The twelve rook and pawns of Christmas

White to play

The twelve rook and pawns of Christmas

White to play

The twelve rook and pawns of Christmas

White to play

The twelve rook and pawns of Christmas

White to play

The twelve rook and pawns of Christmas

White to play

The twelve rook and pawns of Christmas

Black to play

The twelve rook and pawns of Christmas

White to play

Rhymes For The Times

Here are two chess poems for the festive season. Enjoy!

Chess Piece

Of all the pieces that I've played
    There's none like lovely Rita.
I love to play her opening
    No gambit could be neater.

She is positionally strong
    She knows the variations,
But most of all I like to see
    Her pretty combinations.

I tried to fork her one black night
    But I miscalculated;
She niftily unpinned herself
    And thus she got me mated.

                   [by Jedediah Barrow ]

The Game of the Pawn and the Queen

They may sing of the bat and the wicket,
    Or the raquet and net on the green,
But what are lawn tennis and cricket.
    To the game of the Pawn and the Queen!
The gun is a tyrant and slayer,
    The niblick* a joy for the few;
Give me chess with a chivalrous player,
    And a fig for what others may do! 

In summer when perfume of roses
    Blows in at a half-open door;
When the volume unwillingly closes,
    And talking is voted a bore;
Then oh for some leafy pavilion,
    Some bower the hot rays never drench,
With a friend deeply versed in Sicilian,
    And the intricate web of the French!

And in winter, when dismal and dreary
    The snow flakes fall thick in the street;
When newsboys limp haggard and weary,
    And policemen take nips on their beat;
Then whether it thaws or it freezes,
    For a nook by a warm-giving flame,
With the boxwood and ebony pieces,
    And a comrade adept at the game!

        [Anonymous, early 20th century]

*Niblick: an old-fashioned golf club for lofted shots, corresponding to a number eight or nine iron (Chambers).

   

Acknowledgements.
The selections come from The Poetry of Chess edited and introduced by Andrew Waterman, Anvil Press 1981. With thanks for permission to publish Chess Piece from Gerard Benson (aka Jedediah Barrow), who says that he composed it some forty years ago, when out on a country walk. Gerard Benson selects Poems on the Underground. The Game of the Pawn and the Queen was first published in Chess Lovers' Calendar for 1911, and incorporated in The Yearbook of Chess in 1912.  

Seasonal best wishes to all, from the Streatham & Brixton Chess Bloggers.  

The Total Perspective Vortex

Black to play

A rook endgame, as has been observed before, is an unsettling big place. A fact which, for the sake of a quiet life, most chessers tend to ignore.

Which is to say, they ignore rook endings as best they can. The rationalisation, 'rook endings are boring', is simply that. The reality is that there's just too much to take in.

In short: rook endings are chess's Total Perspective Vortex.

Such is my theory, anyhoo.

Sunday puzzle

I saw this puzzle briefly over a cup of coffee in the bar of a near-deserted business hotel in an industrial park north of Zaragoza a few weeks ago.

It was in El Periódico de Aragón but the paper didn't seem to give any details as to the origin of the puzzle, so let me know via the comments box if you know it. But please, only post solutions and suggestions that you've worked out yourselves without computer aid!

White to play and draw.

Definitely Got Something to do with chess X

Sherlock is back on New Year's Day. Until then, Smullyan's book is not at all a bad way to pass the time.

... to do with chess Index

Dirty Little Secrets II

Previously we were looking at Position 1 in the Times Little Book Of Chess Plagiarism.

Let's have a little look at Position 2.

You think Ray might have stolen those notes from somewhere else?

Yup.

Chess in Art Post of the Year

This gets my vote.

[Thanks to Angus for the reference]

Chess in Art Index

Predecessors XIX: Lasker-Chigorin 1895

Just yesterday we were looking at Ray's Times notes to the game played between Lasker and Chigorin at Hastings in 1895, notes which appeared in his column for 3 January 2012 and then again on 24 December 2012 in a version that owed a great deal to the set already published.

Still, among the various notes copied out from the first column to the second, there were several which appeared in one column but not the other, giving the impression that Ray had, at least, done some original work on each.

Alas, it was not so. The fresh notes were not fresh and the copied notes had been copied already.

They were all plagiarised from Part One of My Great Predecessors, where they were annotated on pages 102-106.

With his original manner

Well, Xmas is nearly upon us, and that means Hastings is nearly upon us. Among Hastings' many contributions to chess tradition is that it gives the Times correspondent something to write about over the holiday period, and on Xmas Eve last year, Santa, before setting out, might have glanced at Ray's notes to the game Lasker-Chigorin from the very first Hastings in 1895.

Here's the column from 24 December 2012.

I said it was a tradition. Ray annotated the same game the previous Xmas, on 3 January 2012.

Might these two columns have anything in common with one another?

Did Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer have a very shiny nose?

53

Revisiting the question of whether you should trust your machine when it comes to rook endgames.

This was supposed to be the 52nd. I miscounted though, and it turns out I got there last week. 52 rook and pawn posts in one calendar year, a rare - probably unique in my case - example of a new year's resolution fulfilled. I'm not sure that I actually expected to do it when I started, but here we are. Job done.

Anyhoo, today we've got London Chess Classic winner Hikaru Nakamura, Emms' Survival Guide helping us out of a hole and Chessbase embarrassing themselves.  On with the show.

Chess in Art Postscript: Don't

Last week, in Now You See It, Now You we failed to find Daumier's Chess Players at the RA's current exhibition of his work. This week we go to elsewhere to see what other chess paintings we don't find.

But first another of Nette Robinson's in yer face-offs.

© Nette Robinson

Unlike Magnus last time, Nakamura stares back. It is a nice example of you see what you don't get - he has fixed you with his bead, you just know it - even though he has put up the shutters on his peepers. You sit there behind the white pieces as they break through the picture frame and you might just catch your reflection.  

There is a stunning art-historical antecedent to this spectacle. I don't mean Easy Rider Peter Fonda, but Dame Elisabeth Frink's Goggle Man goon of 1969.

From here

Frink (1930-1993) got the idea from newspaper photos of the Moroccan Interior Minister, and all round charmer, the notorious General Mohammed Oufkir: definitely someone else you wouldn't want to meet over the chess board, especially if he treated you the same as his unfortunate political opponents (though he got his comeuppance, I'm pleased to say). Naka is obviously a much nicer chap than that - in spite of what he'd like do to you with his pieces.

But we digress. We're off to Tate Modern in search of the two Paul Klee (1879-1940) chess paintings that ejh show-cased in Chess in Art XIV. They have an exhibition Paul Klee: Making Visible. Will it live up to its billing chess-painting-wise? Will it be making visible his chess?

Christmas is coming

What to get the chesser who has everything? How about a taxidermied mice chess set? Only $450 apparently.

Maybe it could next to the lamp you bought four years ago. Anyhoo, if you don't want to see the pictures, look away now.

via Morgan (dunno, maybe he has one)

Dirty Little Secrets

Ray's got a new book out!

He was giving it away on Twitter...

...and now he's plugging it in his Times column.

Times, 10 December 2013.

Tell you what, it's worth a closer look.

A Blogger Goes Chessing in Hampstead: Play More

A review copy of the latest GingerGM DVD, Danny Gormally's Improve Your Practical Play, landed on my doormat just before I took myself off to Hampstead last month.  I'll do a proper write up in January (delay in part due to skimpy research at the time of agreeing to do a review leading me to believe that it was an hour or two long when in fact it's more like six and a half).  For now let's just say I really like the first piece of advice.

I've long thought that most amateurs simply don't play enough chess in tournament conditions to come anywhere near reaching their potential. Pleasing to see at least one other person has a similar view.