A match which has attracted less attention than it deserves was Luke McShane’s victory over David Howell in the final of the UK Knockout championship, which coincided with the London Classic last December. En route to the final, Luke eliminated both the reigning British champion Gawain Jones and England’s most celebrated grandmaster, Nigel Short.
Every so often a game is played which is worthy of joining the immortals in the pantheon of chessboard masterpieces. Anderssen v. Kieseritsky, London 1851, Zukertort v. Blackburne, London 1883, Botvinnik v. Capablanca, AVRO 1938; these are the jewels to which every chess player aspires. As Marcel Duchamp once observed: ‘not all artists are chess
The three most important events in the World Chess Federation calendar are the World Championship match, the Olympiad and the Candidates tournament, all of them biennial. The last of these is now in progress in Berlin and the winner will go on to challenge Magnus Carlsen for the supreme title in London later this year. The first
This weekend the Candidates tournament commences in Berlin to decide the challenger who will face Magnus Carlsen for the world title in London later this year. The favourite is Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, with a rating of 2814, and this week’s puzzle shows a sample of his trenchant style. Although he is not the highest-rated, my money
This year’s tournament at Bunratty in Ireland was the celebratory 25th in the series and I was invited to deliver the closing peroration. The competition was particularly stiff on this occasion, with British champion Gawain Jones sharing first prize with grandmaster Sergey Tiviakov, ahead of Nigel Short, Jon Speelman, Luke McShane and a host of other
One of the sharpest lines in the Ruy Lopez (1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 f5) is widely attributed to Wilhelm Karl Adolf Schliemann (1817-1872), said to be a relative of the Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) who discovered the site of Troy. Now it appears that the variation should in fact be attributed to
A good rule of thumb is to avoid sending off knights to excursions at the edge of the board, where their mobility can be limited. Exceptions exist, of course, in particular where a knight strikes from the extremities to land a decisive blow against the enemy king. A good example arose in a win by
The Armenian Grandmaster Levon Aronian has won first prize of £25,000 in the important Tradewise Masters which has just finished in Gibraltar. Britain’s Mickey Adams also shared first place, but due to the exigencies of the tie-breaking system it was Aronian who progressed to the play-off, where he defeated the leading French representative Maxime Vachier-Lagrave.
Various champions have been accused of hypnotising their opponents, including Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Tal and, not least, the reigning world champion, Magnus Carlsen. The respective accusers were the grandmasters and world-title candidates, Efim Bogolyubov, Pal Benko and the relatively recently deceased, Viktor Korchnoi. The latter was an adept in the dark arts of presumed
A remarkable event took place in London towards the end of last year, when the AlphaZero computer program took on one of the leading commercial programs, Stockfish, in a 100-game match. Astonishingly AlphaZero won by the overwhelming score of 28 wins, no losses, with the remainder of the games being drawn. AlphaZero is the brainchild
‘Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike,’ wrote Alexander Pope about Atticus. Those lines more or less describe the entire tone of the London Classic, which concluded towards the end of last year. Though it was a powerful event, there were too many anodyne draws to stir the blood of either the live audience
Although it does not have the prestige of the Classical World Championship (to be staged in London in November), the Rapid and Blitz championships recently concluded in Saudi Arabia carried not just worthy titles, but an impressive overall prize fund of $2 million. Viswanathan Anand emerged victorious in the Rapid, while Magnus Carlsen dominated the Blitz.
It is traditional that in my first column of the new year I review the previous 12 months and select the most outstanding game played at elite level to receive the accolade of game of the year. This time, there is little doubt that the most spectacular game of 2017 was the win by the Chinese
The London Classic is over and full reports in this column will follow in the new year. Meanwhile, we now know the line-up for the World Championship candidates tournament, which is to be staged in Berlin next March and will determine the challenger to Magnus Carlsen for the supreme title. Leading results in the Fidé (World
The English Chess Federation has awarded its Book of the Year prize to Timman’s Titans: My World Chess Champions by Jan Timman (New in Chess). This is a good choice for a present: Timman’s book is aimed at both the expert and the general chess enthusiast, and describes his interactions with many world champions.
The London Classic gets underway this weekend in Olympia. The line-up is formidable, including the world champion Magnus Carlsen, his predecessor Viswanathan Anand, and Sergei Karjakin, who challenged Carlsen for the title last year. The remaining contestants are as follows: Lev Aronian, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Hikaru Nakamura and Michael Adams.
Garry Kasparov was without a doubt Alekhine’s creative heir. The 1985-2000 world champion said himself that he became entranced at an early age by Alekhine’s dynamic style, and that he was particularly impressed by Alekhine’s sudden attacks which came like lightning from a clear sky. This week some further examples of Alekhine’s genius, and a
Alexander Alekhine was one of the two world champions (the other being his fellow native Russian Mikhail Botvinnik) who won, lost and regained the supreme title. In fact 2017 represents the 90th anniversary of Alekhine’s victory over the Cuban world champion José Raúl Capablanca at Buenos Aires 1927, and the 80th anniversary of his revenge
While researching some early games in the Bf4 version of the Queen’s Pawn openings favoured by world champion Magnus Carlsen, I came across an epic publication which called to mind that fine, seminal and instructive writer, Polish grandmaster Savielly Tartakower. His 500 Master Games of Chess, co-written with J. Dumont, contains readable annotations to virtually
Nigel Short, who challenged Garry Kasparov for the world title in 1993, has made a reputation for employing slightly offbeat openings in order to derail opponents who are unused to non-standard situations. As part of his repertoire, Short has a penchant for the ancient Chigorin Defence, and has even employed a version of this in
