Last week saw the death of the city financier Jim Slater. He was famous in chess circles for joining Henry Kissinger in persuading Bobby Fischer to play his 1972 World Championship match against Boris Spassky in Reykjavik. Kissinger’s contribution was a diplomatic phone call to Fischer, while Slater pumped extra cash into the prize fund
It is said that more books have been written about chess than about any other game, sport or pastime. I can well believe it. When the Chess and Bridge (shop.chess.co.uk) catalogue dropped through my letterbox last week, I counted 360 book titles, and I know that is just the tip of the iceberg. One book
I was not quite sure whether to be annoyed or relieved about the recent High Court decision not to recognise bridge as a sport. On the one hand, it’s a comfort to know that there is now little danger of British bridge and, pari passu, chess being classified alongside activities that feature perspiring individuals running
The two great Soviet world champion Russians, Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov, have almost always taken divergent paths. Karpov was the golden boy of the Soviet establishment, while Kasparov was an early supporter of glasnost and perestroika. A détente occurred when Karpov visited Kasparov in prison after he was incarcerated by the Putin regime for
Hou Yifan has won what must be considered one of the strongest, if not the strongest, all-women chess tournaments ever held. Staged in the opulent surroundings of the Casino in Monte Carlo, the organisers succeeded in arranging a line-up which could have been improved upon only if Judit Polgar had agreed to participate. Judit, after
When I first studied chess I thought it was a golden age for chess literature. There were the classics such as Nimzowitsch’s My System and Reti’s Masters of the Chessboard; a series of publications by Harry Golombek on his heroes Reti, Capablanca, Botvinnik and Smyslov; and Peter Clarke’s wonderful elucidations of the best games of
The Fidé World Cup, which finished last week in Baku, boasted over $1 million in overall prize money, with $100,000 going to the winner. The format consisted of short sharp knockout matches, hardly congenial to heavyweight contenders such as Kramnik, Topalov, Aronian, Nakamura and Caruana, who were all eliminated in the early stages. The final,
Joseph Henry Blackburne was the leading British tournament player towards the end of the 19th century. It could be said that he challenged Steinitz for world matchplay supremacy, though he could not hold his own with the great Austrian strategist. A monumental new book by chess scholar Tim Harding represents a huge contribution to chess
Paul Morphy, in a strange prefiguration of the later career of Bobby Fischer, was often described as ‘the pride and sorrow of chess’. In the late 1850s he blazed like a meteor across the chess firmament. He sprang to prominence by thoroughly defeating the German master Louis Paulsen in the New York tournament of 1857.
My grandmaster colleague James Plaskett has two passions, the pursuit of the mythical giant octopus (ongoing) and a fascination with coincidence. Is the latter just a concatenation of unrelated circumstances, or does it have some deeper meaning, signifying something in the air at a particular time? How, for example, does one explain the virtually simultaneous,
This week I conclude my coverage of the St Louis leg of the million dollar Grand Tour. Carlsen-So: Sinquefield Cup, St Louis 2015 (see diagram 1) Although Carlsen is a pawn down here his knight is so much better than Black’s bishop that this small material imbalance is essentially irrelevant. 29 a4 Bd8
The Sinquefield Cup in St Louis, one of the strongest tournaments of all time, has been convincingly won by the Armenian grandmaster and triple Olympiad gold medallist, Levon Aronian. Unusually for such a high-level tournament, a number of games ended in vicious attacks which resulted either in checkmate or decisive material gain. To start with,
England’s top grandmaster, Michael Adams, exerts a powerful influence over the elite player David Navara. In rating terms Navara and Adams are about equal, but in practice Adams has a 4-0 record against his Czech opponent. Navara-Adams: Biel 2015; Queen’s Gambit Declined 1 c4 e6 2 Nc3 d5 3 d4 Nf6 4 cxd5
I have never met David Smerdon, the Australian grandmaster and author of Smerdon’s Scandinavian (Everyman Chess). Last week I gave a ringing endorsement of his new book and I must say that in my mind’s eye I visualise him as some swashbuckling buccaneer of the chessboard, complete with eyepatch, wooden leg, tricorn hat and probably
The Australian grandmaster David Smerdon has written a truly exciting book about some of the byways in the Centre Counter or Scandinavian Defence. The old main lines started 1 e4 d5 exd5 Qxd5 3 Nc3 and generally condemned Black to a long defence. The apparent activity of the black queen tended to be outweighed by White’s
Jonathan Hawkins has emerged as the winner of this year’s British Championship, which finished last week at the University of Warwick in Coventry. Several players were in contention for the laurels as they entered the final round, but Hawkins’s rivals could only draw, and his win clinched the title. In the past there was a
David Howell is on a roll. At the halfway stage of the British Championship he looks set to retain his title, and he has shot to no. 2 in the British rankings, behind Michael Adams. His recent successes include a share of first prize in the Dubai Open and a stunning outright first in the tournament
Alexander Petroff (1794-1867) is often remembered as the first great Russian chess master. He became the strongest player in Russia at the age of 15 and produced the first chess book in Russian. His main legacy, however, is the Petroff Defence (1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nf6), an opening which has been seen consistently at
Sadly, Michael Adams, for many years Britain’s leading grandmaster, will not be playing in the British Championship, which starts next week. Michael is often referred to as ‘Spidey’ because of the way he spins a web to ensnare his opponents. The most spidery player ever was Anatoly Karpov, world champion from 1975, when he beat
Fabiano Caruana notched the result of his life at the Sinquefield Trophy in St Louis last year. Since then he has done nothing in particular and not done it very well, to adapt W.S. Gilbert’s lordly formula from Iolanthe. Now Caruana has reasserted himself at the elite tournament in Dortmund, where final scores (out of
