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Being a sarf Landanner means I’ve never been to one of Adam Raoof’s Golders Green Rapidplays across the other side of the river. Still, don’t let that put you off, especially as there’s one this Saturday coming up. And also because as you can see from Vad’s photographs here from one of the recent rapidplays, these certainly look like friendly events in a nice venue, replete with some familiar faces from the chess scene south of the river . . .

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Source: Streatham & Brixton Chess Club http://streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Logical Chess: Move by Move
by Irving Chernev
Batsford

If I could transport myself back in time to give advice about chess to the nine-year-old-me -

- the nine-year-old who’d just about stopped blundering a piece or two every game, the nine-year-old starting to sense that chess was in some indefinable way more than a game, the nine-year-old who’d had one chess lesson in which he’d been taught about the Sicilian Dragon, but which he misremembered and played only in a mirror image, with f5 and the fianchetto on the queenside, the nine-year-old beginning to get some kind of clue about a little more than the basics, the nine-year-old starting to like chess rather a lot more than his other hobbies - then I would simply advise him to play through the classic book Logical Chess by Irving Chernev.

After all, the first chapter called The Kingside Attack deals with the stuff young boy’s dreams are made of: dashing kingside attacks, devastating invasions on the light-squares weakened by an absentee g-pawn, mating assaults on the castled monarch, sacrifices on h3, f7, the enemy king smoked out from his corner and swept across the board, and the like. And it does so from basics such as why we develop knights before bishops, why we move pieces only once in the opening where possible, from the importance of castling and rapid and efficient development, the fight for the centre and the centre as the zone of counterplay against flank attacks, the avoidance of weakening pawn moves in front of the castled position, how combinations arise as a matter of course from good play against weak play. And it does so in an enthusiastic, captivating prose style, that makes a virtue of repetition - the Move by Move of the subtitle is literal; each move is commented on - which enables the concepts to soak in gradually and unobtrusively in the learner.

In other words, there is a thematic compactness to the games chosen and the way they are explained, and this is Chernev’s outstanding (both senses) pedagogical style in this book. This thematic compactness extends even to the variations he demonstrates and the order of the game, these things cleverly chosen to bring his points truly home. For instance, take a look at the position to the left of this text, from game 12 in the book. White’s pieces got in a muddle earlier and abandoned his kingside, after which black was able to provoke the pawn-weaknesses we see in the chain running from f2 to h4 in front of a worried-looking white king. It’s Flohr, black to move, and with 17…Qxh4! he caused Pitschak’s immediate resignation thanks to the mate coming on h2.

Now take a look at the position to the right from game 13 in the book, where it’s black to move in Dobias-Podgorny - one game later and eight pages on. White has just played 14.Rfe1!, and Chernev explains: “This unexpected zwischenzug (in-between move) threatens immediate victory by 15. Rxe7 Qxe7 16. Bxf6″ - the analysis could have stopped here, but instead continues - “16… Qd6 17. Ng5 h5 18. Qxh5! gxh5 19.Bh7#!” How could a learner fail to absorb this exciting motif, demonstrated vividly in differing circumstances but so closely together in the book?

All this praise extents to part two of the book, The Queen’s Pawn Opening. The emphasis here different: it’s on the positional-pressure starting with 1.d4 promises white, which in these games usually manifests itself along the c-file in Queen Gambits Declineds, or via the built-up energy of Colle systems and similar. In other words, it’s the sort of stuff positionally-naive nine-year-olds need to know how to avoid being on the receiving end of, the sort of stuff they might want to try out against tactically-rampant ten-year-olds. If this sounds less like the chess-dreams of children that chapter 1, it doesn’t really matter. Chernev’s pizazz, humour and enthusiasm carries us through. He even manages to describe castling kingside as “probably the most significant contribution to civilization since the invention of the wheel,” and the chess-besotted-child is likely to half-belief this. Perhaps my life would have turned out better had I read this at nine - rather than instead deciding that the sofa and bath were civilization’s greatest achievements, and that Man should more or less ceased his inventiveness with their discovery, as more or less I did in my life.

The third and final and weakest chapter of the book is called The Chess Master Explains his Ideas, and it is here Chernev’s partiality as an author in this work is particularly visible. In several of these games, the winner plays reasonable moves, the loser pretty awful moves, and an absolute walloping results; yet Chernev rates these games as positional masterpieces. Crushes, yes; Masterpieces, no. Perhaps he rates them so highly because they demonstrates the principles he is determined the reader ought adhere to (despite occasional disclaimers to the contrary about flexibility.) Or some games in this section suffer the opposite problems. In these Chernev again explains the winner’s play as flowing logically from ideal principles such as rapid and efficient development in the opening, piece-coordination in the middle-game, and accurate and efficient play in the endgame - whilst the loser flouts at some point one of these dictums, and suffers the consequences, he says. But in fact the actual losing point is sometimes a lot more elusive, the win far more sophisticated, the decisive error far later. Chernev’s over-confidence that classically-correct play ought be rewarded with such wins risks confusing the learner who believes he is applying absolute-rules only to find the victories don’t follow as smoothly from then as he’s been lead to believe. No sense in this book of dynamics, hypermodernism, the “ugly” nature of modern play can be discerned; the reader who reads only this book will be strong against a certain type of victim, but against more sophisticated others the conceptual limitations will soon tell.

That is why, if I could go back twice in time, I’d travel back six months later and run through some of the limitations with the book. These are most easily seen in the lack of defensive resources Chernev demonstrates, and it is fun to try to search through these games for defensive improvements. Some are interesting but for Chernev’s purposes ultimately irrelevant. In the diagram to the left, for instance, it is black to move, and the pin on the f6 knight implies he has two choices: 13…Kg7 or 13…Bf5. He chose the former, and white Spielmann already in his sacrificial-element finished the game off nicely starting with 14.Nce4!. Of the latter defence, Chernev analyzes after 14.Nxf5 gxf5 15.Qg3 how both 15… Kg7 and 15…Kh8 lead to immediate disaster for black.

Could black - Wahle - have done any better? Chernev omits an important possibility from the point of view of understanding the game more fully. After 13… Bf5 14.Nxf5 gxf5 15.Qg3, black can play 15… Nh5 or 15… Ne4 bailing out to an endgame. True after then 16.Bxe7 Nxg3 17.fxg3 (17.Bxf8 Nxf1 18.Bh6 is witty but inferior) white will pick up the f5 pawn and should have little difficulty winning the endgame, but nonetheless this would have been a much better try for black. And given this, perhaps even 13…Bg4 might be his best bet in the diagram. It is reasonable of Chernev to omit all this, since it doesn’t change the ultimate result, and it is not thematically in-keeping with the chapter - but the reader should be aware this sort of thing quite often exists in these games, and must be look at the book not as a source of all wisdom but as a good starting point to understanding the spirit of a certain type of game of chess, but not the accuracy or sometimes even the inevitability of the result.

Sometimes the omission of a defensive resource is rather more deceiving for the reader. Take the position to the right from Tarrasch-Mieses (1916). White with his two bishops, better development, and extra space undoubtedly has a clear advantage. Black played 15… Rfe8? and after 16.Qh3 Qd6? (that 16…h5 is the only move here says enough about black’s position) 17.Bxf6 gxf6 18.Qh6! soon lost. All this is well and good and clearly explained by Chernev. However, black’s best defence is 15…h6! in the diagram position. It is true that after 16.Bh4 or 16.Bf4 white retains a clear advantage, but 15…h6 staves off immediate disaster by neutralising the threat of 16.Qh3 h6 17.Bxh6. Not only that, in several variations in the surrounding moves Chernev analyzes …h7-h6 to show how it loses. Why did he not include 15…h6 in his notes, really the only move that keeps black in the game, and a defensive try he was happy to analyze in similar positions where it lost? Because, presumably, it contradicts Chernev’s “message” about not making weakening pawn moves in front of your king unless absolutely necessary. But here it was necessary, albeit less obviously absolutely necessary than in some cases he presents, for instance cases where such a move stop an immediate mate. One might even say that Mieses applied the principles Chernev advocates rather too severely here and almost-immediately it cost him the game; this is something that without a doubt Chernev should have pointed out to his reader.

The omission of certain defensive opportunities is not the only partiality displayed by Chernev. For instance, in his note to 1.d4 in game 23 he writes dogmatically about how white’s general plan should include keeping a pawn in the centre - especially for it to act in support of a knight outpost at c5 or e5, about the ideal deployment of the bishop and rooks, deployment of the queen at c2 or e2, and kingside castling. This is ludicrously over-prescriptive, yet Chernev castigates white’s actual choice of the Stonewall Attack for similar reasons, writing that “Aside from the fact that making so many pawn moves in the opening is a flagrant violation of principle, the adoption of a system which calls for the launching of an attack by a preconceived formation of pieces, without regard to the advisability of an attack and without reference to the requirements of the particular position, is contrary to the concept of proper strategy and to the spirit of chess itself.” That’s true, but Chernev’s own prescriptions seem perilously susceptible to a similar criticism. The practical problem is that occasional-disclaimers aside, it is not hard to imagine an easily-swayed reader becoming as dogmatic as Chernev is as to what is right and wrong in chess, without realising that chess is just not like that for the most part.

Why was Chernev apparently so unaware of these problems? Probably due to a lack of strategic sophistication that is evident in certain places in the book. Take the diagram position to the left. Black can recapture on d5 in two plausible ways: with the pawn or with the knight. He chose the pawn, a perfectly reasonable move, and Chernev condemns the alternative capture with the knight on the grounds that e3-e4 will leave white in control in the centre. But the situation is strategically a lot more complicated than this, and 9…Nxd5 is also perfectly reasonable move, since it more or less obliges the exchange of two minor pieces: after which white’s extra-space counts for less, since after the exchange black’s pieces won’t be treading on each other’s toes.

Still, all this shouldn’t put off improving players picking up this book and playing through each game, with Chernev’s commentary warm and welcome company. This is the book children who have learnt a bit about chess should get from Santa, this is the book adults who’ve picked up the basics should use to get to the next level, and every public library should have a copy. As for me, there weren’t many surprises reading this work nowadays, because I have picked up these ideas in dribs and drabs over years. I only need a time machine now to receive their gift in one convincing, direct, memorable dosage at the stage one should, and perhaps to the nine-year-old-me I’ll add in some advice about haircuts too.

PS. Take a look here for an example of how Chernev writes.

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How was your weekend? Not quite chessy enough? Well, that needn’t be the case next weekend - because a Richmond Rapidplay is taking place Sunday 13th July. I know several Streatham and Brixton Chess Club players are already going, and if that isn’t enough to tempt you, you’ll find below excellent photographs from the last one (thanks to Vad from Streatham Chess Club). Oh, more details and entry stuff is here.

Tough competition (click for larger) . . .

. . .

The action begins . . .

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“500 Master Games of Chess. Love it,” commented PG about Tartakower & Du Mont’s classic, having perused a certain picture of my cat-occupied chess books. “Went through the lot when I was about nine. It made me the player I am today. (Take that any way you wish!)”

The way I took it was as an excuse for a dawdle down memory lane, and flicking through the falling-out pages I re-encountered this old position from Rubinstein - Hromadka (1923), where it’s white to play. The killer-move that white unleashed is implied in the text below, so take a little while to try to solve this one before scrolling down:

. . . which in turn reminded me of something else entirely different. In this position (Young - Kittsley, 1902) from the neighbouring book Chess Middlegames by Laszlo Polgar, it’s white to play, and - supposedly - win:

Polgar’s solution is 1. Qe4! Qxh5 2. Qxh7+ etc, adding the variations 1…Qxe4 2.Nf7 mate and the more interesting 1…Rdf8 2.Qxg6! hxg6 3.Rd3! gxh5 4.Rh3 +-.

Now assuming that you’ve solved today’s first puzzle, you’ll see that the connection between today’s two positions is more, of course, than their geoegraphical proximity on my book-shelf. It’s that both feature the queen wafting into an attack on herself in empty space, but with devastating effect on the opponent’s position. Quite the manouver: so regal, so aloof, so final, so beautiful; something of the feline about it, certainly a motif deserving its own name. Except, alas, in this second position after 1.Qe4, black has a far more satisfactory defence* than those offered by Polgar, after which white is at best equal. Puzzle 2 today is for you to fish that one out.

* maybe not - see the comments.

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Die schachpartie

Max Oppenheimer

[private collection]

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“I hope you don’t mind my taking the liberty of contacting you,” emails Yasmin Sethi. “I have just finished a degree in Product Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. As a part of this course I designed a Chess set in response to a brief set by Schott - A German Glass manufacturer. I would love for this product to be featured on your blog and to get some feedback on my chess set from true chess enthusiasts. I am sending you some images and text on this project and links to my website.”

Of course not! Especially since the chess set in question has a particularly remarkable property. But that, in a moment. First, here’s a link to Yasmin’s chess-set site, and below is a picture of the chess-set in question (that currently exists only as a design, although I am told discussions about its production are on-going):

Btw, it’s worth clicking the picture for a larger version.

As for the remarkable property? It’s that once a piece is removed from the board, it completely disappears. Yasmin explains that the set is “inspired by the novel Alice through the Looking Glass where the pieces magically turn transparent when they touch the board,” going on to say:

In ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll, Alice falls through a mirror and on the other side of the mirror, she becomes a piece in a game of chess. Inspired by this, the chess pieces have an opaque mirror finish, when they touch the surface of the board they magically turn transparent and reveal the identity of the piece contained inside them. When removed from the board they revert to being opaque, hiding the identity of the piece.

This is a comment on how a chess piece has no value unless it is in play on the board. If removed from the board, a pawn and a queen are equal, in that neither have any value.

The theme of ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ is the difference between the real world and the world behind the mirror. In keeping with this theme there is a contrast between the unlit mirrored piece and the clear glass piece. Each unlit mirrored piece is a smooth and modern shape. Each lit piece is clear glass, with the negative shape of a traditional, delicate Staunton chess piece enclosed within it. In the book the White Knight talks about how he thinks better when he is upside down. In a reference, the White Knights in the set only work when they are placed upside down. This joke is hidden to all but those who know the background of the chess set.

You’ve got to like that, haven’t you? Well, let us know. Better still, let Yasmin know. Your feedback is wanted.

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I’m writing this on Monday evening and the new FIDE rating list is due out tomorrow (1st July).

This is good news for fans of 17 year old boys everywhere because, as you may have been reading over the past couple of weeks, Magnus Carlsen is going to be the new second highest rated player in the world. Except apparently he isn’t because FIDE published the list a day early and they have him in sixth place. Even though he gained ten rating points he actually dropped down one spot from fifth, thanks mostly to an extraordinary run of form lifting Ivanchuk from eleventh to fourth.

So what’s going on?

Well, let us begin with the general and note a recent chessdom article by Hans Arilde Arunde (FIDE card) during which the Norwegian said, with regard to working out how the rating list might be calculated,

“I must admit that trying to predict what FIDE will do, sometimes feel (sic) like trying to hit a moving target!”

This is not a good start is it? We are, after all, talking about the official rating list published by the game’s governing body - the organisation charged with running professional chess. Shouldn’t the process be clear, transparent and obvious to all?

I can’t help but imagine Magnus phoning FIDE to find out his new rating and the conversation going something as follows:

Magnus Carlsen: “Who are you?”

FIDE Wonk: “The new Number Two.”

MC: “Who is Number One?”

FW: “You are Number Six.”

MC: “I am not a number — I am a free man!”

Why specifically is the Norwegian prodigy not, as things stand, officially the second highest rated player in the world? It seems that the deadline for results to be included in the July rating list was 15th of June and Carlsen’s most recent tournament, Aerosvit 2008 held at Foros, didn’t finish until the 19th. As a result none of the games played there were included in the calculations for the new list even though the event finished two weeks before it was due to be published.

You may recall that we’ve been here before. In April 2007 there was an almost identical kerfuffle over whether Anand had, or had not, taken numero uno status from Topalov. Traditionally FIDE have included important events in their rating calculations even if they ended after the official deadline. Last year, as now, the confusion arose as a result of FIDE’s apparently arbitrary decision to stop this practice.

Magnus Carlsen, as played by Patrick McGoohan, travels to FIDE HQ
(aka ‘The Village’) hoping to establish what the chuff’s going on with the rating system

Now I understand that maintaining a rating list is probably not as easy as I think it is. I also realise that it takes a little while to get data into any system but don’t you think the ‘pressure of time’ argument would hold a little more water had FIDE not managed to publish the new list early? Neither, by the way, can we allow FIDE the possible defence that the tournament organisers may not have informed them of the results. According to ChessBase FIDE do have the information but are choosing not to use it. ChessBase also report it is not the “rating officers” but “administrators” who took the decision not to include Foros.

This all seems very strange to me, not the least because the aforementioned Mr. Arunde runs chess.liverating.org which manages to update ratings on a game by game basis let alone tournament by tournament. How can it be that FIDE can’t match one guy working on his own?

It’s true that Arunde’s ‘live list’ only deals with elos 2700 and above (currently 29 players) but as I mentioned in the comments last time, I don’t think a two tier rating system is necessarily a bad thing. A daily updated system for the elite and the regular list for the rest of us is just fine by me. If FIDE can’t do it themselves I wonder if they might then consider bunging Arunde a few quid/krone/prostitutes or whatever it is that they usually dole out to get things done and have him run a live list for them.

Does any of this matter? Well, I confess that I’m in a minority here at the S&BCC blog but I rather think it does. I happen to think that having Carlsen drop one spot in the rankings when the whole chess world knows he’s really jumped to second place makes FIDE look like divs.

The rating list always was out of date as soon as it was published but now the entire world can find out access a real-time rating list at the click of a mouse button FIDE’s insistence on sticking to an arbitrary and bureaucratic procedure seems totally bizarre and it does not bode well for the future.

Too much to hope for?

I rather suspect that by the time this is published on Thursday morning FIDE will have changed their mind and decided that Magnus Carlsen is the second best player in the world after all. While correcting a mistake can only be a good thing, buggering about in this manner once again does rather reinforce the impression that any owners of whelk stalls would be best advised not to leave them in the hands of FIDE officials for any length of time.

Whether or not a corrected list is eventually issued, as things stand Magnus Carlsen is number six and FIDE have left themselves looking like a bunch of number twos.

Thursday morning update:
Looks like I was wrong about FIDE issuing a corrected list.

This story also covered by …

Chess Vibes
Speedy Malc (got there before me dammit)
Susan Polgar

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I’m not sure how long I’ve been playing email chess. The first games for which I have a record began in November 2000: I can remember beginning a tournament some months before, but I was obliged to withdraw due to serious illness and never completed any games, so presumably no records exist of the moves I played. Anyway, I have played quite a lot of tournaments in the eight years since records do begin. And finally, last month, I managed to do what I had never done before. I won a tournament outright.

I have shared first place a couple of times - including, as I recall, one IECC tournament in which all the games were draws apart from one player who defaulted, giving all the remaining players joint first place on a score of +1. But this is the first time I have actually achieved sole, undisputed first place. I think I would probably retire on the spot, were it not for the fact that, as is normal in correspondence play, I am already playing in another tournament and have been doing so for some months.

I am most unlikely to win that tournament, or indeed to remain unbeaten in it, which is a shame since my current unbeaten run in correspondence play now stands at eighteen games. The last of them, which won me the IECG tournament CB-2007-0-00172 - how those letters and numbers will resound through history, a bit like AVRO 1938 - took almost exactly a year to play. A short time indeed by the old standards of international postal play - but in these modern times with instant communication, a pretty long struggle, and substantially the longest that any game I’ve played has lasted.

My opponent, the Russian Oleg Tkachenko, resigned last week: my penultimate game finished early in December, at which time I was awaiting a reply from Russia to my move 39. Resignation came 29 moves and nearly seven months later.

The diagram shows the position after Black’s 53…Rg7. White is two pawns up but cannot protect the g-pawn. And although he can win the h-pawn, it is not at all clear that by doing so he can win the game. What manoeuvre did he find - one that the computer does not - which did lead to a win?

The answer is in the game, which is given below.

(And with that, I am off - well, I’m off tomorrow - to Benasque. Here is a video from last year’s tournament.)

Blindfold chess has a long and colorful history. But did you know that blindfold chess isn’t just for public exhibitions and special grandmaster events anymore? You can play blindfold chess in the privacy of your own home, as you’ll learn in the latest ChessBase Workshop.
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