Death of an old friend

It has not been a good couple of weeks for some of my old opening hobby-horses. I wrote previously in praise of the QGD Tarrasch Defence, only to have a chunk of British grandmasterdom queuing up to point out that it is probably not really very good. Then yesterday, another of my old favourites was wheeled out on a high board at the Gibraltar Open, and lasted just 20 moves.

This treatment of the old Steinitz Defence, with exd4 and g6, was something I spotted in an old issue of Chess, from the late 1960s, and quickly fell in love with. Over the next few years, I and a clubmate spent a considerable portion of our chess lives, trying to make it work. Sadly, my practical results were always poor, and being the unprincipled materialistic pragmatist that I am, I soon abandoned it in favour of other openings, although I retained the natural parental fondness for an errant offspring. My friend John, on the other hand, kept the faith, although he was greatly helped by the fact that he had by then practically abandoned OTB play, and so rarely ever had to face the grim reality of playing the line over the board. These things always look better when you are analysing at home, with no hard-hearted opponent to knock your rose-tinted specs off.

There are sharper ways for White to play, most notably the "Yugoslav Attack" set-up with Be3-Qd2-f3-0-0-0, but these lines are actually less effective for White. Adams' quiet approach with short castling and Bf4 was always one of the lines my friend and I were most afraid of. Black is forced into playing f6 and must settle for a passive set-up. However, he should at least be able to hold back the advance e4-e5 for a good while. Sadly for Ehlvest, he did not even manage that.

I suspect the time has come to give my child a decent burial, but it is still hard to say the final goodbye. To sweeten the pill, here is the game that put me onto the line in the first place. Balashov's dynamic approach was quite inspiring:

Garry's incredulity

Yesterday's last round at Wijk aan Zee was notable for the manner in which the world champion was outplayed by Wang Hao of China. An apparently harmless opening led to an ending where White had the advantage of R+B v R+N, on an open board, with pawns on both sides. The engines will probably tell you that Black is OK, but in fact, Anand lost without really making any obvious one-move mistakes.

Looking at the game, I was forcibly reminded of small cameo I once saw on the video reports, which used to appear on Chessbase Magazine. At a Linares tournament, around the last 1990s, Anand had just lost to Kasparov, as Black in a Caro-Kann. The video showed part of the post-mortem, and at one point, Anand indicated a line he thought he should have played, which led to a very similar ending to that above - White had R+B v R+N, with pawns on both sides. Kasparov, no great loss to the Diplomatic Service, of course, just looked at Vishy in amazement, shrugged expansively, and said "But it's Fischer-Taimanov! It's just Fischer-Taimanov!", evidently a reference to the classic fourth game of the 1971 Candidates' match, where Fischer won a model ending of the same type.  Anand continued to look at the board, without saying anything, whilst Kasparov went on shrugging and repeating, in an ever-more incredulous tone of voice, "It's just Fischer-Taimanov!". He was clearly dumbfounded that a player of Anand's strength could consider the black position remotely satisfactory.

The scene came back to me yesterday, when I watched Anand gradually losing to Wang. An act of lesè -majesté though it may be to say it, the truth is that throughout his career, Anand has always exhibited these very noticeable technical lapses. I have lost count of the number of quite simple endgames he has messed up over the years (two rounds earlier at Wijk, he blundered away half a point against Hou Yifan, after simplifying a winning knight ending into a K+P ending that was a stone cold draw). It is very strange that such a great player should do this sort of thing so regularly, although stalwarts of the old Soviet/Russian school, such as Mark Dvoretsky, put it down to a lack of formal chess education when young ("Every Russian schoolboy knows these endings!", etc). I am not sure if that is the problem, but something is clearly wrong, somewhere, and it is a weakness that he has never managed to shake off.

Trash-talking - the GMs bite back!

Interestingly, my previous blog entry, pushing the Tarrasch QGD, brought forth two GM responses, both seeking to pour a modicum of aqua frigida on my enthusiasm for the opening.

The first response came from GM Nigel Davies, who commented on my Facebook page that "It's possible that 5.dxc5 is a VERY good move".  Another friend also pointed out that the most recent book to advocate the Tarrasch, Aagard and Ntirlis' 2012 Quality Chess publication, also regards the move as very strong. They in fact prefer it delayed one move, after 4.cxd5 exd5 5.Nf3 Nc6  and only now 6.dxc5.

I have not seen their book, but I assume the reason is that with the black knight already on c6, the line 6...d4 7.Na4 b5 8.cxb6 axb6 is less dangerous for White, because Bd7 is less of an immediate threat. Even so, they presumably consider that Black can hold the balance after 6.dxc5, although I guess he needs to be well-prepared.

The other GM response came from John Nunn, who sent the score of one of his smart tactical wins with the opening (see below). However, he also warned "But really, if White knows what he is doing, the Tarrasch is a bit miserable, as he can always keep the draw in hand". More than any specific variation, this is probably why the Trash is not more popular. In fact, I recall John saying, when he decided to give the opening up, around 1980, that the problem with it was that White seemed to be able to get away with 3-4 small inaccuracies, yet still be drawing, whereas Black only had to commit one, to find himself really suffering.

I do not doubt that this is true at GM level, or even close to it. However, at the ordinary club level, tactics are everything, and the Tarrasch has the great merit of giving free, active piece play. In such positions, few club players are going to be able to control the tactics well enough to maintain a small advantage and keep the draw in hand, so I think John's fears are much less well grounded at that level. John, of course, had to play against the likes of Ulf Andersson (in fact, if my memory does not deceive me, the game which made him decide to give up the Tarrasch was a tortuous afternoon of suffering at the 1980 Phillips & Drew, against Ulfie himself...), so his fears are much more understandable.

However, even GMs of anything below the top rank were liable to get the Nunn treatment in the Trash, as the following display of pyrotechnics shows:

Trash-talking

In my capacity as English editor for Whychess.com, I yesterday put up an English version of part one of a very interesting interview with Alexander Nikitin, who was the young Kasparov's trainer for some 17 years, until they split after a falling out. There are a number of interesting comments in the interview, but I was struck by one sentence:

But I recommended the Tarrasch Defense, in which I consider myself a big specialist, there is equality in all variations.

The Tarrasch Defence to the QGD has always been rather a controversial defence, and for most of its life, has lacked a decent PR man. Just as the Dutch's reputation never recovered from Steinitz's condemnation of it, so the "Trash" never really recovered from Nimzowitsch's criticism, although it was Rubinstein and Schlechter who developed the g3-system for White, which has always been regarded as a near refutation.

But the truth is that the Trash has always been much better than its reputation. Spassky even used it successfully in his 1969 world championship match against Petrosian (of all people!), scoring 4 draws and a win, in 5 games. As Nikitin points out, Kasparov's results were fantastic in 1982-3, scoring 6 wins and 6 draws as Black. He did lose twice against Karpov - THE ultimate anti-IQP warrior - in their 1984 match, but neither defeat was the fault of the opening.

As it happens, I have always had a soft spot for the Trash. One of my closest chess friends and formative influences, a 190-strength player, who was the board one for my club when I was a kid, has devoted much of his chess life to proving the soundness of the opening. Even now, long after abandoning OTB play, he still spends a lot of time analysing different variations and refuting any attempt, by anyone, to show an advantage for White! I also played for some years in a 4NCL team, alongside GM Murray Chandler, who scored remarkably well with the defence, as also (briefly) did my old university colleague John Nunn.

It seems to me that the Trash deserves more "airtime" than it gets. If Tigran Vartanovich could get nowhere against it in a world championship match, are your opponents going to do any better?

5 years ago today

I have just, rather belatedly, realised that today is the 5th anniversary of the death of Bobby Fischer. I was actually in the Press Room at Wijk aan Zee, the morning the news came through. I remember Ian Rogers was the first to break the story to us, having heard from an Icelandic friend early that morning. Within an hour, the BBC and other news organisations were carrying the story. It came as quite a shock, because hardly anyone outside a small circle was aware of Fischer's medical troubles, and the fact that he had been dying of kidney trouble for some months.

I have little to add to the litany of Fischer stories, apart from one nice anecdote told to me that fateful day, by Vlastimil Hort, who was guesting at Wijk as a commentator. He recalled the unofficial world blitz championship, held at Herceg Novi in Yugoslavia in 1970, where Fischer crushed all opposition. The venue involved a flight to a small mountain town, which was undertaken in bad weather, on a rather rickety small plane. Almost all the GMs were terrified, Fischer among them. But he coped by burying his head between his knees, with a pocket chess set in his hands below, analysing furiously! Chess really was his solace in all situations.

As mentioned, he slaughtered the opposition in Herceg Novi, winning by 4.5 points from Tal, with Korchnoi a further half point back, and Petrosian, Bronstein, Hort, Smyslov, Reshevsky, Uhlmann among the also-rans. This was his classic KID crush of Korchnoi:

Horton's Nightmare Headlines (no. 7)

Rogue Penguin resurfaces in Tokyo Bay

Armstrong in TV doping admission

"Of course, if Lance Armstrong had consulted me initially, I would have advised him against using performance-enhancing drugs - they stunt your growth."

What would Garry say?

I do not look at current tournaments much these days, but yesterday, I glanced at the games from round 3 of Wijk aan Zee. There I saw the following effortless win by Carlsen:

At the end of the game, he had well over an hour left on his clock, whilst van Wely was close to losing on time.

An astonishingly easy win, but I could not help being shocked to see such a strong GM as van Wely lose in such fashion. The truth is, it was the sort of game that White used to win all the time in the early days of the Averbakh System's popularity, around the early 1970s. Players like Polugayevsky and Uhlmann fed their families for several years on the proceeds of precisely this kind of game. Black would adopt this system with c5 and e6, White would recapture on d5 with the e-pawn, get the two bishops, exchange off all the heavy pieces, and then win the ending. Uhlmann did it twice within the space of a few months, against KID expert Gligoric - see here and here. Loek tried to avoid quite this classical form of the ending, by the pawn grab Qb6xb2, but it never looked convincing.

Eventually, Black players learnt to avoid such prospectless endings and adopt other set-ups, after which the high popularity of the Averbakh declined sharply. I am not sure why Loek decided to go in for the old-fashioned treatment, but it is perhaps just as well for him that Garry K is no longer around in the chess world - one can just picture the inimitable snorting contempt, with which he would have greeted the sight of such a game.

"I tell you, my mother could play the King's Indian better than that!" (Photo: www.zimbio.com)

Billy Smart's circus lives on

Further to my last blog post, it seems the ECF Board have now considered the two appeals against Gunn's original judgement, and have overturned it, in favour of Sean Hewitt. I make no comment on the rights or wrongs of this outcome, if only because I am (and am known to be) a friend of Sean's, so my opinion cannot be considered objective. However, Gunn's original judgement deserves some attention, if only for purposes of light relief.

The complaint was that Sean had been abusive to the eponymous Burke, on the Forum. Gunn's original judgement said, inter alia, the following:

"in a small number of instances I find that Mr Hewitt’s conduct lacked the courtesy I would expect from an ECF Official" and "Although I draw Mr Hewitt’s attention to the relevant part of the ECF Code of Conduct and recommend that he complies with it in the future, I find that no disciplinary action is appropriate in this case as the vast majority of Mr Hewitt’s posts on these threads were perfectly courteous"

What a wonderful piece of judicial reasoning - "He's guilty, but we won't take any action against him, because on other occasions, he hasn't been guilty"!

I cannot for the life of me understand why Peter Sutcliffe's lawyers did not employ the same foolproof argument: "It is true, m'Lud, that my client murdered and mutilated the bodies of 13 women in and around the North East of England. However, there are many thousands of other women in the area, whom he has neither murdered nor mutilated, so I think we should let him off - whilst, of course, drawing his attention to the general statutory prohibition on murder and mutilation, and recommending him to comply with it in future".

Just where on earth does the ECF find such clowns??

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you must now retire (as indeed should I...)..".

Termitewatch 44 - Old Mother in the dark!

An amusing item posted earlier today on the Forum, by its Chief Censor Carl "Old Mother" Hibbard:

Is the ECF still dealing with the complaint does anybody know or has it been resolved 

He refers, of course, to the complaint brought by the eponymous Mr Burke, against Sean Hewitt - see here. Alas, Old Mother must be just about the only person left in English chess who has not been told the (as yet unpublished) outcome of the investigation by Mike Gunn, one of the Egregious Federation's Non-Exec Directors. So ridiculous is Gunn's Solomon-like verdict that, the last thing I heard, both parties - complainant and complainee - were appealing against the decision!

A Board meeting is apparently being held today, to consider the issue, so maybe Old Mother will finally be enlightened some time soon!

Storm over TV crime drama chess "misrepresentation".

The world of British chess was plunged into controversy last night, after complaints that the game had been misrepresented in the popular TV crime drama, "Midsomer Murders". Viewers of Wednesday night's new episode saw members of a local chess club being systematically bumped off by a serial killer, who turned out to be the local doctor.

"This is a disgracefel distortion of the true reality of British chess", claimed Mr CITC Horton, the TV critic of the Bedlam Daily Post . "Anyone who knows anything about the game in this country knows that the murderer would have been Ray Keene, not the village doctor. I blame those appalling people at New in Chess, only they would commission and publish such offensive rubbish, they probably used Nigel Short as the technical advisor. "

Mr Horton's criticisms were echoed by retired police inspector, Mr Ernie "Good Moaning" Crabtree, who commented "'Mudsimmer Morders' is a joke. We all no that Roy Kane is a cereal killer. You no wot I'd do with the produser? Take him out on the car park and cock 'is 'ead in, that's wot. Thot's the only lingwage these these televishun peeple understand. I felt that Jammy Sivalle's collar once, y'know..."

Nobody in the television world was available for comment, as they had all been arrested on suspicion of sexual abuse.

An Old Testament story

From the Book of Caissa

And lo, it came to pass that the hated ruler of the kingdom of Caissa, that was called de Mooi, didst flee the kingdom, the imprecations of the people ringing in his ears. And lo, there came among the people a new ruler, that bore the name of Ro-ger, but that was known amongst the people of Caissa as Alum-nus, which means "given to self-praise". And there was much rejoicing, and the people of Caissa didst give thanks unto God, and didst praise Him, that He had delivered amongst them a saviour, that wouldst redeem them from the evils of de Mooi.

And lo, Alum-nus didst decree that there should be a great gathering of the elders of the kingdom, and he didst address them, saying unto them "Just as I have saved the people of Caissa from the evil de Mooi, so shall I save them from the evils of the ECF compulsory membership scheme, and so shall I spare them the great purse of monies that hath been lavished on the elders of the kingdom, those that are called 'professionals'. For doth it not say in the scriptures that he that doth not toil, nor spin, neither shall he eat? For blessed are the grass roots, for they shall inherit the Game Fees".

But when they didst hear this, the elders and Pharisees didst wax wroth, and were sore afraid, saying amongst themselves "What manner of man is this that hath come among us, that wouldst dismantle our compulsory membership scheme and starve our professional players? Verily is this the man of whom the prophet hath warned us, he that doth have as much business sense as the man that doth set up a barber's shop on the steps of the guillotine". And they didst seize up Alum-nus, and didst bind him hand and foot, such that he might hold office in name only, but shouldst be unable to to lift even the little finger of his left hand.

Photo: 4UMI.com

And lo, the kingdom didst dry up, and there was a great famine and drought, and the kingdom of Caissa didst wither on the vine. But the people of Caissa, that were called Termites, didst care not, for that they were too busy squabbling amongst themselves and calculating the Elo ratings of cricket teams. And so the chaos didst continue, even unto page 94.

Storm over gay bishop proposal

"Of course, when I drew up the laws of chess, nobody had ever heard of gay bishops".

Chess-based episode of "Midsomer Murders" to air on ITV1

"I bet the serial killer is targeting non-ECF members". (photo: John Saunders)