumann died in 1957, I think we can assume that the fellow at the World Open was not him, but an impostor. Unlikely don't you think, that somebody clearly up to no good would choose that particular nomme de guerre were he not benefitting from the help of a Bloody Iron Monster ((c) Michael Stean)? So, yes, I think we can conclude that on the balance of probabilities the '93 World Open von Neumann was the first chesser to be seduced by a computer's charms.

Eighteen years on Feller, Marzolo and Hauchard are surely not the last to follow in von Neumann's footsteps, just the latest*. Two decades ago, a man who will almost certainly never be identified brought a genie out of a bottle and we're never going to get it back in. The question is, how much damage will von Neumann's legacy do?






[EDIT 29/3/11 3:30pm] I should have made it more clear that the account of the von Neumann case outlined above is very much as given in Hans Ree's article - JMGB



What Happened Next? Index







* as the Bard of Barking would say.

What happened next? XVI

White to play

John von Neumann v A.N. Other, World Open 1993

The World Open: Philadelphia, 1993. It is the eighth round and John von Neumann has the White pieces.  His game begins like this ...

... reaching the position at the head of today's blog. So, What Happened Next?

The answer, should it not appear in the comments box in the meantime, will be revealed in a bonus post which will be published tomorrow morning.







What Happened Next? Index

Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric

"... if the brilliant Twin Peaks can't make chess on TV any good, then what possibly might?"

So asked T.C. on the 9th of this month. I suggested The Wire, but Tom thought chess didn't play a big enough part in that marvellous programme for it to count. On that basis we'll have to ignore a Doctor Who story from the Tom Baker era (shame), but perhaps I can interest you in an episode of Blake's 7?

Don't like any of them? Well, feel free to browse our video archive for a few more possibilities (some of which might even still work), or, if you'd rather, stay on this page a watch Doctor Who: Curse of Fenric in its glorious entirety. Yes, it's Sylvester McCoy, the worst-ever Doctor; yes it's Ace the third-worst-ever companion (behind only Bonnie Langford and Catherine Tate), but dagnabbit, chess is central to the whole story.


Bonus question: why might Ace's mum be a fan of our humble blog?

With thanks to Dominick Zwolinski for the tip.