Miscellaneous

Black to play. Tomashevsky–Lomasov, Nutcracker Battle of the Generations, Moscow 2020. A position with a surprising twist. Tomashevsky has just captured a bishop on b7. What is Black’s best response? Answers to ‘Chess’ at The Spectator by Tuesday 17 March or via email to victoria@-spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1…Rxf1+! 2 Kxf1 Bh3+ 3 Kg1 Nd4! 4 Qxc3 Ne2+ 5 Kh1 Bg2 mate.Last week’s winner Peter Skelly, Bedford

The German word for pawn, ‘bauer’, can also be translated as peasant, or farmer. There are many spectacular games in which the pawns pick up their pitchforks and overrun the landed gentry. A historic example, played in 1834, is the game McDonnell–de La Bourdonnais, in which the Frenchman playing Black advanced his pawns to d2, e2 and f2, overwhelming White’s rook and queen. A modern example is the game Saric–Suleymanli, which I wrote about in December last year. Aydin Suleymanli, just 14 years old from Azerbaijan, acquitted himself well but eventually succumbed to the advancing horde. Much less gets written about failed uprisings, but in this week’s game Suleymanli found

The science-fiction writer Douglas Adams ridiculed our primitive species for considering digital watches to be ‘a pretty neat idea’. Digital chess clocks really are pretty neat, because they enable modern competitive games to be played with an ‘increment’. For each move played, you earn extra seconds to make the next one, a simple innovation which allows all games to reach a natural conclusion. (By contrast, analogue clocks allot a tranche of thinking time for a series of moves). A lack of increment on the clock occasionally makes for excrement on the board; bashing out 20 moves in five remaining seconds may be physically impossible, but that never stops people trying.

Bridge experts are a lovely lot. They give their time freely and generously to encourage and teach students and bring bridge to a wider, young audience. Prof Sam(antha) Punch organised a terrific pro/am event last week for 76 pairs and raised more than £50k for her Keep Bridge Alive charity.   The Young Chelsea BC is launching a major drive to recruit young players by offering to teach bridge to every student in London — all 375,000 of them! Bright young stars India Leeming (who is running the YC youth initiative) and Shazaad Natt are organising a teaching weekend, and up at Acol Stefan Skorchev ran his annual Invitational Pairs

Three consecutive losses in a tournament is dryly termed ‘castling queenside’, in reference to the chess notation for that move (0-0-0). Carissa Yip went one worse, starting with four demoralising zeros at the Cairns Cup in St Louis this month. The 16-year-old American was the lowest ranked player in the elite women’s all-play-all tournament, so it wasn’t about to get any easier, and her experienced opponents were surely looking to capitalise. In the fifth round, she bounced back in style with a win over seven-time US women’s champion Irina Krush. ‘Someone told me that I should just fake it till I make it,’ Yip explained after the game. Those were