The Streatham & Brixton Chess Blog

Rumours II

2012-02-01T08:00:00.010Z

Some questions for the English Chess Federation:-

Q. Is it true that Ray Keene played a significant role in securing the funds that paid for the British Championships at Sheffield last year?

- If it is, at what point did the ECF become aware of his involvement?

Q. Is it true that CJ de Mooi made no financial contribution to last year's Championships?

- If it isn't, how does the ECF explain the President's ongoing involvement with a man who says that it is?
- If it is, how does the ECF explain the President's statement on 13th July last year that,
The British Championships this year received 2 donations - one of £250 from a private benefactor and one of £16585 from me.
(my emphasis}
and where precisely is the cash that the President claims (see the ECF's own website last October) that he has put " ... into chess and into the federation ...."?

Q. However it was raised, is the ECF confident that it knows how and where the money was spent?

We've been here before. If these questions remain unanswered I fear that we, English chess I mean, will just end up going back to them again and again and again.

Rumours

2012-01-31T07:00:00.056Z

[Don't allow today's bonus post let you miss PJM's You Should Date a Chess Player from yesterday.]

@Times_Chess 23:47 Monday 30th January 2012
rumours abound that LARA BARNES of t-shirtgate fame has offered a grovelling apology to cj de mooi and the english chess federation board

@Times_Chess 23:49 Monday 30th January 2012
if true perhaps lara barnes shd reconsider her now incompatible position as manager of the 2012 british championship #cjdemooi

@Berlin_Endgame 00:03 Tuesday 31st January 2012
Evening Ray. Any comment on Gidders' claim that CJ didn't put any of his own cash into Sheffield 2012?

@Berlin_Endgame 00:08 Tuesday 31st January 2012
... Or G's suggestion that you yourself helped secure the funds that actually paid for the 2011 British

@Times_Chess 00:15 Tuesday 31st January 2012
his account is accurate-however cj has undoubtedly poured much of his own funds into british chess-best president ever imho

You Should Date A Chess Player

2012-01-30T08:00:00.022Z

Date a chess player. Find them in The Plough on Museum Street on a Monday evening. Find them in The Wargrave Arms, doing their best not to look at the beautiful bar staff. Find them failing, frequently. Wherever you find them, find them in deep thought, dwelling over the complexities of the Czech Benoni. Make sure they look challengingly at their opponent from time to time, for this means they know how affecting eye contact can be. Engage them in clichés and wait for them to talk about the weather. Persevere until their glance lingers and talk nonsense instead. Marvel at their imagination and breadth of vocabulary. Ignore their friends exchanging excited half-whispers by the bar. Write your number on the back of their scoresheet. Recognise that chess players are notoriously bad at making first contact. Insist on having theirs too. Wait until the weekend. Call them. Accept their mumbled apologies with good grace and an invitation to dinner.

Find shared interests and common ground like cricket and the Times crossword. Accept that chess will be more important than you. On a particularly long evening, ask them to teach you to play. Start to understand their obsession while not understanding the concepts. Let the months pass. Give up, but only after scoring 1/6 in the Golders Green Minor. Take up squash. Argue about how your playing partner Charlie is just a friend. Sleep with Charlie. Realise Charlie means nothing and you just needed a break from your partner and their bloody chess friends. At the same time, realise you like all that. Realise you love all that. Realise you love them.

Let the years pass. Marry them. Move to the suburbs where houses are big enough for a chess library. Have children. Watch them respond with indifference to being taught chess. Grow old. Wonder at your partner’s lack of achievement despite devoting 60 years of their life to the game. Watch them die, still hooked on that infuriating mixture of strategy and solitude. At their funeral, notice that, despite being unremarkable in every other way, 300 people have come to pay their respects to their rival, their inspiration, their drinking partner. Their friend.

Do these things, because a chess player understands how a subtle departure from the norm can change everything. How one mistake can ruin a life’s work. How a poor sense of timing can lead to missed opportunities. Do these things, because a chess player is forced to move on after every battle, win or lose. Because, while the little things will matter the most, they’ll still consider the bigger picture. Because not making progress can hurt more than the most crushing defeat.

Do these things, because chess players are as human as anyone else. Possibly more so. Except the ones who don’t wash. Leave them alone.

Based unashamedly on this. Thanks to Lisa Marie Thompson for drawing my attention to it.

The Other Talent of Bill Hook's Friend

2012-01-28T11:00:00.061Z

Last Saturday's "Other Talent" post looked at the paintings and photography of Bill Hook, who played chess with the best of them in the Olympiads for the British Virgin Islands – that’s after honing his chess skills on the American chess scene, in the clubs of New York (about which, see more in the Kevin Spraggett blog) and in state and national tournaments.

One of his sparring partners was Larry Evans (1932-2010), not only a GM, but a sometime chess club proprietor and blackjack addict, and importantly for the purposes of this series of posts, a minor patron of the arts. That is to say, he bought several of Bill’s paintings (six to eight, according to Bill's memoir Hooked on Chess) in the late 1950s (or thereabouts, the memoir is sometimes a bit vague on chronology).

Bill also relates that:

“Aside from the chess paintings for his club, [Larry Evans] had bought a couple of my student paintings, one of which was a nude of an ex-Ziegfeld Follies girl, who had turned to modelling in her elderly corpulent years. Also Larry once commissioned me to paint a nude of his current girlfriend. It took me three days.”

Unfortunately the chess paintings disappeared when the club eventually folded, and presumably the nudes went West, too. But, en passant, the above passage is significant in showing that in addition to portraits and abstracts, Bill enjoyed another of the great thematic genres of Western art – the nude.

Getting back to Larry Evans: he evidently collected art in a small way and, as if by coincidence, the woman he married (he had met her across a blackjack table) was destined to become a modestly successful artist: Ingrid Evans (she took his surname) – and so we come to the subject of this post. OK, maybe not an artist who played serious chess, but the artist wife of a GM. Which is close. Worth a detour, anyway.

But first a game of chess (one I couldn't find anywhere else on the Internet; though it may be there - somewhere).

Yes, the sixteen year old Larry Evans played and beat the 61 year old Duchamp – which is a nice pendant to the Hook v Duchamp game last time. Unfortunately, I can’t find a score of a Hook v Evans game to complete the circle (but maybe a reader could help).

Larry stays cool as Marcel makes waves on the King's side, in 1953.

As for the Duchamp v Evans score: it comes from maybe an unlikely source, an artwork by Ingrid Evans. Specifically, a collage shown at an exhibition in 2009 at Francis M. Naumann’s gallery, in New York, installed to coincide with the publication of his book Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess (co-authoured with Bradley Bailey) which we blogged about here.

Here is the work, hung in situ in the exhibition (with startling chess sets at the front - we'll come back to those):

Its full title is Games People Play (Duchamp Evans 1948), created in 2005, and it shows Larry Evans original score of the Duchamp v Evans game (as above, except in descriptive notation). But it was an unflattering game for Duchamp (he lost, after all), and so maybe not quite an hommage.

The other major element in the photomontage is an image of Duchamp’s 1944 work Pocket Chess Set with Rubber Glove. In fact the orginal work (shown at Julien Levy's 1949 Imagery Of Chess exhibition) was lost, but was re-created in 1966 under Duchamp's supervision. I think what we see is a bleached-out photo of the reconstruction, which bore, under the ‘a’ through to ‘c’ files, Duchamp's signature – and that detail makes it clear that Ingrid Evans has, deliberately, montaged it the wrong way round, in mirror image. For some reason, back in 1944 Duchamp, also deliberately, set up his Pocket Chess Set with a nonsense arrangement of the pieces.

The other element is the QGD pawn formation, taken from the first two moves in the Duchamp Evans game, on an 8x8 grid and using modern pocket-set tokens. They appear as the drip of symbolic blood from the wrist of the defeated party (Duchamp lui-même?). This is a close up of the complete work:

The exhibition had a companion piece (below) by Ingrid Evans hanging nearby: Games People Play (Cuba 1952), which collaged the score of Pomar v Evans in the International Tournament in Havana. Having shown a Duchamp defeat in the first work, this time she shows a draw: albeit in a game that Duchamp didn’t play. The other major element in this one is a photo of another work supervised by Duchamp, of and about Duchamp: Marcel Duchamp Cast Alive of 1967, in which a disembodied head (cast from himself) contemplates a reduced chess board bearing a knight of his own 1918/9 design.

The scrap of a chess position in the upper left of the frame doesn’t occur in the Pomar Evans game itself, nor of course in the Pocket Chess Set (excepting the a7 and b6 pawns); but from what we can see of it, it does at least look like a part of some kind of sensible chess position .

By the way, before we chide the Evanses with accusations of discreet nepotism (suggested by Mrs Evans display of two of Mr E's decent, though not his most distinguished, games), remember that Marcel himself had an artwork made from the score of his own 1928 drawn game with Tartakover (so proud he was of it). Game score as a ready-made art work is a typical Duchamp trope - though this is stretching things a bit. He sold his perspex encased Chess Score (1965) to raise funds for his youth programme with American Chess Federation. Good man.

All very interesting; and Ingrid Evans invites us to get lost in a maze of hidden meanings, false echoes, crossed references and blind alleys that would have amused Duchamp himself – the joker par excellence. Well, fun for us chess players as maybe, but pity the non-chesser. Although they may have chortled at this: in front of the Duchamp Evans work are those two stunning chess sets by Sophie Matisse (yes, that's right: Henri’s great grand-daughter and grand-daughter of the second Mrs Marcel Duchamp’s first husband Pierre Matisse) as if to invite you to play a game yourself – except that the curators say........

After all that it might be a relief to get on to some of Ingrid Evans more conventional works: abstract collages from paper. Just time for one: it's called Area B :

This website shows more of her work, and says:

Much of the imagery is based on aerial views of the terrain, where natural land formations and evidence of human presence appear as organic and geometric shapes--evidence of our presence on the land.

As we noted last time, this is of that type of "abstract" art that takes the real as its raw material, and distills it. Area B starts from the down to earth - craters/crop circles, fissures/freeways, creeks/canals - and by eye and application extracts the fraction that contains the art. These days such grounded works have a broad appeal, and smooth the mood in many a corporate boardroom, hotel foyer and penthouse lounge - but they won't be seen rocking the ramparts.

Ingrid Evans thoughtful work has provided an absorbing diversion, for which, thank you Mrs E., and may the road rise up to meet you.

Footnote on the Duchamp v Evans game score

Unfortunately I'm unable to decipher the details of the event. Could anyone familiar with chess Stateside and who can make it out, please let us know via the comments box. Thanks.

And if anyone out there could help by explaining whether the Pomar/Evans round 7 game, here, had any chessic significance, that would also be much appreciated.

Acknowledgements

Hooked on Chess; A Memoir. By Bill Hook. Published in 2008 by New in Chess.

Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess. By Francis M. Naumann and Bradley Bailey. Published in 2009 by readymade press, on the occasion of the exhibition Marcel Duchamp: Chess Master at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York, September 10 - October 30, 2009.

The excellent photographic record of the exhibition, and the Evans and Matisse works, is from mickeyono2005's photostream.

See here for some more colour-saturated chess sets.

The Other Talent of Philip Poyser

The Other Talent of Bill Hook

Chess in Art Index

Never happened before

2012-01-27T07:55:00.105Z

Very strong player in their time. History of disputes with the national chess federation. Undoubted ability in the popularisation of chess. Widely distrusted by well-informed people in the chess community. Despite that, has a lot of fans, particularly on social media. Also has some iffy associates. Not everything that appears under their name is necessarily written by them. Not everything they say is necessarily to be believed. Much prefers to blog rather than write books.

I don't read a lot of Susan Polgar's blog - who did you think I was talking about? - and I'm not usually tempted to. Its claim may be "updated, timely, fair, and objective chess daily news and information from around the globe" but it might be more accurate to say that they recycle chess stories from wherever they can find them (not always with perfect literacy) and then acknowledge their sources as barely and inadequately as they can.

But chacun à son goût. At least they're not writing blog pieces every week about what they've just read on bloody Twitter.

Not that I am either, mind - I'm writing about what I read on her Twitter account in December.

Big and very exciting.

Never happened in chess or any other sport before.

Personally, my reaction to this apparent news was to try and imagine what, possibly, could have never happened in any sport before, and what it would look like if it - big and exciting as it was apparently going to be - were to happen in chess. Regrettably my imagination failed me, though in all fairness I didn't try to exercise it for very long, what with the big and exciting news coming up the following week when we would all see for ourselves.

So I settled down to wait. And wait....and wait....

....and it's now five weeks later. So did I miss it then, or what? You have to do a lot of scrolling to get through Paul And Susan's Other People's Chess News and I have scrolled through five weeks' worth of it. Is it possible that something extraordinary happened in the world of chess - and in all that scrolling, it passed me by?

You wouldn't think so. I mean at the very least, if it had, somebody else would surely have written about it. And their report would have been borrowed by ChessDailyNews.com.

Pop Quiz, Hotshot

2012-01-24T15:16:00.004Z

The name of one chess grandmaster appears in the pages of John Berger's Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), the book based on the television series of the same name. Whose?

Annotation for the Masses, Not Just for the Ruling Classes

2012-01-23T08:00:00.009Z

YES.

I recently found myself in a conversation about the nature of published game analysis, particularly how it can become an outlet for the annotator’s frustration or ego. If the scribe has won, it’s easy for them to slip into the mode of the crowing jackass. If they’ve not done as well as they expected, the sob stories can flow like the BBC3 primetime schedule. You know how it goes.

Barry God - Geoff Rabbit

Obviously I’m completely winning here. Black’s king is far too exposed and his threats against my king are illusory. My opponent had been sipping noisily from his beer can for a while. He looked like one of those poor people I see from a cab window on Shepherd’s Bush Green. You know, the ones who’d be clamped for parking without a permit if they were a Ford Escort.

Unfortunately, with one move to make before the time control, he unleashed a belch that brought back memories of the time I accidentally set foot in The Rocket on Euston Road, thinking it was a gastro.

40. Rg2??

Obviously, because I’m a good player, I’d intended to play c3 first. The cretin had put me off.

40… Qxg2 0-1

I shook his hand swiftly, declined a post-mortem and headed straight for a shower.

Geoff Rabbit’s going to be pretty miffed when he reads something like that. Of course, something as blatantly character-defaming is unlikely to show its face in a serious publication. The other side of the coin is when no personality is displayed at all.

Having titled players annotate their games for a publication is a big draw and can be very lucrative. However, such games are likely to be victories. The chess pro’s ego is very fragile. One of the many impressive things about 7DCS and Zebras by Jonathan Rowson is how many games he includes where he’s lost. After all, as my primary school teachers told me, you learn more from your defeats.

I suppose it’s a question of what published annotations aim to achieve. If they aim to educate, taking a personal approach is necessary. Style is subjective. If they aim to entertain, the actual chess content takes second priority. The personality of the players is given greater exposure and the game is humanised. Both of these approaches are very readable.

The third approach is sadly very prevalent. Many annotations are soulless extensions of a player’s ego and have no ascribable value or depth. Many publications seem intent on fellating the egos and wallets of the elite, while giving little thought to the demands of the readership. Many of the best sporting pundits competed at a level below the elite, or didn’t compete at all. Jonathan Agnew, Peter Jones and Simon Barnes spring to mind. Of course, many have done, notably Martin Brundle, Matthew Syed and John McEnroe. I’m not suggesting that all very strong chess players write like automatons, but it’s undeniable that many do.

A good chess annotation should be able to identify and evaluate many concepts, including those of a more psychological nature. It should tell a story. Character, setting, plot. It should reveal the inner turmoil that comes with making a decision. Conflict. It should describe those breathtaking moments of realisation and discovery. Anagnoresis.

And then a king dies and the pieces are put in the box for another day. Catharsis.

The Other Talent of Bill Hook

2012-01-21T11:00:00.041Z

You may have read this book already, published in 2008 by NiC, or one of its many enthusiastic reviews in the chess press. It’s the memoir of Bill Hook (1925-2010), chesser, gambler, photographer and artist. It's worth another look, as it gives us the subject for this episode in our occasional series on chess players with the other talent.

You can also get edited highlights in an hour long interview with Bill Hook, by John Watson, here.

Bill Hook's chess took off when he acquired a serious habit in his late teens, then frequenting New York's chess club scene to get his fix, principally at “Fisher’s” (so-called after its proprietor), which continued as the “Flea House” (self-explanatory) until its demise. In the book we meet the characters he fought there across the board, and those he befriended off it. The superb photo composition on the front cover (as all the others in the book, one of his own) captures the ethos of the joint and its Chandleresque habitués: just don’t ask them to smile for the camera.

It’s the kind of place that would lend atmosphere to a film, and indeed it did: Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 noirish “The Killing”. Kubrick himself was a notorious chess hustler in New York, apparently, and chopped plenty wood with Hook.

Even though Bill was an American citizen – almost archetypically so: making his own luck in a Wild West sort of way - he played for the British Virgin Islands. That’s because he lived there, on and off, for 42 years, on the tornado wracked paradise of Cooper Island. And in case you wondered, like me, BVI is here:

BVI (pop. 20k) improbably, and regularly, fielded a team in the Olympiads, playing in its lower reaches, and it was a proud achievement when Bill Hook won the Board One medal in 1980. He played in 17 overall, with Jon Speelman dubbing him, in 1977, “the Father of the Olympiad”.

Art, and latterly photography, intertwined with chess throughout his life. TB prevented active service in WW2 and emerging from treatment, and subsequently, he was awarded several grants enabling him to develop his creative talents.

Chess and art knotted together in one piquant moment when he played and beat fellow chess artist Marcel Duchamp in 1951, even though when asked, Marcel claimed, a little disingenously perhaps, that he was on a "long vacation" from his other talent.

Duchamp had himself also been an international Olympian: for France, before the war. Here is the game.

In the interview Bill elaborates on the development of his art:

I started in a very orthodox manner, doing a lot of realistic subjects, and I gradually introduced abstract elements…towards the end I was entirely abstract which I felt was much more creative than simply rendering a scene realistically...which I didn’t feel was creative enough.

Chess remained one his themes even as his style evolved. Here is a severely representational rendering of players and the struggle. It is based on a photograph, surely, but his artist's eye has stripped down the scene and its tonal contrasts to the essentials. Interesting enough for its three-quarter orientation, it also, as so often in chess art, calls on the hands to do the heavy lifting of the emotional load; they aren't there simply to move the pieces, so to speak. In Bill's painting they steal the scene. That's Pal Benko on the right.

And this is a sub-surrealist bit of whimsy evoking opponents in battle (note those hands again).

But that can’t really be the abstract style that Bill championed in the quote above. A better example would be this:
The scale of this reproduction doesn't do it justice, but it seems to be about the contrast of the opaque with the translucent; surface with depth; solid with fluid. If you reach out, your hand might go through it or - put better - into it. Bill was of that trend in "abstract" art that derives from reality - "abstract" as verb, rather than adjective.

He says that his experience of the world under water was his inspiration, and that his method of painting such works was...

…pouring quick-drying acrylic paints on my canvas which lay on the floor, employing a spoon and palette knife for control, (no brushes) and cultivating thin translucent washes while building up richness of colour and texture…taking months to complete a canvas.

If I understand the chronology of his story correctly, this development in Bill's work was from the 60s onwards, though in truth the expressive possibilities of pouring stuff on the floor were already well-known from Jackson Pollock in the 40s.

Bill Hook turned away from ambitions of an artistic career after early disappointments on the gallery circuit, eventually more or less completely eschewing painting for the same reason. He seemed to have found the camera a more simpatico instrument than the spoon. In the book there are 50 or so photos of the chess personalities of the latter part of the 20th Century into the 21st - from the jejune blandness of the impossibly young Carlsen to the life-etched cragginess of the indestructibly veteran Kortchnoi - and many would stand out in any photographic exhibition.

Bill's treated his subjects sympathetically, and they invariably display positive good humour, reflecting what one imagines was his own glass-half-full outlook on life. Only once or twice does he show us the dark side, as in this revealing shot of Kamsky père et fils (with apologies for the poor reproduction, here and throughout this post). It could walk off with first prize in the psychodrama category.

Bill Hook’s chess photos appeared in the chess press, and his chess achievements were honoured by a special BVI stamp. His paintings decorated several chess venues, including one started up by Larry Evans (who will appear next week), but they seem not to have survived well, are lost or disappeared into private hands who knows where. I could not find any, apart from those already in the book, on the Internet. Which is a shame, as he was a rare example of a modern chess competitor on the international stage (one or two others we'll come back to), albeit by accident of domicile, who was also a first rate artist.

The reproductions in his memoir are testament to his enormous talent – it would be good to see more of his paintings. Can anyone out there help?

Acknowledgements:

Hooked on Chess; A Memoir. By Bill Hook. Published in 2008 by New in Chess. Worth a read! All photos and paintings used in this post are by Bill Hook (except his own portrait which appears unattributed on the web).

Please see this Chess in Art post, and its comments, for more on hands.

Chess in Art Index

There's a new kid in town

2012-01-20T08:00:00.001Z

How time flies. That's not the freshest of observations, I grant you. Still, it hardly seems a moment since T.C. suggested starting a blog and yet we've already whizzed through five years and well over a thousand posts.

As fun as it's been we grow weary, or old if you prefer. Two marriages, the birth of a child and new jobs have all taken their toll on our combat effectiveness. We need new blood and happily we've found some sloshing around in the body that belongs to Phil Makepeace.

The first I heard of Phil was when Release the Kraken started around a year and a half ago. Intelligent, interesting and amusing - what's not to love about a blog which uses its first post to invite readers to send in limericks about Stewart Reuben's beard? - RTK is everything that chess writing should be. Well, it is when it manages to haul its arse out of bed and get itself published.

Quality and not quantity is the Kraken watchword. I'm very pleased that Phil has agreed to fill some of the gaps by writing regularly for the S&BC Blog too. His first post is coming up this Monday. Do drop by and say hello.

Quiet time

2012-01-18T08:00:00.043Z

It was an enjoyable afternoon, albeit a confusing one at times for my young friend.

"Can't I do that?" Zac asked at one point, glancing up at me with a quizzical look in his eye.

"Not all at once," I replied. "Pawns can move two squares on their first go, and they do capture diagonally like that, but they can't do both at the same time."

"You can go here," I jabbed a finger at c4, "and then next turn you could take me ... if I don't take you first."

Zac is seven. He got a chess set for Christmas and had pretty much taught himself the way the pieces move. He might not have got it all entirely right - wanting to play his knight from b1 to c5 was another of his novelties - but was a never too far off.

Charlotte plays too. She's three years older than her brother and, which way around the king and queen start aside, is much more confident about the rules. She told me she'd learned chess at school during 'quiet time'. Chess is one of the things they can do while the volume is turned down and one week a friend had showed her the moves.

Chess is most definitely not on the curriculum at Charlotte's school and, Malc Pein's efforts notwithstanding, I can't help feeling that's how it should be. When kids are leaving education with good grades in their English exams and still not knowing how to use an apostrophe, I'm not sure that it's the teaching of chess that is the top priority.

Yes, I know it's claimed that the introduction of chess to schools aids rather than inhibits academic attainment. I may or may not get around to writing something more on that at some later date. For now let's just say that, pleasing-to-the-eye brochures notwithstanding, I'm far from convinced that the statement that chess "makes children smarter" is true in any meaningful sense. Even if it were it's a really poor way to encourage participation in the game for the simple reason that there's an infinitely better argument readily available. Our old chum Nigel Short wasn't talking about chess in schools per se, but he hits the nail on the head here, I think:-

Give a message to all children who want to take up chess. Why should they?

Because it's FUN! Not because it's a good career move, it isn't. Not because of anything else, it is just a very enjoyable game.
CHESS, vol 76 #8 (interview with Carl Portman)

Play chess because it'll be fun? That's something Zac and Charlotte have worked out for themselves. Other kids will too if we let them.

Quiet Time photo from the Frugal Family Fun Blog

Department of A Likely Story : Richard Desmond and the chess correspondent

2012-01-16T07:55:00.004Z

So we felt by backing the editor, by putting more money into the editorial on the Daily Star, by looking at the chess correspondent, who was based in Latin America, or the New York bureau, one person in New York, all this sort of nonsense and grandism that surrounded the paper at the time, we felt that by taking a firm control of that we could, you know, get the magazine -- get the newspapers back into profit.

I was following Richard Desmond's evidence to the Leveson Inquiry last Thursday, via the Guardian liveblog, when he made this unexpected reference to a chess correspondent based in Latin America. The Guardian reporter's immediate response was

That, presumably is a joke

and mine, to be honest, was the same: I assumed it was some kind of mythical figure representing snobbishness, elitism and luxury among the metropolitan broadsheet press. A lot of mythical figures like that exist in the contemporary imagination. Not a few of them exist in the pages of Richard Desmond's newspapers.

A man of imagination

But mythical or otherwise, he must have meant it, since he said it again shortly afterwards:

I think a lot of these other groups don't really understand that it is a business, and, you know, there's more to life than the chess correspondent based in Latin America.

Well, if you can't repeat your own jokes then whose can you? But is it a joke? Or did such a figure actually exist? Or did some other figure exist, who over the course of a decade has been transformed, in Richard Desmond's imagination, into the bogeyman he brought up at Leveson?

It's not the first time Desmond has made such a claim. Radio Four had cause to mention it last August, which was mentioned on the English Chess Forum:

He fired the paper's chess correspondent who lived in South America earning £60,000 a year.

This, in turn, may derive from statements he made when acquiring Channel Five in July 2010, at which time he made at least two mentions of this transatlantic chess correspondent whose employment he terminated. One was in an interview in the Jewish Chronicle in 2010:

When two companies come together, there will be efficiencies which need to be made. When we bought Express Newspapers, for instance, we were paying £50k for a chess correspondent in Latin America.

while another was in a Sky News interview in which (at 2:30) he says:

When we bought the newspapers in 2000, there was a chess reporter based in South America who was paid fifty thousand pounds a year. So we did terminate his services.

So what, as they say, is all that about? It's hard to believe that even at its most profligate, any British daily paper would have retained the services of a full-time chess correspondent based in South America, which is why, along with the Guardian journalist, I assumed it was a joke. But the repetition of the story leads one to believe that Desmond is at least thinking of something real, even if the reality was rather different to what his memory, or his imagination, says it was.

But what? I can't admit to seeing the Daily Express very often (though my parents used to get the Sunday Express about a million years ago, when John Junor was still alive). My impression is that it used to be written for genteel fascists and is now written for street thugs, which is not remotely the fault of its chess correspondent, one Luke McShane. A very long-term chess correspondent, as I understand it, though I don't know if his period with the paper has been unbroken. I do know that he's unlikely to have been based in Latin America at the time of Richard Desmond's acquisition of the title, since he was then at the City of London School.

Not guilty

So who? Stewart Reuben notes that Bill Hartston was at the Daily Express at the time, though far from having been dispensed with, he has been there ever since. Moreover he wasn't living in Latin America and for that matter wasn't the chess correspondent: instead, as he related in an interview with this very blog, he was signed up by Rosie Boycott to write the Beachcomber column.

Life in Rio

Intriguingly, though, he does say in the interview that he did write about chess for a short time:

There was a brief moment when The Express had a puzzles supplement and I did some stuff for that but that's all.

Can this possibly be the source of Desmond's recollection, the closure of this puzzles supplement? It's pretty thin evidence to go by. But we seem to have a choice between pretty thin evidence and none at all.

The oddity of Desmond's comments haven't gone entirely unnoticed in the media, especially by the Guardian's Stephen Moss. He Tweeted:

He doesn't, however, go on to say who thinks it was. Perhaps he, too, is thinking of Bill Hartston.

But maybe there really was a Latin American-based chess correspondent, trousering fifty or sixty big ones a year for no obvious return. As the late Sir John so often said, I think we should be told.

. . .

As it goes, it's not the first time Richard Desmond and mysteriously expensive chess correspondents have coincided. When I read the following passage from the Leveson transcript

A. I hope so. Frankly, I'd rather get rid of this, you know, prosecute the people that have committed offences and get on with business. And have a proper RCD board of proper business people, legal people...

LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: What do you mean -- I'm sorry, you have to explain -- RCD?

A. Richard Clive Desmond.

I couldn't help but recall another passage (which I first saw mentioned here) from Docklands Encounter, a 1984 instant Batsford book by Keene and Goodman*:

That afternoon, Keene, Campomanes and Chetwynd assembled at Ivory House, HQ of Strategy International, and then drove to Northern and Shell for their appointment with Richard Desmond and Chris Cottom of Sightline. The meeting was a failure - it quickly became apparent that there was bad chemistry between the two sides. Keene and Campomanes had hoped to be offered sponsorship. Instead, Cottom suggested that he pay his Company a flat fee of £5,000 and, in exchange, his sales force would look for sponsors. This fee would not be refundable, even if no new sponsors were found. The meeting broke up with Keene and Campomanes dissatisfied. Richard Desmond did, however, offer everyone a lift in his gold Rolls Royce (number plate RJD001) and dropped Keene and Campomanes off at the Cumberland Hotel in Marble Arch where Hasan was staying. (p. 17)

Thanks to the reader who supplied me with the passage. But RJD? Must have been written by Goodman. You wouldn't expect Ray to make a lapse like that.

[Source for Sky News interview]
[Desmond photo: Guardian]
[McShane photo: The Scotsman]
[Ray Keene index]

[* Actually the authorship of the book is somewhat obscure since the hardback and paperback editions give different and inconsistent information: it's actually a mess. Other people who are listed as having contributed include Robert Wade, HM Hasan and John Groser. I've gone for Keene and Goodman as the main authors. Thanks to our reader who assisted me with this.]

A Literary Reference : Funeral In Berlin

2012-01-14T09:55:00.000Z

I went with her down the long cream corridor to a room at the extreme western wing of the building. The decor too was like County Hall. She tapped gently on a large door and without waiting for a reply motioned me through. It was dark inside the room with just enough light filtering through the window from the courtyard to see where the desk was. From behind the desk there was a sudden red glow like an infra-red flash-bulb. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I saw that the far side of the room was filled with a silvery sheen.

"Dorf," said the voice of Stok. It boomed almost like an amplifier. There was a click from his desk; the yellow tungsten light came on.

Stok was sitting behind his desk almost obscured by a dense cloud of cigar smoke. There was Scandinavian-style East German furniture in the room. On the table behind me there was a Hohner simple button-key accordion, piles of newspapers, and a chessboard with some of the pieces fallen over. There was a folding bed near the wall with two army blankets on it and high leather boots placed together at the head. Near the door was a tiny sink and a cupboard that might have held clothes.

"My dear Dorf," said Stok. "Have I caused you great inconvenience?"

He emerged from the cigar smoke in an ankle-length black leather overcoat.

"Not unless you count being scared half to death," I said.

"Ha ha ha," said Stok, then he exhaled another great billow of cigar smoke like a 4.6.2 pulling out of King's Cross.

"I wanted to contact you," he spoke with the cigar held between tight lips, "without Vulkan."

"Another time," I said, "write."

There was another tap at the door. Stok moved across the room like a wounded crow. The grey-haired one brought two lemon teas.

"There is no milk today I am afraid," said Stok; he drew the overcoat around him.

"And so Russian tea was invented," I said.

Stok laughed again in a perfunctory sort of way. I drank the scalding hot tea. It made me feel better, like digging your finger nails into your palm does.

"What is it?" I said.

Stok waited while the grey-haired one closed the door behind her. Then he said, "Let's stop quarrelling, shall we?"

"You mean personally?" I said. "Or are you speaking on behalf of the Soviet Union?"

"I mean it," said Stok. "We can do far better for ourselves if we co-operate than if we obstruct each other." Stok paused and smiled with studied charm.

"This scientist Semitsa is not important to the Soviet Union. We have other younger men with newer and better ideas. Your people on the other hand will think you marvellous if you can deliver him to London." Stok shrugged his shoulders at the idiocy of the world of politics.

"Caveat emptor?" I said.

"Not half," said Stok in a skilful piece of idiom. "Buyer watch out." Stok rolled the cigar across his mouth and said, "Buyer watch out," a couple of times. I just drank the lemon tea and said nothing. Stok ambled across to the chessboard on the side-table, his leather coat creaking like a windjammer.

"Are you a chess player, English?" he said.

"I prefer games where there's a better chance to cheat," I said.

"I agree with you," said Stok. "The preoccupation with rules doesn't sit well upon the creative mind."

"Like communism?" I said.

Stok picked up a knight. "But the pattern of chess is the pattern of your capitalist world. The world of bishops and castles, and kings and knights."

"Don't look at me," I said. "I'm just a pawn. I'm here in the front rank." Stok grinned and looked down at the board.

"I'm a good player," he said. "Your friend Vulkan is one of the few men in Berlin who can consistently beat me."

"That's because he is part of the pattern of our capitalist world."

"The pattern," said Stok, "has been revised. The knight is the most important piece on the board. Queens have been made...impotent. Can you say impotent of a queen?"

"On this side of the wall you can say what you like," I said.

Stok nodded. "The knights - the generals - run your western world. General Walker of the 24th Infantry Division lectured all his troops that the President of the U.S.A. was a communist."

"You don't agree?" I asked.

"You are a fool," boomed Stok in his Boris Godunov voice.

"I am trying to tell you that these people..." He waved the knight in my face. "... look after themselves."

"And you are jealous?" I asked seriously.

"Perhaps I am," said Stok. "Perhaps that's it." He put the knight back and he pulled the skirt of his overcoat together.

"So you are going to sell me Semitsa as a little bit of private enterprise of your own?" I said. "If you'll forgive the workings of my bourgeois mind."

"You live only once," said Stok.

"I can make once do," I said.

Stok heaped four spoonfuls of coarse sugar into his tea. He stirred it as though he was putting an extra rod into an atomic pile. "All I want is to live the rest of my life in peace and quiet - I do not need a lot of money, just enough to buy a little tobacco and the simple peasant food that I was brought up on. I am a colonel and my conditions are excellent but I am a realist; this cannot last. Younger men in our security service look at my job with envy." He looked at me and I nodded gently. "With envy," he repeated.

"You are in a key job," I said.

"But the trouble with such jobs is that many others want them too. Some of my staff here are men with fine college diplomas, their minds are quick as mine once was; and they have the energy to work through the day and through the night too as once I had the energy to do." He shrugged. "This is why I decided to come to live the rest of my life in your world."

He got up and opened one of the big wooden shutters. From the courtyard there was the beat of a heavy diesel engine and the sound of boots climbing over a tailboard. Stok thrust his hands deep in his overcoat pockets and flapped his wings.

I said, "What about your wife and your family, will you be able to persuade them?"

Stok continued to look down into the courtyard. "My wife died in a German air raid in 1941, my only son hasn't written to me for three and a half years. What would you do in my position, Mr Dorf? What would you do?"

I let the sound of the lorry rumble away down Keibelstrasse.

I said, "I'd stop telling lies to old liars for a start, Stok. Do you really think I came here without dusting off your file? My newest assistant is trained better than you seem to think I am. I know everything about you from the cubic capacity of your Westinghouse refrigerator to the size your mistress takes in diaphragms."

Stok picked up his tea and began to batter the lemon segment with the bowl of his spoon. He said, "You've trained well."

"Train hard, fight easy," I said.

"You quote Marshal Suvarov." He walked across to the chessboard and stared at it. "In Russia we have a proverb, 'Better a clever lie than the foolish truth'." He waved his teaspoon at me.

"There was nothing clever about that clumsy piece of wife-murder."

"You're right," said Stok cheerfully. "You shall be my friend, English. We must trust each other." He put his tea down on the desk top.

"I'll never need an enemy," I said.

Stok smiled. It was like arguing with a speak-your-weight machine.

"Truthfully, English," he said, "I do not want to defect to the West but the offer of Semitsa is a genuine one." He sucked the spoon.

"For money?" I asked.

"Yes," said Stok. He tapped the fleshy palm of his left hand with the bowl of the spoon.

"Money here." He closed his hand like a vault.

...

I thought about 'King' Vulkan when I got back to the Fruhling. I was surprised that he was one of the best chess players in Berlin but he was full of surprises. I thought about my code name - Kadaver - and about Kadavergehorsam, which is the sort of discipline which makes a corpse jump up and salute. I poured a Teacher's and stared down at the screaming shining lights. I had begun to get the feel of the town; both sides of the wall had wide well-lit streets separated by inky lakes of darkness. Perhaps this was the only city in the world where you were safer in the dark.

...

He turned his back to me and began to toy with the junk on the bench, setting up some monstrous chess game. He tapped the rusty sparking plugs and squeezed valve springs in the palm of his hand. At the side of the bench was a thick polished oval of wood. There were twelve different sizes of drill stuck into it like matches in a peg board. Johnnie amused himself throwing the springs over the shiny drills. "Schmidt's of Solingen," it said on a scroll around the wooden base. "Best drills in the world."

...

Already it was dusk. The back-gardens all along the block were a chessboard of lighted
windows. The light inside the houses was very yellow in the blue evening of a London winter.

Len Deighton, Funeral in Berlin, Triad, 1978. p.29-31, p.35, p.166, p.183-4. (Original date of publication 1964.)

[Thanks again to Campion - and to Richard who did a lot of work on this]

[A Literary Reference index]

"The Berlin Defence is a classic defence by means of counter-attack"

2012-01-13T07:55:00.238Z

1 Players move alternately — only one at a time.

Len Deighton's Funeral In Berlin, originally published by Jonathan Cape in 1964, is probably best-known these days for the 1966 film, directed by Guy Hamilton and starring Michael Caine, that was made from it.

The novel, however, is of particular interest to those who follow chess as well as cinema, because it refers to chess not only in a number of different passages (for which, see tomorrow's posting) but also at the head of nearly all of its fifty-one chapters. (The others all have, as headings, names of characters in the novel: the second chapter, for instance, is headed ROBIN JAMES HALLAM.)

3 Where pieces are used to protect other pieces, there will be high casualty rate. Better by far to assign only pawns to supporting roles.

I've reproduced them all here, with the numbers of the chapters which they head attached to them. (In the text, they appear in italic type - I've preferred blue here for ease of viewing.) They are all short references, offering definitions, explanations or some other kind of information or advice on various aspects of the game. The name of an opening, for instance

4 The Berlin Defence is a classic defence by means of counter-attack.

or some simple advice on how the game is played

5 When a player offers a piece for exchange or sacrifice then surely he has in mind a subsequent manoeuvre which will end to his advantage.

or the explanation of some piece of chess terminology

6 A bad bishop is one hampered by his own pawns.

or simply how one of the pieces moves.

7 Knights can pass over squares controlled by enemy forces. Knights always end their move on a square of the opposite colour.

When you start reading through them, though, you notice certain things that don't necessarily seem right. Some of the terminology, for instance, is strange. Have you ever heard of a Roman Decoy?

13 Roman Decoy: a piece offered as bait to save a hazardous situation.

Is "range" a common term in chess?

30 Range in chess is measured not by distance but by the number of squares to which a legal move can be made.

Does this sound like an apt description of the Czech Defence, even supposing that name were generally used in English?

31 Czech Defence: a sequence in which pawn is matched with pawn but the queen's bishop tips the balance.

There is some clumsy English: I don't think that we would normally "make" an attack, for instance

15 Even a pawn can make a 'double attack'.

and in the following snippet, the identity of "his" is not at all clear

23 King's Gambit is an opening in which his own side's pawns are sacrificed.

while we would surely talk of "losing a tempo", rather than just "tempo" without the article.

38 A player who uses two moves to do something possible in one is said to have 'lost tempo'.

There's also a missing article here

36 Switchback: to return to original position in any given sequence.

as there is in the heading to chapter three, given above. There are also some possible typos, as for instance here

37 A committed piece is one given a specific duty. It often becomes the focal point of an opponents attack.

where the possessive apostrophe has been omitted. Which might be an error of understanding rather than an accidental omission, but the absence of the inverted comma before "foot", here

44 In China, Hungary, India, Korea and Poland pawns are called foot soldiers', but in Tibet they are called 'children'.

is surely accidental.

Accidental by whom, though? By the UK publisher, quite possibly. But taken as a whole, various strange aspects to the snippets - unfamiliar terminology, clumsy English - give the impression that they are from an work in another language, translated into English by a non-native speaker. The occasional omission of the article may suggest that the original language (and presumably its translator) could be Russian, which lacks "a" and "the", and shoddy production would not be atypical of the Soviet publishing industry. (Or indeed, the chess book publishing industry elsewhere, har har.)

It has the feel of a translation. Perhaps from some chess primer, a beginners' guide, an introductory work. But is it? And if so, what? I don't know. There's nothing in the book to say so, to indicate (if this is indeed so) what the original work was, or who translated it. Nor to say, if this isn't so, where all these little snippets come from.

I don't know whether Deighton was a chessplayer, or if he ever explained the references, or if anybody else has ever discovered their provenance. My searching the internet hasn't produced any results, though perhaps somebody else may do better.

I'd guess that British chess magazines, from the mid-Sixties, when Deighton's novel was published, might have looked into it. But I don't have access to them where I am. Any readers who do, or can shed any light on the origin of Deighton's chapter headings from any other source, would find their information warmly welcomed.

8 Skilful use of knights is the mark of the professional player.

9 In certain circumstances pawns can be converted into the most powerful unit on the board.

11 Zugzwang: to move a chess piece under duress.

12 Every piece has its mode of attack but only a pawn will attack en passant. Similarly only a pawn can be captured in this manner.

14 J'adoube: a word used to indicate that a player intends to touch a piece but not move it.

16 Every pawn is a potential queen.

17 A knight can be used to simultaneously threaten two widely spaced units. (This is called a 'fork') If one of these threats is against a king the other piece must inevitably be lost.

18 Mate: a word from Old French meaning to overpower or overcome.

19 One can escape from check by removing hostile pieces or interposing oneself.

20 Enemy territory is that area of the board within one-move range of opposing forces.

21 The king may well be moved to a well-protected spot away from danger.

22 Checkmate remains the ultimate aim of every player.

24 A skewer is an attack along a straight line. As the first piece avoids capture it exposes the second, real target to the full force of the attack.

25 Corridor mate: when a king can only move along an expected route, he can be trapped by closing the corridor.

26 The skilled player memorises and uses the classic sequences of the games of masters.

27 Any move that attacks a hostile king is known as check.

28 Development for its own sake is insufficient. There must be a keen purpose in every move.

29 Players who relish violence, aggression and movement often depend upon the Spanish Game.

33 Two hostile bishops can be used to block the advance of passed pawns since between them they control access to all squares of both colours.

35 In medieval times it was the aim of players to annihilate every opponent instead of checkmating the king.

39 In Burma and Japan a general is the piece we call a queen, but in China and Korea a general is the piece we call a king.

40 A king cannot be captured nor need it be removed from the board. It is enough that the king is put into a position from which it cannot escape.

41 Strong square: one placed well forward, secure from attack and firmly under control.

42 The Exchange: when a player sacrifices something for an opponent's piece of lesser value he is said to be 'the exchange down'.

45 The End-game: this often centres around the queening of a pawn. Here a sudden threat can arrive on home ground.

46 Unless one is a master player the Queen's Gambit — when a pawn is offered for sacrifice — is best declined.

47 The power of a queen often encourages its use single-handed. But an unsupported queen is in a dangerous position against skilfully used pawns.

48 Pawns can only move forward. They can never retreat.

49 If a player is not in check but can only make a move that will place him in check; this is stalemate and is scored as a draw.

50 Originally the piece we now call a queen was a counsellor or government adviser.

51 Repetition rule: it is a rule of chess that when the same sequence recurs three times the game can be terminated.

[Thanks to Campion, and to my brother Richard, whose birthday, by the way, it is today.]

Chiv Chat

2012-01-11T10:01:00.063Z

Portsmouth-based artist and chess player Kier Eyles has created, well, a collector's item:-

I don't know if Kier's piece is for sale, but I also liked this ice chess piece maker, a bargain at $10:

Tonight's the night I play my first chess game this season - my first since some time in Spring last year. And this lunch time is my birthday lunch time, spent at the pub. Predictions for how many moves I last anyone?

Sixty Memorable Annotations

2012-01-09T08:00:00.087Z

#5: Salov-Gligoric, Belgrade 1987

White to play

“Oh no, not a rook ending. I hate these rook endings, just so you know”

Jesper Hall

Well here we are, over a week into 2012 already. It’ll be Christmas again soon.

Anyhoo, to kick-off the New Year, I’m going to have a look back at the last one. It was certainly an unusual twelve months for me. Chessically speaking it was a case of more and better (for the most part) than ever before, and it was different too

Let’s start with the more. In 2011 I played a total of 88 graded games. That’s getting on for three times my usual chessing rate and if you include rapidplay games (24) I broke three figures for the first time ever.

The reason for the increase in activity is simply that last year, for the first time in my life, I regularly played in tournaments. After deciding that 2011 was finally the time to take a holiday in Benasque I thought I could probably do with a warm up and so I entered the e2-e4 events at Sunningdale in May and Gatwick in June. I enjoyed those so much that when I came back from Spain I finished the year playing several more: Twyford, Sunningdale again, Imperial College and the London Chess Classic Open. That’s as many tournaments between August and December 2011 as I had played in the preceding ten years put together.

2011 wasn’t just a year of more chess for me, though. Quite often it was better chess too. Winning the Sunningdale Major was by far the best tournament result of my life and when I look back at individual games I see that I met all of the three highest-rated players that I’ve ever beaten in the last twelve months.

Chess, however – I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you this - is always ready to kick us in the nuts. So what if my grading performance in fifteen club and county games since the start of the 2011/2012 season comes in at 180 ECF (approx 2090 elo) and 8 points above my most recent published grade which was already my highest ever? I still ended the year with a truly dreadful display at the LCC – my elo has already plummeted and no doubt my grade will soon follow – but that terrible result notwithstanding, I feel that in terms of playing strength, I made a small but definite step forward in 2011

Progress

Which brings us to the “different” and the quote from Jesper Hall at the head of today’s blog.

Before last year I don’t think I’d have gone as far as Hall and said that I “hated” endgames (of the rook variety or otherwise), but that would have been because I hardly had any feelings about them at all A few posts aside – for example October and December 2008 - in twenty-five years of chessing endgames had almost never attracted my interest.

In 2011 that all changed. I seemed to be playing more endings in my own games and I started blogging about them too. I even began studying them and, surprise surprise, the more interest that I took in endgames, the more I found endgames interesting.

Take Jesper Hall’s hated rook endings for example. I might have found them dull before, but now it fascinates me that while this

is a draw, if you push everything one file to the left

White has one move that wins. Bring Black’s king a single rank forward, however,

and it’s a draw again. It’s remarkable that the whole game can hang on such apparently insignificant details isn’t it? Sure, this kind of thing is a world away from some kind of double-edged middlegame position, but it’s hardly dull.

As Jacob Aagaard writes

... endgame technique is not just knowledge of manoeuvres and theoretical positions. It is also a matter of accuracy [and] calculation ....

That sounds rather like what good chess – any kind of good chess - should be, doesn’t it? Whatever. Coming around to the idea that endings might be worthy of a much closer look than I’d been given them has certainly broadened my chessboard horizons.

Well that was my 2011: lots of games, a smidgen of success and a newfound interest in the endgame. Last year was really quite unusual for me and yet, when I think about it, I didn’t actually intend any of it.

It wasn’t a conscious decision to play more and I certainly didn’t sit down and conclude that studying endgames would be a good idea. It all happened more or less by accident and I just kind of went with the flow … which makes me really curious as to what will happen this year. Let’s find out shall we?

Desperate times

2012-01-07T09:55:00.015Z

Suppose this. Suppose you were working for the New York Times, and you had this article ready to go, all about the impact of continued austerity of the Irish people and economy. But you had to select a photo to head the piece. What sort of photo would you want?

Me, I think you'd want something striking. Something that would make people think "ah, there but for the Grace of God go you and I". Something that would say to the general public, look at what is happening to these people - they must be really desperate, if they've ended up like this.

But maybe the New York Times thought otherwise.

Or maybe they didn't...

Over and out

2012-01-06T08:00:00.032Z

Well that's it. EJH's Twelve Puzzles of Christmas series has come to an end so the festive period is now officially over.

No correct answers from me I'm afraid. Rather than solving chess problems, I spent much the holidays playing with my Christmas presents and, I mention without any further comment, going to watch a children's show with niece and nephew.

Anyhoo, Chrimbo is finished; welcome to 2012. What passes for normal blogging resumes tomorrow.

The twelve puzzles of Xmas

2012-01-05T07:55:00.001Z

Mann, 1912

White to play and win

[Thanks to Sean]

The twelve puzzles of Xmas

2012-01-04T07:55:00.000Z

Lazard, 1911

White to play and win

The twelve puzzles of Xmas

2012-01-03T07:55:00.013Z

Harley, 1910

White to play and mate in two

Pauly, 1910

White to play and mate in three

[Thanks to Jonathan and Martin]

The twelve puzzles of Xmas

2012-01-02T07:55:00.007Z

V. Platov and M. Platov, 1909

White to play and win

The twelve puzzles of Xmas

2012-01-01T07:55:00.002Z

Behting, 1908

White to play and win

[Thanks to Sean]

The twelve puzzles of Xmas

2011-12-31T07:55:00.007Z

GW Chandler, 1907

White to play and mate in two

The twelve puzzles of Xmas

2011-12-30T07:55:00.010Z

[This study is cooked! Scroll down for replacement puzzle]

Troitzky, 1906

White to play and draw

Replacement puzzle below!

Bruski, 1906

White to play and mate in three

The twelve puzzles of Xmas

2011-12-29T07:55:00.003Z

Shinkman, 1905

White to play and mate in three

The twelve puzzles of Xmas

2011-12-28T07:55:00.002Z

M. Platov, 1904

White to play and win

The twelve puzzles of Xmas

2011-12-27T07:55:00.003Z

White to play and mate in two

Wynne, 1903

The twelve puzzles of Xmas

2011-12-26T07:55:00.016Z

White to play and mate in three

Blumenthal, 1902

The twelve puzzles of Xmas

2011-12-25T07:55:00.002Z

Lasker (Em.) and Reichhelm, 1901

White to play and win

This Is Not A Pipe Dream

2011-12-24T08:00:00.024Z

To all our readers,

The Streatham and Brixton Chess Bloggers wish you seasonal greetings, and great chess in 2012.

Picture from: The Ultimate Pipe Book, by Richard Carleton Hacker [sic] Souvenir Press, 1988, where it says that the picture, from the 1950s, was "an attempt to popularize women's pipes." Thanks to Richard Rawles for the tip.

Don't miss another edition of ejh's Twelve Puzzles of Xmas, kicking-off tomorrow.

It's The Way They Told 'Em

2011-12-23T10:30:00.003Z

From the Chess Column of the Irish Weekly Times, Saturday 24 December, 1904.

Click to enlarge:

There's more, awfully more:

Gosh.

Not so simply the best

2011-12-21T07:55:00.193Z

I've been looking forward to Larry Kaufman's new repertoire book, which according to the rumours I'd read, he's been putting together. His previous one, The Chess Advantage In Black And White (Random House, 2004) is as good a repertoire book as I've seen: my copy is getting as dog-eared as a good book can expect to be.

So I was pleased to see that The Kaufman Repertoire For Black And White is due out early year, published by New In Chess.

I was also pleased to see that according to John Watson, that most respected of chess book reviewers, the new book appears to be every bit as good as the old one. Better, in fact: it's "simply the best comprehensive repertoire book I have ever seen".

Hurrah! I almost ordered it on the spot, such is Watson's enthusiasm: enthusiasm all the more impressive, given that it appears to be in praise of a book that has not actually been published. Though it's not unusual for review copies to be made available in advance of official publication.

However, the advert gives no source for Mr Watson's brief encomium, other than the author's name. One trusts that this reticence is not because, on investigation, the quote (a slight misquote, as it happens) turns out to be from a review written some years ago, and describes not the forthcoming work - but the book that came out in 2004.

A different book. Not even, strictly speaking, an earlier edition of the same book, but a different book. With a different title. Issued by a different publisher.

Not that you'd know that, from the ad.

[Book Reviews by John Watson]

Ray Could Play X

2011-12-19T08:00:00.209Z

Keene v Iskov, Esbjerg 1981

"A disaster." That was how Vishy Anand summed-up his performance at the London Chess Classic. Maybe it was, but if he thinks scoring 50% at Super GM tournaments is bad he should try getting minus three in an Open and see how that feels.

Unfortunately my LCC was one of those events where absolutely nothing goes right. It wasn't a losing a lot in a sound-thrashing-every-now-and-again-is-good-for-you kind of a way either. I'm afraid it was much more of a playing-utter-bilge-and-wanting-to-give-up-chess-by-the-end-of-it experience.

Things started to go wrong as early as move two in the first round. I was paired with IM Lorin D'Costa, but after I'd carefully prepared for his Nimzo-Indian he played 2 ... g6. "Arse it", I thought as I watched him push his king's knight pawn forward, "that's a morning's work down the drain."

9 h3

Not knowing what branch of the Nimzo to expect from Lorin, I had a look at a few possible lines. My choice to counter the Hubner variation, should the game go that way, would have been an old idea introduced by Portisch against Tony Miles at Amsterdam in 1981 and subsequently taken up with some enthusiasm and success by our old friend Raymond Keene.

1 d4 Nf6, 2 c4 e6, 3 Nc3 Bb4, 4 e3 c5, 5 Bd3 Nc6, 6 Nf3 Bxc3+, 7 bxc3 d6, 8 e4 e5 and now, instead of 9 d5 as in the famous Spassky-Fischer game from Reykjavik amongst countless others, 9 h3. White is happy to let Black capture multiple times on d4 - he'll play Bb2, recapture the pawn and have a pair of bishops on an open(ish) board - and will wait for a better moment to close the centre. As far as I know Portisch's plan was defanged pretty much as soon as the novelty had worn off, but I was hoping that it was old enough that my IM opponent would have forgotten all about it.

That, in any event, is how I came to spend some of the morning before my second-ever game against an International Master watching the last of the old episodes of The Master Game which featured in one of Justin's posts - It's all over now, Baby Blue - back in June. Naturally, I made sure to track down the games that Keene and Browne mention in that video too and they're both pretty interesting. Raymondo's win over Iskov reached the position shown in the diagram at the top of today's blog and apparently the unusual central pawn formation prompted somebody to ask him "Are you playing chess or building a cathedral?" The Ligterink game, by the way, is the one mentioned in the comments box to Ray Could Play VI and featured a brace of rather tasty exchange sacrifices.

It's a shame I didn't get to play any of this really. If I get the opportunity at some point next year I'll definitely take it. 9 h3 might not lead to an objective advantage for White, but it seems sound enough and it certainly leads to some interesting positions. Mind you, given that it was favoured by Keene during one of the most successful periods of his career, it's hardly surprising that it's a decent move. Ray could play a bit, you know?

Ray Keene Index

Photograph of Lorin D'Costa from Gibraltarchesscongress.com

Broadmoor Chess - There Has Been So Much Piffle

2011-12-17T11:00:00.078Z

This series has been following, in its most recent posts, the story of chess in Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire, as documented in the Broadmoor Chronicle, the patients’ in-house magazine.

There was as strong tradition of chess behind the walls, both as a social pastime and as a serious game with, post-war anyway, some club-strength players. These students of the game wrote an occasional chess column in the Chronicle, and were the mainstay of the internal Broadmoor Chess Club, which took on several local club teams in the 1970s.

The Chronicle appeared pretty regularly from the mid-40s into the 80s; its chess column perhaps less so. After a short break, as it was wont to have, it re-appeared in January 1967 posing a mate in two problem, which we reproduced in an earlier episode, but here it is again (solutions are at the end, if you need them).

Given in the Broadmoor Chronicle 1967

“For Chess Fans” was the heading of that edition of the chess column, but it might also have intrigued an unchess fan as it revealed that in the 1920s Broadmoor had a problem composer in its ranks, and that his work had been published in The Daily Telegraph. He was one Walter Stephens. After another break, of two years, the Chronicle at last gave its readers the solution, and offered a second Stephens problem (also a mate in two, as are they all in this post)

W. Stephens
Given in the Broadmoor Chronicle 1969

At about 2.30pm in the afternoon of Thursday 24 August 1905, Walter Stephens, or Cyril A Desparde as he also called himself, had gone to Greener Gunsmiths in the Haymarket to buy one “for house protection”, but was told, quite properly, that he needed a licence. So, he simply popped next door to the Post Office and, as was possible in those days of yore, got the requisite document over the counter. He went back and bought the revolver he'd had his eye on, and a small amount of ammunition. At the trial, the shop manager said “I thought the man seemed a bit strange, and that he had shaken hands with me for rather a long time; customers who are strangers do not shake hands with me.”

"Strange" his behaviour may have been (not only on the tenuous account above, but from other testimony as well), but inebriated he certainly was - he’d been drinking for several days according to the Police surgeon who saw him after his arrest - and at 10.15 pm, in the street outside 45, Honeybrook Road, Clapham, just off the South Circular, near the Common, he emptied the revolver into his unfortunate wife (they’d been married for 21 years; her sister said they were very fond of each other, as did he; Stephens was already aged 47), and she died the following morning in St. Thomas’s Hospital (though, as the post-mortem showed, the medics had not spotted, in their first examination, the fatal bullet in her lung).

The scene of the crime, today
(from Google Street View)

Evidence was given that Stephens had spent a short spell in an Asylum in Jersey, and another in a padded cell in the Infirmary at Dulwich, both a few years before, and had persistently exhibited delirium tremens from alcohol abuse. "Guilty but insane" he was admitted to Broadmoor at His Majesty’s Pleasure.

Now, in 1967 the Broadmoor Chronicle told its "Chess Fans" that back in 1922 – that’s 45 years earlier - Stephens (who had by then been in Broadmoor for 17 years) had written a letter of complaint to the Daily Telegraph. The Chronicle reproduced the text of the letter:

There has been so much piffle written about Broadmoor in the papers of late that perhaps you would like to be able to say something true about it, so I enclose a couple of my problems as a sample of the work done here.

And yes, Walter Stephens had indeed written to the Telegraph. Here is the letter, as printed in the paper's chess column on July 1st 1922, along with the two problems given above:

(click on to enlarge)

But the fascinating disclosure about Walter Stephens, Broadmoor’s very own chess problemist, didn't end there. The Chronicle went on to say, “It is interesting to note that not only did Walter Stephens continue to set problems for the Daily Telegraph, but he was a regular contributor to the Manchester City News, the Observer, the Daily News and the Referee…” This may be an example, reproduced at the time in an anthology.

W. Stephens
Given in Chess Problems Made Easy (1924)
by T.Taverner, Chess Editor "Daily News"

Your blogger admits to not having had the time to trawl through the newspapers to locate any of the others alluded to (the problems in this post, apart from the first two, have been sourced via the internet), so they remain lost - if any reader of this blog turns up a Stephens, please let us know.

And there is yet a bigger intrigue in all this: how did the author of the Broadmoor chess column in 1967 know about the 1922 letter? After all, Walter Stephens wasn't around to tell him because he had died twenty years earlier in 1947. So we ask again: how did the Chronicle come by the Stephens story, especially as (according to the Berkshire Record Office Archive) there is no copy of the 1922 letter in Stephens' Broadmoor file.

And not only that: the Chronicler was able to report also that Stephens had been published in the Manchester City News, the Observer, and so on and so forth – a fact which is not mentioned in the 1922 letter itself. Is it really likely that the 1967 chronicler could have found out for himself about Stephens' widely-published problems by, say, researching the newspapers of the 1920s? In Broadmoor? Surely not. Could somebody have told him? Well, if so, who? Could Stephens' personal papers have been somehow handed down within the hospital, patient to patient? In a high-security set-up like that one? And where might they be now?

Thus we finish this post with that mystery, three more Stephens problems from The Problemist of the 1920s (below), and another question: who was A. Foster?

Three problems by A. Foster and W. Stephens
From The Problemist (l to r) 1928, 29 and 30
Sourced from Meson

And that also brings us to the end, for the time being, of this series on Dadd, the Asylum, and the subsequent chessers in Broadmoor Hospital (as we call it today). Little did your blogger anticipate the path ahead when visiting the Tate's Watercolour exhibition back in March: from the "The Child's Problem" to Walter's problems (chess and otherwise), and everyone else along the way.

Perhaps now we can see the merit in his complaint: “so much piffle” does get written about the patients and what goes in Broadmoor (and I hope this series may be spared that epithet), and it deserves rebuttal. Their chess, and the Broadmoor Chronicle, are worth celebrating: they do the patients proud, and not forgetting the staff.

Stephens' trial transcript is here.

Asylum Index.

Solutions (click to enlarge!)

A Game of Shadows

2011-12-16T08:00:00.007Z

Sherlock Holmes. What's not to like? Well, Jude Law obviously, but according to well-placed sources there's a big dollop of chess in SH2, so we can make allowances.

A Game of Shadows opens across the country today.

How HJR Murray didn't tell it

2011-12-14T07:55:00.027Z

[click image - rather lopsided, sorry - to enlarge]

From Larry Gonick's The Cartoon History Of The Universe III (WW Norton, 2002) p.138.

The Other Talent of Philip Poyser

2011-12-12T08:00:00.082Z

Chess-playing-artists; artists-who-play-chess. There's a good few of them. Richard James and Mike Fox listed some in their Addicts books, where they created a six board Artists' chess team (and other teams besides).

This is not about chessers who merely doodle or, to flip it over, artists whose first move is with their rook’s pawn. It is about artists who feel compelled to create serious artworks and who are also driven to play proper chess (and that's not as in the back of the team captain’s car, obviously). Or the other way round. Marcel Duchamp was the grandaddy of them all, but he has had his fifteen minutes of fame, and then some, so let’s have a look at a hitherto unsung chess-artist: Philip Poyser (1912 - 1988).

This note about him is an unexpected spin-off from our Asylum series: he was a sometime team captain for Richmond and Twickenham Chess Club, in particular when they played Broadmoor CC in the early seventies. Richard James has commented about him on the ECF, and its time we looked at his art.

But first a bit of his chess. Richard James knew him of course, and reckons he was about 140ish strength: so a middling club player. Here is one of his games, in which he pulls off an appropriately aesthetic finish.

Phil didn't hit the big time chess-wise. Nor did he as an artist, but he was a very able one, dedicated to his métier. His work crops up now and then at auction, and so some of it is on-line, though seldom given a date. Although it is a limited selection of his work, it says a lot about Philip Poyser the chess playing artist.

He used watercolour and oils, was accomplished in both, and his most effective pictures show an eye for atmosphere and light. Take this simple watercolour, for example, suggesting that apart from his art he had other ways of supplementing his income....

Dog Track.

It was probably blocked in on the spot to fix the hard electric glare. Watercolour is often said to be a fickle medium, as you can see where it has blotched above the canopy. But it is portable, fast and unobtrusive. You can imagine Phil perching up at the back, washing in the colour.

Colour? It’s just brown and blue washes on tinted paper. But it works – it evokes at one and the same time the bleach of the arc-lights, and the uniformity of their garb. Yet, in spite of the drab there is the spark of character as the bloke marks his card.

Which dog track was it? Wimbledon Stadium – not far from Richmond - is still there, with floodlighting, though more often these days it is bashed-in stock cars that tear up the track. But, apparently, as recently as 1955 there was yet another stadium two miles north in Wandsworth Town. The cloth-cap dog racing culture was captured in a pavement level observation by Carel Weight. However, here there are no floodlights, so they stream home before the sun sets. Perhaps then, Phil was in Wimbledon Stadium after all.

The Dogs (1955-56)
Carel Weight (1908-1997) Tate Gallery.

Phil Poyser's touch with atmospheric watercolour is also shown off nicely in this next delicate winter scene. It was up for auction in 2009 when it was titled "Chinese Tower Amongst Woodland". But is very recognisably the pagoda at Kew Gardens, Richmond upon Thames, snowbound in a veiled winter luminescence.

This next one may have been unkindly treated by time, and the internet, as it is difficult to see the detail. But it looks like another on the spot sketch and may have just been a study for a studio piece. Using tinted paper again, he evokes a glowing summer's day.

Figures In A Busy Children's Playground.
Ink and watercolour.

There's a thread linking this to the dog-track punters above, and the skaters to come below: they are all local scenes of ordinary people off-duty, relaxing, and doing it together : it's workers' playtime.

Phil's other medium of choice was oils.

The Star of The Show (1946)

Here he works up an image with greater impact. You can see again his fascination with artificial light, as well as for people en masse. He's caught the poise and fluid grace of the principal as she planes across the ice, calling up repeated echoes behind.

Once again it is a scene of collective enjoyment; of the hoi-polloi having fun. It must have been at Richmond Ice Rink (the columns give it away as you can see in the illustration from The Twickenham Museum in this link). It’s as if he’s doing his own personal mass-observation.

As we've seen, Phil preferred to find his subject matter on his doorstep, and here's another fine example of a local scene, though for once he's more interested in architecture than activity - he has endowed riverside Richmond with the grandeur of Venice on this high-summer's day.

Richmond Bridge and Tower.

Next along is a frank nude portrait: another lady (or maybe the skater, déshabillé) is to be found, with erotic intimacy, in a domestic setting. Any ice here has long since melted.

Reclining Nude (1932?)

Don’t miss the ripe fruit allusion. Or the hint of mountain pictured on the wall - a visual rhyme with her explicit charms and, given her unabashed sexuality, maybe an aural pun on the artist’s carnal imaginings. Maybe he was only twenty at the time; the artist and his model: same old...same old...

Finally, there is this change of gear.

Dandelions (1949)

We are back to watercolour, with Phil exploiting its potential for happy accidents. It's also a step away from his more conventional representational approach. The jump in scale goes beyond the literal, and invites a more allusive interpretation: perhaps it's a meditation on post-war bomb-site Britain: the weeds reclaim the wasteland, someone looks on helplessly, some Braque-ish birds and a stork promise new life....hmm....I'm sure you could do better.

So that was Phil Poyser, an eccentric Bohemian-like character according to Richard James (and thanks to Richard for his help with this post), and judging from his art, a man of the people very much at home in his corner of south west London. Following Duchamp he was the next of our chessers with the other talent. There may be more in due course.

Dog Track comes from here. Chinese Tower, Playground, and Nude come from here (where it says that the Nude was done in 1922, when he was only 10, so I'm guessing that was a mistake). The Star is from here. Richmond Bridge is here, and Dandelions is from here. I also came across a reference to a Portrait of Bill Norris , but without an image. Various other works, including more riverside views, are referred to here.

Chess in Art Index

A Literary Reference : The Dream Of Macsen Wledig

2011-12-10T09:55:00.030Z

And he saw a dream. And this is the dream that he saw. He was journeying along the valley of the river towards its source; and he came to the highest mountain in the world. And he thought that the mountain was as high as the sky; and when he came over the mountain, it seemed to him that he went through the fairest and most level regions that man ever yet beheld, on the other side of the mountain. And he saw large and mighty rivers descending from the mountain to the sea, and towards the mouths of the rivers he proceeded. And as he journeyed thus, he came to the mouth of the largest river ever seen. And he beheld a great city at the entrance of the river, and a vast castle in the city, and he saw many high towers of various colours in the castle. And he saw a fleet at the mouth of the river, the largest ever seen. And he saw one ship among the fleet; larger was it by far, and fairer than all the others. Of such part of the ship as he could see above the water, one plank was gilded and the other silvered over. He saw a bridge of the bone of a whale from the ship to the land, and he thought that he went along the bridge, and came into the ship. And a sail was hoisted on the ship, and along the sea and the ocean was it borne.

Then it seemed that he came to the fairest island in the whole world, and he traversed the island from sea to sea, even to the furthest shore of the island. Valleys he saw, and steeps, and rocks of wondrous height, and rugged precipices. Never yet saw he the like. And thence he beheld an island in the sea, facing this rugged land. And between him and this island was a country of which the plain was as large as the sea, the mountain as vast as the wood. And from the mountain he saw a river that flowed through the land and fell into the sea. And at the mouth of the river he beheld a castle, the fairest that man ever saw, and the gate of the castle was open, and he went into the castle. And in the castle he saw a fair hall, of which the roof seemed to be all gold, the walls of the hall seemed to be entirely of glittering precious gems, the doors all seemed to be of gold. Golden seats he saw in the hall, and silver tables. And on a seat opposite to him he beheld two auburn-haired youths playing at chess. He saw a silver board for the chess, and golden pieces thereon. The garments of the youths were of jet-black satin, and chaplets of ruddy gold bound their hair, whereon were sparkling jewels of great price, rubies, and gems, alternately with imperial stones. Buskins of new Cordovan leather on their feet, fastened by slides of red gold.

And beside a pillar in the hall he saw a hoary-headed man, in a chair of ivory, with the figures of two eagles of ruddy gold thereon. Bracelets of gold were upon his arms, and many rings were on his hands, and a golden torque about his neck; and his hair was bound with a golden diadem. He was of powerful aspect. A chessboard of gold was before him, and a rod of gold, and a steel file in his hand. And he was carving out chessmen.

And he saw a maiden sitting before him in a chair of ruddy gold. Not more easy than to gaze upon the sun when brightest, was it to look upon her by reason of her beauty. A vest of white silk was upon the maiden, with clasps of red gold at the breast; and a surcoat of gold tissue upon her, and a frontlet of red gold upon her head, and rubies and gems were in the frontlet, alternating with pearls and imperial stones. And a girdle of ruddy gold was around her. She was the fairest sight that man ever beheld.

...

And they went along the mouths of the rivers, until they came to the mighty river which they saw flowing to the sea, and the vast city, and the many-coloured high towers in the castle. They saw the largest fleet in the world, in the harbour of the river, and one ship that was larger than any of the others. "Behold again," said they, "the dream that our master saw." And in the great ship they crossed the sea, and came to the Island of Britain. And they traversed the island until they came to Snowdon. "Behold," said they, "the rugged land that our master saw." And they went forward until they saw Anglesey before them, and until they saw Arvon likewise. "Behold," said they, "the land our master saw in his sleep." And they saw Aber Sain, and a castle at the mouth of the river. The portal of the castle saw they open, and into the castle they went, and they saw a hall in the castle. Then said they, "Behold, the hall which he saw in his sleep." They went into the hall, and they beheld two youths playing at chess on the golden bench. And they beheld the hoary-headed man beside the pillar, in the ivory chair, carving chessmen. And they beheld the maiden sitting on a chair of ruddy gold.

...

And immediately the emperor set forth with his army. And these men were his guides. Towards the Island of Britain they went over the sea and the deep. And he conquered the Island from Beli the son of Manogan, and his sons, and drove them to the sea, and went forward even unto Arvon. And the emperor knew the land when he saw it. And when he beheld the castle of Aber Sain, "Look yonder," said he, "there is the castle wherein I saw the damsel whom I best love." And he went forward into the castle and into the hall, and there he saw Kynan the son of Eudav, and Adeon the son of Eudav, playing at chess. And he saw Eudav the son of Caradawc, sitting on a chair of ivory carving chessmen. And the maiden whom he had beheld in his sleep, he saw sitting on a chair of gold. "Empress of Rome," said he, "all hail!" And the emperor threw his arms about her neck; and that night she became his bride.

from The Dream Of Macsen Wledig, as collected in The Mabinogion and translated by Lady Charlotte Guest.

[A Literary Reference index]

Sing a Song of Chess VII

2011-12-09T08:00:00.001Z

Take me Away

Check. Mate.
This song will teach you how to checkmate as White.
Assume that Black is going to put up a fight.
Firstly remember you can't checkmate with only a bishop or knight.

Sing a Song of Chess Index

Funny Old Game

2011-12-07T08:23:00.000Z

Chess in comedy, no.1: Hancock, 'The Radio Ham', 9 June 1961:

'King's pawn to queen's bishop three...'

'Just a minute, it's my move...'

Independent and accountable

2011-12-05T07:55:00.000Z

I was a little shocked to learn, last week, that the English Chess Federation, of which I am a member, was taking legal action against the President of FIDE.

A little shocked, if such be possible. I mean not shocked in the way that Oedipus was shocked when he found out who his girlfriend really was. But not shocked, either, in the sense that Captain Renault was when he found out that gambling was going on at Rick's. Not hugely shocked, nor not really shocked at all. Nor even shocked in the sense of "outraged", since Kirsan's the sort of guy that somebody really ought to sue. No, I was just a little shocked because nobody had bothered to tell us. Even though the ECF had just had an AGM and all.

Yes, somehow the information that we were taking the chess world's most powerful figure to court was not considered quite important enough to tell the membership about it: not even the FIDE Delegate, one Nigel Short, was able to find space in his report to mention this frippery. Indeed, it didn't come to light until occasional comments box visitor Roger De Coverley looked closely at the FIDE President's report to the last Congress and then started a thread on the English Chess Forum asking about it.

All I've done is read the thread, and I have no more information about the business than appears (or is speculated on) there, but if I understand what is happening, which is a sizeable if - though if the ECF had been forthcoming about the case, it's be a smaller one - the basis of the case is as follows:

The case revolves around the appointment of extra FIDE Vice-Presidents, which, it is alleged, is unconstitutional
It is being paid for by Garry Kasparov - or so it is suggested, and at any rate will not, it is claimed, cost (or risk) the ECF a penny
Kasparov (or whoever it may be) is not able to take the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne because the complainant needs to be a federation affiliated to FIDE, and hence, presumably via Nigel Short and/or CJ de Mooi, it's been agreed that the ECF should do it.

That's pretty well as much detail as I reckon I know, insofar as I reckon I know it, and to me it's a damned sight less than I ought to know. There really is no good reason I can think of for keeping this quiet. I mean I don't even know whether I object or not: that's not the point. I don't particularly have a view on the merits of the case either. I just object to not being told.

Now I haven't got time to engage in an extended polemic on the reasons why I think we ought to be told about stuff like this. I think it's obvious enough. More than obvious enough.

Ever read the ECF's Memorandum and Articles? It's not an exciting document, nor a short one. Nevertheless I wonder if it could do with a short addition, making a statement about its identity. Something like:

The English Chess Federation is an independent body which is accountable to its members.

This ought to be a statement of the obvious, but apparently is not. Especially the part about accountability to its members: we should have the right to know what's going on, and in principle, at least, there is nothing that should be kept from us. (And in practice, absolutely as little as possible.) But the part about "independence" is also of value. It's nobody else's organisation to pick up and manipulate as they please. Not Garry Kasparov's, not CJ de Mooi's, not Kirsan Ilyumzhinov's.

If these principles were recognised, and respected, certain things that do not happen now, would be more likely to happen, and certain things that do happen, would be more likely not to. In particular:

the ECF would not be used on the quiet by private individuals to pursue their own legal and political battles
the ECF President would not use the ECF's official title, email and website and then claim he is operating his own private events
the financial organisation of the British Championship would not be quite so opaque to its members
British Championship organisers would not find their tournament being opened by a speaker who they had not invited and of whose invitation they knew nothing
the ECF would not find themselves manoeuvred into working with, and endorsing, an individual who is not even an ECF member because he owes them a sum of money.

These things are of course of varying degrees of seriousness: but they all display, in some degree, one or more of the themes of opacity, unaccountability, and the organisation being subservient to the wishes and interests of private individuals. Independence and accountability: these are presently, shall we say, somewhat neglected in the operating culture of the ECF, and I don't believe that an organisation which neglects them is a healthy organisation.

It's one thing that the ECF facilitates a legal action against Kirsan. It's quite another that it doesn't think that's any business of the subs-paying members. It's one thing that CJ de Mooi can't distinguish his private from his official role: it's quite another that he's indulged. Who is the ECF for? It's not for Garry Kasparov or CJ de Mooi or Ray Keene. It's for us, the members. It would be appreciated if it would act as if the members were its authority and its priority. Independent in our interests, and accountable to us.

Broadmoor Chess - The Atonement of GW

2011-12-03T11:00:00.071Z

This series of posts is now following the story of chess in Broadmoor as documented by the Broadmoor Chronicle, the in-house magazine produced by the patients, who were themselves identified only by initials. The subject of this episode is GW, who we now know was Günther, Günter, Gunter, Ginter, or even Peter, Wiora from Poland.

The story starts in 1957, when he had already been in England for just over ten years. He was 34 years old, and an art student, living in a basement flat with his common law wife Shirley Allen (she was known as Mrs Wiora). He was by all accounts extremely jealous, accusing Shirley of unfaithfulness and worse.

In the morning of 4th May 1957 Mrs Dally, the neighbour across the way, is woken by screams. In the corridor she finds Shirley bleeding from a head wound crying “Help me, Peter’s gone mad.” Mrs Dally takes her in for safety and rushes back out to raise the alarm. Peter appears, brandishing a Samurai sword. He slashes Mrs Dally as she makes for the stairs to rouse a neighbour and call the police.

Back downstairs again Mrs Dally now finds the door to her own flat open, and inside she finds Shirley stabbed to death. The sword is nearby. The door to the Wioras’ flat is locked; the police arrive, and smelling gas break it down to find Peter lying on the bed, bleeding from wrist wounds.

At the Old Bailey Wiora pleads diminished responsibility, and on 25th July 1957 is sentenced to twelve years. He is later transferred to Broadmoor, where he is to spend many more years inside than that.

GW must have had the chess in him already, before these dreadful events, because the Chronicle gives a pretty reasonable club-level game of his from a mere two years later, December 1959, although he lost it to FJC (see it in this episode). Then in 1961 he wins one, loses one, against FC in a Block 5 v Block 2 match on Christmas afternoon, and around the same time he beat KW to win the Block 5 championship “after a classic and extended tussle in which three games were drawn and the other two won by GW”, as the Chronicle reported.

He contributed to the Chronicle’s chess column on and off through 1963 and 1964, and he showed himself to be a well-read student of the game, giving games by Tal and Fischer, using a test exercise from Euwe (in German) in one article, and acknowledging Baruch H Wood’s Chess Notes in yet another.

GW was a stalwart for the Broadmoor Chess Club playing against visiting teams, working his way up eventually to the top boards. We featured a game of his from 1972 in the last episode in which he lost in the match against the visitors from Richmond Chess Club. It was in this match that he revealed his name: Gunter Wiora (though, as we've indicated, the spelling of the forename appears to be variable).

The content of the Broadmoor Chronicle was mixed and, within the constraints of its production schedule, topical. Articles were anonymous or signed-off with initials only, and were also subject to the approval of Dr McGrath, the chief officer of the hospital. All the more credit to Dr McGrath then, when in 1972 he let through an article from the young bloods of the “Revolutionary Action Committee for Broadmoor” setting out their Manifesto.

Yes, comrades, that’s the Manifesto of the RACB, in which “victims of the fascist violence in the prison system consistently apply the theory of Marxism-Leninism,” and here are their demands:

impartial review of fitness for discharge of any prisoner who requests it
freedom of political thought, speech and action
an immediate political enquiry into Broadmoor
immediate end to medical drug abuse and ECT
immediate end to prevalent brutality in Broadmoor.

In April some patients (aka “prisoners” according to the RACB) took direct action and staged a roof-top demonstration, bringing the Chronicle (and Broadmoor itself, of course) some probably unexpected, and certainly - from Dr McGrath's perspective - unwanted, publicity:

From the Glasgow Herald, 3 April 1972.

GW entered the fray and joined the debate in the Chronicle espousing a more social-democratic approach. He was an advocate of gradualism having, by now, nigh on fifteen years experience of the ways things worked in Broadmoor. He agreed with the RACB’s aims, but argued that “goals must be achieved by democratic and non-violent means”.

Later in August, in the aftermath of this upheaval, there was an open letter from the Editor of the Chronicle to Dr McGrath asking if there was any "factual basis for fearing that articles [in the Chronicle] may reflect adversely on [patients] clinically”. To which Dr McGrath forthrightly replied “There is no factual basis”. In the same issue there was a comprehensive guide to accessing Mental Health Tribunals, the conventional path to securing release (as I think I'm right in saying). Perhaps the winds of change were stirring in the corridors of Broadmoor.....

On to 1974 and, with the heady days of matches against outside clubs having only one more year to run, Gunter appeared in the pages of the Chronicle again – in a new role. He made an appeal for support for the Arbours Association, whose modern day website says is “an internationally renowned registered charity with 40 years experience providing psychotherapeutic support for individuals with serious emotional problems.”

The following year, in June 1975, Gunter wrote long critique of an article by a certain Robin Knight in the US News and World in which Knight took a poke at Britain and its way of doing things. Here is a short extract in which GW firstly reveals a little about his past - he may have spent his late teens/early twenties in war-torn mainland Europe - and then even more about his present:

I arrived in this country, as a young man, in 1946 and, in the last two decades at least, I have been a deeply interested observer of the British scene, of life and customs in this country…Since my admission to Broadmoor especially, I have been able and fortunate in increasing very considerably my circle of friends…

About a year ago 30 patients in Gloucester House, and a few patients in other houses formed, with the kind permission of the Physician-Superintendent, a charitable organisation called Helpmate, with the aim of helping those outside who perhaps are in greater need than we are…We have saved £108 from wages, plus £15 from the sale of articles. Two charitable institutions and one needy individual (a sick child) have profited from our effort.

The following month a further Helpmate (note the chess reference) report identified the two institutions as the Harts Leap Cheshire home in Canterbury, and the National Society for Autistic Children. Then: in October Helpmate reported that some patients were making jewelry for sale; in November that a representative of the NSAC had visited; and finally in December that the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins had written to commend their efforts (as did Maggie Thatcher, then Opposition Leader, and even Norman Tebbit, which was nice, I suppose).

Gunter Wiora had a review of a book, evidently read in German, in the same issue of the Chronicle which, perhaps with a little irony, he titled Quo Vadis? Homo Sapiens. There’s another mention of him again in November 1977, still doing good work with Helpmate, but that’s maybe the last reference to Gunter, that I noticed anyway. By then he would have been about 54 years old, and would have been in Broadmoor for around twenty years.

Of course, these edited highlights of chesser Gunter Wiora’s life in Broadmoor may not tell the whole story, or give a full picture, of his illness, but on the above evidence he was clearly a cultured and compassionate man, with an interest in outside affairs, and a lack of bitterness towards a country that considered it necessary to curtail his liberty for so long.

Warning. There now follows a Thought for the Day.

(Further warning. Don't expect anything profound.)

Unfortunately GW's “moment of madness” in 1957 cut short one life, wrecked his own, and got him banged up in Broadmoor for twenty years or more; and he may still be there after fifty. One imagines (from the vantage point of relative freedom) that in his circumstances life would have little sense of purpose (Quo Vadis? indeed), and it says something about the human spirit that Gunter, and his fellow patients in Broadmoor high security hospital, organised to “help those in greater need”. Perhaps he also felt it was some kind of exculpation. Anyway, it seems to me (although this may be a fanciful notion) that it would be good if chess had served a higher purpose by helping him as a patient, even in a small way, to discipline his disordered mind.

Note.

The account of the events of 1957 comes from here (where they use "Ginter" and "Peter") but I have not tried to corroborate what it says otherwise. There are almost certainly other newspaper reports of the 1972 protest, but the Glasgow Herald archive is on-line and free.

Asylum Index.

If you want prose, read Shakespeare

2011-12-02T07:55:00.005Z

Question Which of Shakespeare's prose works does Bruce Pandolfini recommend we read?

[The Q & A Way, Chess Café, 23 November 2011]

Thank you Sir, can I have another?

2011-11-30T08:00:00.027Z

Black to play

The London Chess Classic begins on Saturday and the Open being run alongside the main event has got quite a field. A quarter of the 200 entrants are titled players. 13 Grandmasters, 22 International Masters and 16 FIDE Masters! Your correspondent expects to be employing Jonathan Rowson's line - "Today I learned" - fairly often.

In twenty-five years chessing I'd never played in an Open tournament until this June, but The Classic will already be my fifth. I'd been doing OK without achieving anything special, but the fourth, at Imperial College a few weeks ago, didn't go well at all:-

Round 1:
White against FM 2341 – lost.

Round 2:
My opponent didn’t turn up so I was re-paired Black against a 197 who happened to be loafing around the tournament hall – lost.

Round 3:
Black against a 179 – lost.

Round 4:
White against an unrated player (but who finished on 2.5/5 with a TPR 178 ECF) – draw.

Round 5:
Obviously the last thing that you want when you’ve scored +0 =1 -3 is to be paired with a 190-graded thirteen-year-old, but Isaac Sanders is who I got – lost.

My haul for the weekend was a solitary half-point and a TPR of 144 or 151 if Round4Guy plays at the same level for a whole season. Fun it most definitely was not.

Enjoyable, no, but at least the beating I took at Imperial College seems to have done me some good. I played another six games over the following two and a half weeks and, even though I had Black in all of them, I scored +3 =2 -1 at 189 – seventeen points above my published grade.

My first game after the IC Open was a club match at Guildford the very next day. It reminded me of the Simon Williams' Play Like Tal DVD which I’ve been watching recently . Not that I was playing like Tal, of course. It's just that I seemed to have become temporarily infected by the old Latvian’s taste for creating chaos on the chessboard. It makes a change from Berlin Endgames, I suppose

The DVD is structured around Tal’s most interesting games. You follow the action and every so often you get to choose from three candidate moves. If you get it right the game continues. If you get it wrong Williams tells you why and the DVD takes you back for another go.

It’s an interesting concept and I suspect ‘thinking practice’ like this is one of the most effective training methods you can adopt if you’re trying to improve. Anyhoo, I’m going to steal the format today for the position at the head of today's blog which is taken from my Guildford game. It’s Black to play and I’m going to offer you three choices:-

18 … Bxf3

18 … Bc5

18 … Nxc1

Not so much Play Like Tal as Play Like an S&BC Blogger. If you want a clue, the game appears below and although I think I might have made the right choice I suspect it was for the wrong reasons.

Photograph from ~~Brian Eley~~ parentdish.co.uk

Constable Savage again

2011-11-28T11:00:00.113Z

Steinitz used to play all-comers at Simpson's coffee-house in the Strand for half a sovereign a game. (Now an old-English style of restaurant noted for its roast beef, Simpson's still has on display the board and pieces used by such legendary players as Staunton, Zukertort, Blackburne, Tarrasch and of course Morphy himself. The board is a big one, 60cm square.)
David Spanier, Total Chess

I don't know if the Simpson's chessboard had on a plaque on it when Spanier wrote those words (Total Chess was first published in 1984), but it does now. It reads

An original chess board and men in use at Simpson’s-in-the-strand since 1826 and played upon by the following champions:

H. Staunton Paul Morphy W. Steinitz
J. H. Zukertort I. Gunsberg H. Bird
J. H. Blackburne S. Winawer J. Mason
S. Tarrasch M. Tchigorin D. Janowsky
S. Tinsley and Doctor E. Lasker

Then, after a full stop and a dash*, the name “R. Keene” appears. It’s kind of funny, in a ‘spot the odd one out’ kind of a way, but, then again, who in the modern day other than Raymondo has a better call to be there?

With the Staunton Memorial tournaments [e.g.] and other events [e.g.], Keene’s name has become synonymous with chess at Simpson’s. Rather odd, then, there was no mention of RDK whatsoever when the ECF published CJ de Mooi’s announcement that a blindfold simul would be conducted by Nigel Short in London next year.

It’s my pleasure to be organising another major chess event at Simpson’s in the Strand on 20th August 2012.

That's how the ECF President (who is/was not acting as the ECF President) began before he went on to explain how he is

looking forward to another wonderful event following on from the Staunton Memorial Dinner at the same event (sic) last year

A dinner which is itself an event intimately associated with Raymondo and yet not even the slightest hint of a mention of our man can be found. A dog that didn’t bark in the night if ever there was one and it didn’t take long to find out from the horse’s mouth, if I might be forgiven for mixing my animal metaphors, that he will indeed be helping to make the simul happen.

Before I go on, I should probably make a few things clear:-

I wish the simul well and hope it is a big success. I doubt I’ll be attending – an invitation seems unlikely and I don’t hold a “high position” in a Chess Association and therefore am not eligible to make an “application” for a ticket – but I’m sure those who do will enjoy themselves hugely.

I have no particular problem with Keene being involved per se. Of course, by promoting and ‘endorsing’ the simul, and by allowing CJ to use his position as President in the announcement, the ECF have once again allowed – encouraged, even - the boundaries between private and public activity to be blurred. Even so, Raymondo being closely involved with an ECF event wouldn’t bother me as long as both it and he were subject to appropriate management and supervision.

I have no beef with ECF nor with any individual within it. It is unfair to single out anybody in particular, but since he has come in for some unreasonable personal criticism on the EC Forum recently, I will say that I find Andrew Farthing’s commitment to engaging with the ordinary chesser to be both refreshing and highly praiseworthy. Many other folk within the federation have been kind enough to spare me some time over recent weeks and months and I can say that without exception I have found them all to be genuine people who are doing what they feel is best for chess in what I consider to be difficult circumstances.

OK, one exception. People tell me that the real-life CJ is very different to his TV persona which may well be true for all I know, but I’ve never met him, and I didn’t get where I am today by watching Eggheads, so I can only judge him on his public announcements and his actions in and around the chess world. I’m afraid that, as a result, I find him to be a bit of a twonk. A twonk, moreover, whose word should not necessarily be mistaken for his bond.

Still, twonkishness notwithstanding, it remains true that CJ has done a lot of good for chess in this country since becoming President. Assuming that he is willing to up his game a bit in terms of accountability, and supposing the ECF are both willing and able to hold him accountable where necessary, I see no particular reason why that shouldn’t continue for a long time to come.

Finally, when I talk about the ECF I mean the whole ECF not just ‘the board’. After all, the recent AGM re-elected CJ as President with barely a dissenting voice.

Caveats over, here’s the problem: while the ECF are busying pretending Ray doesn’t exist they can’t manage him or CJ. They can’t manage anything at all and the situation will only get worse as the federation has to get itself into ever more contorted positions to ensure that it's looking the other way each time the pair buddy-up.

The story so far:-

CJ goes to an event he claims he is running himself – but which is subsequently acknowledged to be jointly run by Ray – and comes back with a bucketful of cash.

Ray turns up at the opening ceremony at Sheffield.

After CJ has a “hissy fit” at the closing ceremony, Ray uses his twitter account to give the pot a massive stir.

Q to ECF: And now CJ’s going to be hanging out with Ray again next summer?
A from ECF: I can’t say that I’d noticed.

Is that the ECF line? They’ve decided to endorse and publicise an event without knowing who was running it? That’s a recipe for getting yourself bitten on the bum sooner or later for sure, but, of course, that’s not what’s really going on is it?

Our Federation are trying to square a circle by promoting the fiction that if CJ calls it a private initiative then his actions have nothing to do with them. Not even if the initiative is announced on their website and publicised by their Director of Home Chess (a person I both like and respect, incidentally).

It’s a policy that's already got them into a rather bizarre situation. Our sometime visitor/commenter Roger de Coverly is quite right to point out that ignoring the guest of honour at your Championship’s Opening Ceremony is rather rude, but I suppose the ECF feels it can do nothing else. Why? Perhaps because then it would have to answer the question that it ‘no commented’ in August and, probably more significantly, they’d also then have to address the issue of whether it’s a tremendously good idea to have a President who goes around doing whatever he happens to feel like doing at any given moment.

Never grows stale

I must admit I’m getting a sense of déjà vu finishing off this post. In the immediate aftermath of the Sheffield closing ceremony going nuclear I felt the ECF should review its relationship with its President, I said it again when everybody seemed to have kissed and made up and I’m saying it once more now. I accept that the ECF is in a difficult position, but that's more reason to take action not less.

With regard to Keene, it’s clear that he isn’t going to go away just because the ECF pretend he’s not there. Neither will the CJ-RDK mutual admiration society disband itself simply because the federation is ignoring it.

Bottom line: Ray is getting ever more closely involved with ECF activities and there’s much less chance of the whole thing ending in a(nother) car crash if we all acknowledge what’s going on.

Ray Keene Index

CJ Index

* the punctuation is rather reminiscent of a scene from Dario Fo’s The Accidental Death of an Anarchist

Nightmare over for The Riddler

2011-11-27T11:00:00.265Z

[Don't let today's bonus post stop you from reading Martin's excellent Broadmoor Chess Club versus The World from yesterday]

I thank the reader who sent me these cuttings (the text of which you can read at the conclusion of today's post)

“Not guilty.” That’s what the jury said. The judge's direction was to dismiss the allegation, the prosecution having decided to offer no evidence at all after some of what they had intended to present to the court had been ruled inadmissible. Colin English had been held in custody for eighteen months awaiting trial for the killing of Therese Terry. Twenty years ago today he walked out of Liverpool Crown Court a free man.

This failed prosecution from so long ago is of interest to us because the quashing of the murder charge brought an end to much more than English’s imprisonment. The collapse of the trial also put a stop both to a book that a certain Raymond Dennis Keene was intending to write* not to mention his suggestions that the Prime Minister should draft in a think-tank of chessers to help tackle the issues of the day. What it didn’t kill off, however, was the myth that had grown up around the case.

The Black Queen Murder Mystery in brief: English was suspected of involvement in the disappearance of Terry, but the police couldn’t prove it so brought in a chess Grandmaster – RDK himself – to solve the devilish crime. “Police pass sinister poser to Times chess man” in The Times on Saturday 21st July morphed into “Grandmaster breaks the code in mystery of hidden grave” in The Sunday Times on the 22nd. Write a chess book in a weekend? A mere triffle. Raymond Dennis Keene cracks murders overnight!

That’s how the media told it at the time. That’s how Ray tells it now. If you take a look at his CV, you will find the sole entry for 1990 reads,

1990 Dramatically solves the Black Queen Murder Mystery for Lancashire police.

The myth lives on.

“It is like something out of Batman,” said Keene yesterday.
“The Joker has given the police an insane clue but thinks they are too stupid to solve it. So the police call in Batman.”

The Sunday Times 22/07/90

“Times chess man cracks ‘missing woman’ riddle” was the headline that appeared on the front page of The Times on Monday 23rd July, an article we reproduced last year. How to justify it now we know that nobody was convicted of the crime? OK, so English wasn’t found guilty as a result of Keene’s intervention, but did Raymondo perhaps help the police …

… identify a suspect?
No. Colin English was arrested in June. RDK didn’t get involved until late July.

… find a corpse?
No. Therese Terry’s body was never found.

… identify the area where Terry’s remains might be discovered?
No. True, Keene did suggest a likely location, but the officer in charge of the case, Detective Superintendent Fletcher, “had believed for some weeks that Mrs Terry was buried near Limerick” (The Times 24/07/90 Volunteer Detectives), i.e. long before Ray was ever contacted.

… in any way at all?
Perhaps is the best that we can say here. Our man Fletcher was quoted as saying “Thanks to Mr Keene, we may be much closer to solving this mystery” (The Sunday Times, 22/07/90), but, then again, The Garda “confirmed that they had read Mr Keene’s analysis but had not launched any new lines of enquiry as a result.” (The Times, 24/07/90).

So what exactly did Keene do? Remembering the case on chessgames, back in 2004 he writes,

the information i (sic) derived from the diagrams supported what the police already felt they had deduced in the case

I like that ‘supported’. Still, whether or not you conclude that Raymondo simply reflected back to the police what they had told him about the case - and whether or not you decide that Fletcher’s comment to The Sunday Times was merely polite PR – even if we take Keene at his word, it’s clear that his involvement in the investigation into Terry’s disappearance falls an awfully long way short of solving the case, “dramatically” or otherwise.

Multiple front-pages in The Times; coverage in all the national press; world-wide attention (Ray claimed interest from America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Italy**). It was - and is - a great story, and it must have been an exciting time for RDK. Still, while it's easy to see why the press lapped it up, and although it's perhaps understandable that Ray got a bit carried away and maybe even came to believe the hype, the fundamental truth remains: the 'Black Queen Murder Mystery' is a media-created myth and nothing more.

I drew heart from my recollection of a Sherlock Holmes story, “The Dancing Men”, in which Holmes breaks a singularly barbaric and recondite code which utilises little figures of dancing men. This case was redolent of that fictional forerunner

The Times 23/07/10

And here, with the conclusion of the Colin English/Therese Terry case, we end our Raymondo Memorial Sergeant Pepper tour:-

23rd July, 2010
Times chess man cracks ‘missing woman’ riddle

13th January, 2011
Keene's Gambit

10th February, 2011
Keene's Move

17th February, 2011
Checked Again

27th November, 2011
Nightmare over for The Riddler

If there’s one thing we can all agree about Ray, it’s that he’s super-GM standard at publicity, both for himself and for chess in general. The Black Queen Mystery and the Keene-Miles affair mark the high point and the nadir of the RDK PR machine. It’s curious - but somehow not a coincidence, I’m sure – that in such a long career the two extremes should come so close together.

Twenty years ago today? For sure, and yet the fact that Keene is a skilled media manipulator and the aftershocks of his departure from the (then) BCF remain very contemporary issues for British chess. We'll back with more on that tomorrow.

Nightmare over for The Riddler
By John Ryall

Brighton Evening Argus
27/11/91

THE Chess Board Mystery ended in checkmate for detectives.

Colin English, the Sussex man they called The Riddler, was formally cleared of murder today.

Mr English, 31, was held in custody for 18 months accused of murdering vanished divorcee Therese Clare Terry. The 45-year-old disappeared from her home in Preston, Lancs, in January last year and has not been seen since.

After the verdict at Liverpool Crown Court he said he was convinced Mrs Terry, last seen in January 1990, was still alive. He said: “She informed everybody she was leaving to return to Australia. She had not ties, no home, no family here, and it was not a great mystery that she had gone again.”

Mr English, 31, from Holters Way, Seaford, had been kept in custody since his arrest in June 1990. At Liverpool Crown Court today he was cleared by a jury on the judge’s directions after prosecuting counsel John Rowe, QC, yesterday offered no evidence on the charge of murder.

The decision to abandon the case against computer designer Mr English followed two weeks of legal arguments about police evidence. His solicitor, Paul Rooney, said after the case his client plans to sue the police.

Mr English was nicknamed The Riddler after he drew a chess puzzle which police believed would lead to where Mrs Terry was buried.

Fraud charges against Mr English involving Mrs Terry’s money were left on file. Yesterday, friends called at Mr English’s home to celebrate with his wife, Yvonne, 32, who has three children. She said: “I’m so relieved this nightmare is over.”

Mystery of the vanishing lady
By Paul Bracchi

Brighton Evening Argus
27/11/91

WHERE is Therese Clare Terry? That is the question which remains unanswered nearly two years after she disappeared.

Police believe she is dead. But they failed to produce the single most important piece of evidence in any murder investigation – a body. Yesterday, the Sussex man accused of killing her walked free from court after the case against him collapsed.

Today, the mystery of the ‘vanishing lady’ continues. If divorcee Mrs Terry is dead, where is her grave? If she is alive, why does she not come forward? The bizarre story has all the elements of a classic detective novel – but the last page is missing.

Chapter One: Mrs Terry leaves her Lancashire home in January last year and travels to Ireland with a mystery man. She is never seen again.

Chapter Two: Police arrest her friend, Colin English, from Seaford, and hold him for questioning over her disappearance.

Chapter Three: Mr English is nicknamed The Riddler after he sets detectives searching for the missing woman a series of chess puzzles.

Chapter Four: Chess grandmaster Raymond Keene is brought in to crack the code. He believes the ‘journey’ begins in Sussex and ends in Limerick. Irish police begin the search for her body.

Chapter Five: English, who later says the chess riddle was an elaborate hoax, is charged with murder but is cleared by a court.

The final chapter …? The story made headlines in newspapers around the world. Mr Keene, an organiser of the Hastings Chess Congress, emerged as a central character in the plot. He was presented with a puzzle, featured on this page, and told: “Solve it.” The Times chess correspondent immediately went to work.

He said at the time: “I realised the figures that look like sevens – what police had taken them to be – were maths vectors symbolising movement.”

Mr Keene believed that:
The figures on the triangular British Isles were I Sussex, II London, III Preston.
The bigger drawing was a cross section of Ireland and was not only a map but a chessboard.
Like a chessboard, the large map was cut in two and a mirror image made so there are two Dublins shown as IV and two Corks shown as V. Limerick is VI.

Mr Keene said: “I was able to pinpoint where certain players were on certain dates and elements were the confirmed by police.” The trail ends in Limerick with the message BK BP Do This is where he thought Terry was allegedly buried.

Mr English later admits the puzzles were an elaborate hoax to get police off his back.

* See The Chess Murder in Hans Ree's, The Human Comedy of Chess

** See his interview with Cathy Forbes, CHESS November 1990 (vol 55, #8)

Broadmoor Chess Club versus The World

2011-11-26T11:00:00.127Z

The last few posts in this series have been piecing together the story of chess in Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital since it opened (originally as an "Asylum") in 1863, and most recently we've enlisted the patients’ house journal, the Broadmoor Chronicle, to help us.

In this episode we are going to look at the matches that Broadmoor Chess Club started playing (at home as you'd expect) against local clubs in the late sixties into the seventies. It's interesting to see what they got up to; and it's not. What's remarkable is that it's so ordinary, chess-wise. And it's not.

The first mention of a chess match against outsiders was in March 1969 when Broadmoor took on Reading CC over six boards in the Norfolk room. Here is the score card:
ADN (from Essex house) won on top board, his swan-song perhaps, before leaving for the “world outside the walls” as we saw last time. GW gets a mention in the Chronicle's report by DGT: “he strove to out do his man, and won a most valuable point for our side”. DGT came clean with something we could all admit to at one time or another: “I for one, played like a zombie”....

...and we share his pain.

Play like a zombie, lose like a zombie... and this one was nailed by Vic Ballard, who is still playing for Reading Chess Club today. I managed to track Vic down (the only survivor of the match that I could find) and spoke to him, hale and hearty, a week or so back, and he generously provides us with some recollections of the match over forty years ago.

Vic particularly remembers all the hanging about as the Reading team went through security, and then even more in the playing hall until the patients were brought in, one by one. The visitors were told that their opponents' play might be affected by their medication; but even if that were so, it didn't inhibit their hospitality - the host team prepared copious refreshments in an adjacent kitchen, which were then plied liberally to their guests.

Vic also remembers that a couple of warders, burdened with massive bunches of keys, paced up and down until the session ended. The patients were then called away, block by block, and only when they had disappeared were the visitors allowed to leave to be counted out through security.

Not your typical away match.

In the February 1969 Chronicle, Broadmoor Chess Club posted its ambitions for further matches: “St. Benedict's school want to send a team on Saturday 22 March, DHSS chess club may be able to come and play us some time, and there is also the possibility of a Board of Trade team coming down from London some time”.

There is no record of matches against the last two (did the civil servants get cold feet?), but here is the score card for the St. Benedict’s match:
A thumping victory for Broadmoor (and, no that's not some twist on a "3-1-0" scoring system - each pair slugged it out over several games) that attracted an ever so slightly smug comment in the Chronicle: “better luck next time St.B’s”. This time GW won on top board for the home side, and the rest of the team cleaned up too . But perhaps it is significant that when the plucky, but out-gunned, pupils of St. Benedict's called up Brother Oliver (a teacher presumably) the rout was stemmed. But let's not begrudge Broadmoor their only recorded victory. Although, as for the "next time", please pick on someone your own size....

....which they did – in shape of local club, Bracknell Precision (a works team), who put Broadmoor in their place.

This was reported in January 1970, along with the following rather rueful, even critical (and anonymous) comment: “As we all trooped back to our respective houses at the end of the evening I could not help suppress the feeling that some of the interlectual (sic) “so and so’s” we have among us have been shown up in their true colours…Admittedly Bracknell fielded a reasonable side, but is was not all that strong...” Oh dear!

And there had already been some serious soul-searching by Sandy R in the December 1969 issue, noting that Broadmoor lost all its matches on the previous season, and quoting “a friend’s” suggestion (and he wouldn’t be the first to float this one) to play in reverse order of strength.

Indeed, in 1970 Broadmoor lost yet another one – to Richmond Chess Club who played there several times, as we learn from information kindly furnished by Richard James.

This is an extract from the Richmond & Twickenham Chess Club Newsletter No. 4 (probably November) 1970, written by the editor, Alan May:

Suggested friendlies by other clubs have met with a discouraging response until this season when a letter was received from the Broadmoor Hospital. Richmond had been suggested by the Surrey authorities as suitable opponents for the in-mates chess team. (I have my own dark private thoughts as to why Richmond was selected!)……

…. Philip Poyser took charge of the team and the match was played at Broadmoor (of course) on Saturday 24 October……..a good time was had by all. Playing conditions were ideal, a plentiful supply of food and drinks was provided and all our team were released about 7.00 pm…..

……Well, we won. In fact we won 9 - 1 with Phillip Pratt doing the decent thing to encourage the opposition. I gather that we were assured of a marked psychological advantage before the kick-off. As the drawbridge was lowered to receive our party of gladiators, a patient was heard to remark that we looked fantastically strong. The herculean performance of the team undoubtedly strengthened this belief but despite the one-sided result we have been invited back and it seems likely that a return fixture will be arranged some time next year.

Indeed, this was to be the start of run of annual fixtures against Richmond.

1971 saw Broadmoor take on Basingstoke CC. Although marred by no-shows, the match was close, the home side (as with their football and cricket teams, now known as "Patmoor" - surely a cosmetic, and thin, disguise) going down 2½ – 3½, with Günter again making a draw on board 1.
On into 1972 and another match against Richmond, which merited a passing mention in the Chronicle. It saw Richard James in action (he played in them all) and remarkably he still has the score of that game, as well as some from other years. He played our old friend GW, who revealed himself to be one Günther Wiora. Restoring him his full name suddenly makes him a real person. Here is the game:

As for matches against Richmond there were, as we noted, several over the years, and here is another extract from the Richmond and Twickenham’s club’s newsletter, of June/July 1975, headed "Broadmoor Matches" and written by Phil Poyser, also a veteran of the initial 1970 encounter (and who will get another, rather unexpected, mention later in this series):

On the afternoon of Saturday, 22nd March, a team of 9 Richmond & Twickenham players met at the Rising Sun (Schooner Inn), opposite Marble Hill Park, and journeyed in three Club members' cars to play a match against a team of Broadmoor Patients in the hospital at Crowthorne, Berkshire.

The result was: Richmond & Twickenham 8½ pts! Broadmoor ½ pt.

This match has been an annual event since 1970 and this was the fifth of the series. An earlier fixture had to be cancelled by the Hospital on the day before owing to staff problems. Although we have always won these matches (so we should with all our practice ) the patients take defeat well and always ask us to come again. We play in a comfortable well heated room and generous refreshments of tea, soft drinks, sandwiches and cakes are provided.

There has never been any shortage of willing players for these matches……

The visits, Phil noted, were much appreciated by the patients, and their attentiveness to the needs of the Richmond visitors, offering copious quantities of tea and cake, had now become the stuff of legend.

Broadmoor Chess Club's home venue.

The matches against local teams petered out for some reason; but judging from the keenness of the patients, and the willing enthusiasm of the visitors, it must have been some objective impediment: attrition of players on the Broadmoor side, say, or a bureaucratic hitch. In this connection there was a report in the Chronicle of 1972 of a meeting of the Recreation Committee, which may be germaine. Dr McGrath, the CEO, was present and asked that “arrangements for outside teams...be made formally by an official here…in order to establish a legal relationship with visitors for legal protection.” A straw in the wind, maybe.

We'll end on this recent reminiscence by Richard James, echoing the themes of fellow chess visitor Vic Ballard:

What I remember - the warders (probably not the right word as they made it clear to us that Broadmoor was a hospital, not a prison) with enormous bunches of keys: the matches being the most enjoyable of the year because of the refreshments and the fact that there was no pressure to play well: remembering that we probably shouldn't ask our opponents what they were in for: making very sure we didn't leave anyone behind as they could well believe that any of us were just as insane as them. Then we (or at any rate I) started to think about what it means to be sane or insane, normal or abnormal. We were a pretty eccentric bunch; it was just that our insanity wasn't criminal.

A salutary thought.

So. Well done Broadmoor Chess Club! Chessing like the rest of us; striving to win, against the odds; and if not winning, then enjoying the game and the society - and the tea and the cakes. But chessing under lock and key.

And welcome to the unanonymised Günter Wiora, about whom there is a bit more to say, next time.

Acknowledgements
Richmond and Twickenham Chess Club is here, and a special thanks again to Richard James, and Vic Ballard.

Thanks to ejh for this on St. Benedict's, depressing as it is.

Asylum Index.

We've all been there...

2011-11-25T10:01:00.015Z

And if you like that - after the jump, two more examples of Argentinian cartoonist Quino's chess-related work to enjoy.

This one has a political message of some kind?

Ok, this one isn't really chess related. But it very nearly could be:

Whatever happened to the Polugaevsky Variation?

2011-11-23T07:55:00.208Z

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Bg5 e6 7.f4 b5

When I was young, fresh and foolish, as opposed to old, tired and cynical, I used to play the Sicilian Najdorf. In fact I seem to have played it almost right the way through my teenage years, something which surprised me when I looked it up in the course of writing this piece. I'm not sure I learned anything from those years playing the Najdorf other than I'd learned nothing from those years playing the Najdorf, so after I started playing chess again, a couple of years after university, I dropped it. But, during those teenage years, my problem was, as with any other Najdorf player, what to do against 6.Bg5, since of the many possible alternatives, none seemed to be quite secure.

I seem to have mostly played the Poisoned Pawn with 6...e6 7.f4 Qb6, although eventually I moved over to the old main line with 6...e6 7.f4 Be7. But I looked at more or less everything at one time or another. Including, although I never actually played it, the Polugaevsky Variation with 6...e6 7.f4 b5.

I was, almost certainly, first attracted to the line by the long discussion of its development that takes up more than a quarter of Lev Polugaevsky's book, Grandmaster Preparation, which was issued by Pergamon in an English translation (by Ken Neat) in 1981 and swiftly recognised as a classic. The work the author had put into its creation

Sometimes you see books that have been written in one month. I don't like that. You should take at least two years for a book, or not do it all

was evident, and in some ways mirrored by the twenty years, off and on, he had been prepared to put into the variation that took his name, trying always to keep alive a line too tactical in nature to be anything but fragile.

In his long chapter The Birth Of A Variation, Polugaevsky* went from its birth almost right up to the time of publication, to the point where two extra short sections had to be added just before the book came out, one, by Neat, giving these two games, and an addendum by Polugaevsky giving this one (as did Neat) as well as this one from the same match, and this one from later in the year.

Anyway, if I try and give too many of the games that are referred to in the book, I will never finish this piece and you will never read it, so onwards. Polugaevsky devotes most of his time to what he considered the "most critical" continuation, 8.e5 dxe5 9.fxe5 Qc7

after which there are two lines which most concern him, 10.exf6 and 10.Qe2. After the first of these, the game normally continues 10...Qe5+ 11.Be2 Qxg5 12.O-O (there are alternatives, of course, but we're skimming rather than swimming here) after which Black looked to be in a lot of trouble

until Polugaevsky came up with 12...Qe5!

which (after many games and much analysis) looked satisfactory for Black.

However, scarcely had that resource been discovered than Polugaevsky had to find a reply to 12.Qd3 instead

and although he found a response, it proved inadequate: the blow being sufficiently severe that he abandoned the variation (or, as he has it, The Variation) for more than a decade.

I won't go into the whys and wherefores, or what he discovered that brought him back to his variation, but rather observe that he was also discouraged for a long while by the other major line he discussed after 9...Qc7, which was 10.Qe2.

I mean why not keep more pieces on, if almost all of yours are developed and almost none of the opponent's? Play then usually went 10...Nfd7 11.O-O-O Bb7 12.Qg4 (though other ideas are given, notably 12.Qh5 and 12.Nxe6). Then Black's two ideas - both resulting in "colossal complications" - were 12...Qb6 and 12...Qxe5.

Never mind the colossal complications, one of those options always looked ludicrously dangerous to me, while the other looked to be another move by a piece already developed without the virtue of grabbing any material for it.

To be honest, I don't recall whether I ever seriously intended to play the Polugaevsky, and if so, whether I'd opted for 12...Qb6 (I am sure I was never in a million years going to take on e5) or for another line that Polugaevsky tried, in the 1979 Riga Interzonal. This involved, instead of 11...Bb7, Black playing 11...Nc6

which he did in his game against Grunfeld (given above, and analysed in the extra section added by Ken Neat).

Who knows? It never happened. I never played it, not even once. I took much of the Eighties off, as far as playing chess was concerned, and when I came back to the board at the end of the decade, although there was a new world champion who championed the Najdorf, he wasn't one to play the Polugaevsky. And, although I didn't really think about it at the time (I was on to safer, Scheveningen ground by then) I don't recall seeing any other leading players try their luck with 7...b5. Not then, not since and not right now.

So it's been more than twenty years since I had any real knowledge of contemporary Najdorf theory - thank God - give or take a brief reacquaintance with it during the Kasparov-Short match, though not the 6.Bg5 line (unless you count this).

Where did it all go, eh?

So, as far as I am concerned, it's as if I fell asleep when the Polugaevsky Variation was alive and thriving: then, when I woke up, having forgotten all about it, it was no longer there. And now I've remembered it, and I'm wondering what happened and where it went. Was it refuted? Did it go permanently out of fashion? Or is it, in fact, still being played quite happily by grandmasters even today, but as I'm neither a Najdorf player nor a reader of databases, I just don't know about it?

[* I've chosen to render the surname thus, rather than Polugayevsky, even though the latter variation is the one given in the book. Both have been used previously on this blog!]

[Polugaevsky photo: Perluka Farinn]

WwwK XXI: When we Stopped Being Kings

2011-11-21T08:00:00.053Z

Thirty years ago today, a golden age ended ...

Knights of Merano

WwwK Index

The Times
Saturday November 21, 1981
Page 1

Masterful Karpov retain chess title
By Harry Golombek

Viktor Korchnoi resigned the eighteenth game of the world chess championship match at Merano yesterday without resuming play, and this meant that Anatoly Karpov won the match 6-2, retaining his title in the most convincing and crushing manner since the present system of world championship contests was instituted after the Second World War.

The decisive game was probably the best of the match and an excellent illustration of one of Karpov’s chief virtues as a player: his power of seizing the initiative and increasing it move by move until the pressure is too great for his opponent to bear.

The win was all the more creditable in that the opening, a Ruy Lopez in which Korchnoi used the open defence, was a speciality of the challenger. In fact, the relevant section in the Encyclopedia of the Openings, a modern standard work, was written by Korchnoi.

Even so, Karpov was able to surprise him with a new move that made the variation Korchnoi employed almost unplayable. It was a tactical move that, by weakening Korchnoi’s Queenside position, also affected his position in the centre. There was a flicker of resistance on the challenger’s part when he tried a counter-attack six moves later. But it was soon extinguished and the remainder of the game was a copy-book example on Karpov’s part of how to take advantage of the greater command of space.

Karpov’s match victory gained him a prize of 500,000 Swiss francs (about £144,000) while Korchoi had to be content with 300,000 Swiss francs. But the contingent rewards of retaining the title are more considerable.

Moscow: Karpov sent a telegram reporting “mission accomplished” to President Brezhnev of the Soviet Union yesterday.

“I and all the members of the Soviet delegation have felt your daily support, the concern and interest of our dear country,” he wrote – AFP.
Game by game, page 4
Leading article, page 7

The Times
Saturday November 21, 1981
Leading Article, Page 7

The other pawns in the game

The World Chess Championship, which was won yesterday by Mr Anatoly Karpov, very much as expected, has left a rather sour taste. The quality of the chess, according to the experts, was poor. Mr Viktor Korchnoi, the embattled challenger, did not do himself justice. His place in the history of chess is secure. But his fate, on the three (sic) separate occasions when he has challenged for the title of the world champion, has been to be number two.

On this third, and presumably final, tilt, Mr Korchnoi’s age was clearly against him. Chess at this level is only superficially a sedentary game. It requires great stamina, concentration and physical fitness. The twenty years which the challenger was giving to the Soviet champion was too heavy a handicap. That is the most likely explanation for the weaknesses in Mr Korchnoi’s play – not just the blunders to which grand masters, like ordinary mortals, are sometimes prone, but a certain flatness and stereotyped quality in his opening play, and a lack of bite in most of his games.

Mr Karpov, though he has attracted some criticism for his somewhat conformist attitude to chess which is, after all, a very political game in the Soviet Union, is a worthy champion. He is one of the greatest positional players the game has ever seen. There is nothing flashy about his game. His results in international tournaments have been most impressive. The games which he loses in the course of a year can be counted on one hand. The margin by which he defended his title on this occasion, six games to two, draws not counting, was in chess terms over-whelming.

But as all enthusiasts of the game know, the challenger was struggling under a more baleful handicap than merely a difference in years. Mr Korchnoi is an exile from the Soviet Union. He left, as have so many distinguished performers in other fields, because he could not stand what he regarded as the oppressive system. Whatever the rights and wrongs of his particular case, he has shown great courage in fighting for his beliefs and making a new life for himself; and he has earned the vilification of the Soviet establishment as a result.

Moreover, he has left behind him in the Soviet Union a wife and a son. The Soviet authorities will not let them go. Mr Korchnoi has bitterly denounced the authorities, on many occasions, for this ungenerous and indeed senseless refusal. The circumstances of his marriage are his own affair. What is not in doubt is that he wants his wife and son to be allowed to go to the West. He has even said, putting the matter into chess terms, that their continued detention in the Soviet Union means that he started every game in the championship two pieces down. That may be a funny way of expressing it, but his psychological handicap is obvious enough.

Now that the championship is over and the coveted title remains in the Soviet Union, it is surely time for the Soviet authorities to do the decent thing and let Mr Korchnoi’s family go. The World Chess Federation has, from time to time, made representations on Mr Korchnoi’s behalf, seemingly to no avail. As usual, politics and sport do not mix very easily. It might be too much to expect that Mr Karpov himself could put a word in the right place. But the Soviet authorities would be doing one of the great players of the game, and themselves, a small service if they could now relent.

Bad book covers XXIII

2011-11-19T09:55:00.007Z

Grandmaster Versus Amateur, Aagaard and Shaw (eds), Quality Chess, 2011

[Bad book covers index]

Five Years Ago Today

2011-11-18T10:01:00.007Z

On the day of my fifth birthday, I ate all the chocolate fingers from my cake, and then redecorated the entire lounge with them just as my friends arrived. You can expect much the same today here on the S&BC blog on our fifth birthday: a burst of excitement from me, soon turning ugly in public once the comments come in. Maybe.

Yes, it all kicked off five years ago today with a post where I tried to assess the scale of the impact our new little corner of the internet was likely to have on the chess world:

It's the news the chess world has been waiting for.

No - not that Fischer has returned, and will face an unretired Kasparov, in an unlimited match. No - not that The Master Game is back on BBC2. No - not that Hydra has created a 32-piece tablebase that proves once and for all that 1. g4 wins outright, whilst everything else is a draw. No - it's not the low-down of what Kramnik was doing in his toilet after all. No - Wood Green have not lost a London League match.

Think bigger.

Think better.

That's right - think the S&BC blog.

So what's changed since then? Well, a Fischer-Kasparov rematch looks even less likely, to the relief of M.Adams everyone's forgotten about Hydra - although maybe Houdini is about to pull off the same trick, and to some at least Kramnik's toilet antics remain a mystery. But Wood Green have lost a London League match, albeit with no thanks to any of us.

Still, it seems to me we have a fair bit to celebrate: from shining lights into the murky realities of the chess world to investigating the place of chess in art; from featuring entertaining blunders to highlighting local brilliancies; from the bliss of favourite moves to bitter realities of red pills; from chess in bad book covers to chess in great literature; actually - stop me. There's too much to even begin to list or classify.

So: let me just say instead thank you to my fellow writers for such an interesting five years, and invite our readers to let us know in the comments how they expect our next five years to shape up. The Grob proven a forced win anyone?

Ten years ago this week

2011-11-16T07:55:00.001Z

or, A Modicum Of Respect

I obtained a measure of revenge not only by eclipsing Tony in terms of chess performance but also by sleeping with his girlfriend, which was definitely satisfying but perhaps not entirely gentlemanly.

Sunday Telegraph, 18 November 2001

[Nigel Short index]

A rare event II

2011-11-14T08:00:00.037Z

White to play and seal a move
JMGB v Drunken Knight, October 2011

I have Malc Pein to thank for this one. The commentary room of the British Championship in 1990, a snippet of chess knowledge passed on: a bishop totally dominates a knight when they are separated by two squares. Trivial if you already knew it, but I didn't and, twenty years ago though it might have been, I've never forgotten that moment.

I came to learn that Malc's^* bishop/knight aside was one of those little nuggets of wisdom that turn out to be extraordinarily powerful, today's game being a case in point. More of that in a moment. Right now I've got a move to seal.

It looks like it should be relatively straight forward. I'm a pawn up, I've got a bishop on an open board and what's more his knight is miles away from the action. A simple case of mopping up, then?

Objectively speaking that might be right, but nothing's really that easy in chess is it? Especially not when you've been playing for three hours and you're on the verge of what will be a notable scalp. Chuck in a history of ballsing things up at the last moment and things start to look a little trickier.

Still, long story short, I took my time and managed to come up with what looked to be a winning line. 38 Kb4 a5+, 39 Kxa5 Nb3+, 40 Kxb5 Nd4+, 41 Kc5 allowing 41 ... Nf3 forking e5 and h4.

Initially I didn't fancy being just one pawn up with everything on the same side of the board. It was only after failing to find anything else that I returned to this position and discovered that it would actually be very good for me. 42 Kd5 leaves Black in all sorts of trouble since after 42 ... Nxh4 I have the simple 43 Be4! leaving his knight without any moves whatsoever.

This much I calculated at the board and it was enough to persuade me that 38 Kb4 was the move that I wanted to seal. Later I realised that instead of taking the pawn Black could try 42 ... h5. Then, regardless of what your engine might tell you, 43 gxh5 Nxe5! is just a draw, but instead I can play 43 g5 and now if 43 ... Nxh4 I have 44 Be4 again.

"No Garry, two squares"

Photograph from Chessbase

Black resigned without resuming, so this game turned out to be another adjournment that didn't happen. It's a shame that we didn't get to 'finish' the game, but I got a lot of pleasure out of sealing that move. Game in x, then wind the clock back y minutes and play to the end has it's advantages, but if that had been what we we'd had here I wouldn't have had the time to think things through in the same way. Maybe we would have ended up in this position anyway,

but I can imagine it happening with me 'blundering' a pawn and only realising at the last minute that it couldn't be taken. The result might not have been any different, but it wouldn't have felt even remotely the same.

It would have felt like I'd fallen into it rather than earned it. Rather than earned my share that is. Like I say, for this win Malcolm Pein deserves at least part of the credit.

A rare event

* Yes, I know it's not really Pein's, but I always think of it as his.

Broadmoor Chronicled

2011-11-12T11:00:00.098Z

This series is now following the fortunes of chess in Broadmoor Hospital which started out, in 1863, as an "Asylum for Criminal Lunatics". We have already registered a number of chess-playing patients (Richard Dadd, Edward Oxford, Reginald Saunderson, Robert Coombes, F.J.C.) and we are continuing now to follow the house journal, the Broadmoor Chronicle, as our guide.

The Chronicle's chess column was a regular feature of the magazine in 1963 and 1964, until it disappeared from view. Then, in January 1967 it popped back up with a piece “For Chess Fans”. And what a come-back! It made the intriguing revelation that in the 1920s Broadmoor had a proper Chess problemist in its ranks, good enough to have his compositions published in the national press. Fascinating, tantalising, and a mystery in more ways than one, as we'll explain in a separate post. In 1967 readers were challenged with one of his “easier problems”.

Mate in two.
Broadmoor Chronicle, January 1967.
Originally: The Daily Telegraph, July 1922.
(But please see the footnote before you try and solve it)

Throughout the rest of that year, and into 1968 there were the familiar references, now and then, to chess competitions in Gloucester House (they were no longer called "Blocks"), Essex, Monmouth, and so on; but virtually nothing of chess content until March 1969. Then, for the benefit of any frustrated and tortured soul still on tenterhooks, P.J.W. of Gloucester House gave the solution to the "Broadmoor Problemist" puzzle (above) set a mere two years before.

Anyone now thirsting for a fresh challenge would have found it in P.J.W.'s column, where he offered another fiendish teaser from the in-house Torquemada of the 20s. This time the setting had the black king removed, and would-be solvers stared into the another abyss of feverish nights, and angst-ridden days of labyrinthine retrograde analysis to determine where it should be placed. Solutions would be verified, if recent experience was anything to go by, in 1971. If only, if only, the misprint had been spotted before going to press.

Talking of fiendish teasers, here's a minimalist problem, though not set by their own man, which the Chronicle offered its readers as a treat for Christmas 1972. Mate in two.

Solution in a couple of years' time - so, back to the story. In March 1969 a one-off item headed “Chess Club” reported a six-board match against Reading Chess Club. Broadmoor chess had come of age and was confident enough to take on outsiders, and that too is worth a second look, later.

The following month the Chronicle announced, poignantly, and with an air of finality, “A.D.N. has left us…he was the life and soul of the chess club.” So, another stalwart chesser hung up his pieces for the last time. But. Not so fast. The Chronicle continued: “We wish him a successful and happy future in the great world outside these walls”. Discharged, not deceased, and (let's hope) still fit to play - on the far side.

Times they were a-changin’ for others, too, as it was also reported from the Recreation Committee of 20 February 1969 that “negotiations are taking place to let patients from the ladies’ wing who are genuinely interested [join the men to play chess]…I have it on good authority that the Physician-Superintendent (i.e. the CEO) is considering the matter in a favourable light…” Not until January 1972 is there a further reference to “the ladies”, for whom "mixed-seating" had now been installed for the chess, and also (the ladies hadn't been hanging about) for bridge; and, it said, table tennis (seating? table tennis?). There was at least one lady though, as we'll see below, for whom chess had a particular attraction.

But we have skipped an item from 1970 that may have some resonance in our bureaucratic world on our side of the walls. An Extraordinary General Meeting of the Bridge and Chess Club had been called – all the more extraordinarily, observed P.J.W., "as it was a baking hot day in the middle of Summer" - to discuss the separation of the two sections into autonomous clubs. The Chairman sternly ruled, however, that as not all members of the bridge section had been informed of the meeting, no formal decisions would be taken. For the time being, then, any sub-Machiavellian scheme the chessers had for sovereign status was thwarted. The discussion, however, meandered on till close of play. “A non-event, but an important one,” B.S. (a chesser, btw) dryly observed.

Machiavelli says "He who wishes to be obeyed
must know how to command."
Sound advice, Niccolò.

When the issue was ventilated again in October at the AGM, the proposed split was defeated by two to one, though there were mutterings that it would have been a damn good idea “because of the noise” - but quite what the chessers had been doing to cause such a nuisance is left to our imagination.

In March 1972 one of “the ladies”, Penny Cassandra, as she dubbed herself, insisted that "one is never too young or too old to discover the enjoyment and satisfaction" of playing the game. She went on to offer some “Chess Anecdotes” including a potted history. Unfortunately there was a minor slip in her otherwise well-informed article, and it was seized on by correspondent P. Kelly in Shenley Hospital (on the other side of London -the Broadmoor Chronicle had now spread its wings) who quoted H.J.R. Murray’s history of the game to add ballast to his position.

Ms Cassandra had written that Spanish cleric Ruy Lopez had played in a tournament in 1944, raising a chessical eye-brow or two among those in the know, P.K. included. Penny readily admitted her error, and on the counter-attack claimed Jacobus de Cessolis’ ancient volume to be superior, as a bible of chess, to Murray's, tossing in a reference to Forbes' 1860 History for good measure. Mr. Kelly of Shenley Hospital had clearly met his match. He was not heard of again.

In 1972 the cataclysmic Spassky-Fischer World Championship match didn't pass unnoticed, and from what better vantage point than Broadmoor to assess the psychology of the challenger. In a one-off and prescient piece B.S. diagnosed as follows: “the point is that Fischer has (as a result of declining to take on Further Education, and deciding to concentrate exclusively on chess) an undeveloped personality”. Which proved to be, unfortunately, only too true.

Bobby, lost to the world.

February 1973: the chess column now hits its stride again, relying mostly on monthly problems, and appearing regularly until the middle of 1977 sometimes under the nom de plume “Sartor” (who must have been the snazziest dude on the Block, or just a chap named Taylor). From then on it appears but less consitently, reflecting the halting appearance of the Chronicle itself.

The principal columnist, now P.C.G., was reporting real chess news: Candidates semi-finals, British Championships, Mestel youngest GM ever in UK, and the like. Some of these articles were really quite advanced chess-wise (one was devoted to the theme of "domination" - P.C.G's favourite), and writing in one column about himself, he says that “in answer to PK4 I spent my early chess mastering the French Defence, and after many years I switched to the complicated Scheveningen Variation of the Sicilian.” P.C.G. clearly had form, and one wonders what he did to get it.

Maybe that’s enough edited highlights to give the flavour of the rich vein of chess activity in Broadmoor, as brought to us by the Broadmoor Chronicle. There are some particular episodes yet to be related in detail (the Broadmoor Problemist of the 1920s; G.W. from foreign parts - we mentioned him last time, Broadmoor chessers contra mundum), so there will be more, ~~in two year's~~ next time.

Footnote added after post and in light of comments.

As you will see from the comments box, the diagram above is wrong, and has errors introduced by your blogger. This is as it should be.

Apologies to all readers. Please see the comments box for further grovelling.

Asylum Index

Risky business

2011-11-11T07:55:00.008Z

1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 e6 5.e3 Nbd7 6.Bd3 dxc4 7.Bxc4 b5 8.Be2 a6 9.O-O c5 10.d5 exd5 11.Nxd5 Bb7 12.Nxf6 Qxf6 13.a4 b4 14.e4

14...Bxe4? is much too risky in view of the simple 15.Re1

Steffen Pedersen, The Meran System, Gambit, 2000, p.25

14...Bxe4? is far too risky after the simple 15.Re1

Glenn Flear, 8.Be2 in the Meran, TWIC Theory, 2005, p.2 (pdf)

Immediately, if not before

2011-11-09T07:55:00.072Z

Somebody has offended CJ de Mooi, and he's not going to give us any more of his money. Or so he says, in his 31 October message to the nation.

Funny piece, in a number of ways, ending with the exhortation

we'll make it an Olympic year in many ways.

How? Will chess be in the Olympics then? But let it pass, and scroll up to the flounce:

I do understand the criticisms levelled at me by some people for my more radical methods – one major issue seems to have been my habit of putting my own money into chess and into the federation but in the light of these concerns, I shall desist from doing so immediately.

Hmmm.

Now as it happens I know of nobody who's criticised CJ for his "habit" (a settled or regular tendency or practice?) of "putting [his] own money into chess", but the comments box is open for anybody who can supply a reference to anybody doing so.

Curiously, though, I do have a reference to a previous comment of CJ's, from 13 July 2011, more than three months before the one given above.

In all honesty, I won't be contributing any more personal funds to chess as I can't afford it

Makes a change. Previously CJ reckoned he'd done things he didn't appear to have done. Now it's the other way around: he's claiming he's going to do something that he already did.

[CJ index]
[Thanks to JB]

A rare event

2011-11-07T08:00:00.014Z

White to play

JMGB v Drunken Knight, October 2011

I'd been aiming to reach this position for a couple of moves. When I got here I played 23 Rf2. It wasn't my original intention, and it is very probably not the best move, but there is a point to it.

What was my idea?

Dadd's Army

2011-11-05T11:00:00.120Z

This series began with a chess painting by Richard Dadd who was confined, eventually to Broadmoor, after he murdered his father in 1843. It has morphed into a celebration of other patients ("inmates" in the early days) who, over the decades, played chess there.

A couple of episodes ago, we met East End lad Robert Coombes who, like Dadd, was detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure. Young Coombes was fortunate enough to be discharged in 1912 when he was then only 30 years old. Perhaps he went on, faute de mieux, to another mad-house where he might have served now His Majesty’s Pleasure: the trenches of the First World War. Who knows.

We are making a new world. Paul Nash (1918)

---x---x---

To bring the story of chess in Broadmoor further into the 20th Century your blogger has consulted the Broadmoor Chronicle, a more or less monthly “house magazine” produced by the patients themselves. It ran from the end of the Second War through to the seventies, thereafter appearing less frequently. There was a surprising amount of chess in it, on and off, and from its pages we can follow the fortunes of the game in the hospital, and some of the characters who played it.

Articles in the Chronicle were anonymous, and the Physician-Superintendent (CEO Broadmoor, you might say) had to approve their publication. He seemed pretty relaxed, prohibiting mention only of such things as escapes, deaths, and demands for his resignation (joke!). It was managed by committee of patients, and produced painstakingly on a Gestetner 360 Rotary Duplicator which (on a nostalgic note for our senior readers) looked something like this.

The Broadmoor Chronicle had a run in the region of 500 copies, a modest cover price, and an avid readership throughout the Hospital and possibly beyond.

Although it is the chess that interests us, the Chronicle’s other content was wide and varied. There was the seemingly safe and, to an outsider, trivial. There was the thought-provoking and creative. And there were the saucy bits - in a McGill sea-side postcard manner - somewhere in between.

All in all, it seems so, well, normal.

Another nostalgic note for our senior readers

In the main, the organised chess activity was in the “Parole Blocks”, numbers 2 and 5, where a more relaxed regime allowed patients to schedule their own time. Chess had its up and downs, and in the sixties and seventies (the period reviewed in these posts) its driving force was a few students of the game who were a class apart, in terms of chess strength, from the social players, and it was they who ran the matches in and between the hospital blocks, and wrote the Chronicle’s intermittent chess columns.

In the early sixties there were only sporadic mentions of chess (Christmas competitions and so on) usually in the monthly Sports and Social Reports, but a dedicated column appeared in 1963, always on page 6.

F.J.C. (initials only, I’m afraid) was the main-man of chess in the period, organising handicap tournaments where he sportingly offered his less skilled opponents odds such as Queen and move. He published one of these games, played a few years earlier in 1959.

The old anthologies used to show such games, in which the Master, as if blessed by the Deities, prevailed against such an impossible handicap. But F.J.C. was a Chess Hero for another reason: he featured a game where he offered odds of Queen and was himself mated on move 19. Good on him: even if he used the rest of his precious space to give thirty-three moves of analysis showing how he might have won. He was a mere human, after all.

The walls of Broadmoor didn’t cut our colleagues off from the chess world beyond. In May 1963 the Chronicle reported on the Botvinnik - Petrosian World Chess Championship match, complaining that although “it is the hardest struggle in the way of sport....[chess] rates a fraction of a column in the Times and nil in most other papers” (the usual story, of course).

The Chronicle’s own assessment of the match was downbeat: as “most of the games result[ed] in draws” it was “less inspiring than [other] recent battles e.g Botvinnik and Smyslov”. Indeed there were fifteen draws in the twenty-two game match, in which Tigran Petrosian ran out winner with 5 wins and 2 losses.

Petrosian and Botvinnik in 1963 - before digital clocks

Fifteen draws there may have been, but also a whiff of controversy. It concerned Iron Tigran’s 41st sealed move in the 5th game, and if you will permit a degree of dramatic licence the story runs as follows.

Chief Arbiter (and sometime Brixton Chess Clubber) Harry Golombek opens the envelope and plays 41. Kf8 on the board. Trouble is: Kf8 is illegal. The habitually undemonstrative Botvinnik, on the ropes in the game, can’t believe his luck. Though such behaviour is frowned on in the classrooms of the Soviet School of Chess he leaps to his feet, punches the air and claims victory. Iron Tigran curls a lip in disapproval. Harry rubs his eyes, and peers again at the score sheet. Now, it is well known that on the board Petrosian liked to camouflage his intentions by adding extraneous flourishes to his play. Apparently, and unknown to our Harry, he would add confusing embellishment to his script as well. Our man gets it at last. Looked at properly 41.Kf7 was the right (and legal) move. Chief Arbiter Golombek adoubes adroitly.

Iron Tigran curls his lip again, this time in approval. The Patriarch, deflated, disgruntled, and now seated, demands a face-saving photocopy for graphological post-mortem. Without troubling his lip further Petrosian wins in short order.

And if that, even with my lame effort to pep it up, was the best they could do for drama, then verily the Chronicle (and the Times) may be forgiven for leaving the whole anti-climax unreported.

The chess column maintained its internationalist outlook with a “test yourself” exercise giving, as a source, a book by Euwe and using, perhaps to the bemusement of its readers, German notation. This suggests the item was by foreign-born G.W., an interesting figure in Broadmoor life (chess and otherwise) to whom we shall return. In September 1963 the Chronicle gave a game between F.J.C. and G.W. himself, again from 1959. Not GM stuff, maybe, but it compares favourably with the action on the lower boards of any club match.

Evidence of an inextinguishable urge to play came in the summer of 1963 when a correspondent complained that “there have been no chess or bridge matches between blocks 2 and 5 this year, perhaps someone could start up some interest again”. In fact, to leap ahead of the story, the 2 v 5 rivalry did resurge, run for a several years, only to fall away around 1973. Fast forward to September 1978, Winter Activities Planning Meeting report: "Hywel D. said there used to be an inter-house chess competition....and he wondered if they could be re-instated." September 1979: "Wishing everyone luck in the internal chess competition," and the wheel of history wound slowly forward to whence it started.

To get back to 1963: Grandmaster game scores appeared occasionally (Tal v Olafsson; Fischer v Gligoric - serious chess) with analysis certainly culled from one of the chess magazines, invariably signed off by G.W., and the column ticked over regularly well into 1964. Then, in June that year, it disappeared…… bursting back over two years later in January 1967...... and we'll pick up the story there, next time.

Notes.

The Hospital authorities have deposited The Broadmoor Chronicle, and considerable amounts of other material, at the Berkshire Record Office for research purposes, and we should be extremely grateful for that (and to the ever-helpful staff at the BRO), though the Hospital has a seemingly blanket ban on publication of images of the Chronicle, even where there is no patient reference, which is a bit frustrating. See this about other problems that beset researchers into Broadmoor history.

The Petrosian - Botvinnik 5th match game is here. Apologies to all parties for taking liberties with the sealed move episode, which is discussed at length in the thread at the link, giving also Botvinnik's account of the affair.

The Paul Nash is in the Imperial War Museum.

Check out the series at the Asylum Index.

At what point does this become embarrassing?

2011-11-04T07:55:00.073Z

[Warriors Of The Mind]
[The Batsford Chess Encyclopedia]
[CJ index]
[Ray Keene index]

Received

2011-11-03T08:00:00.021Z

We have a bonus post for you today, but I wouldn't want you to miss Morgan's Today in Chessminster which went up yesterday. Chess debated as a possible distraction for Parliamentarians? Who'd have thunk it?

Meanwhile, newly received from the GingerGM and his crew: a couple of DVDs for review. Given that I haven't finished with Killer Endgames yet (review Part's I and II are available, mind), that's kind of generous. Come to think of it, I'm not done with John Cox's book on the Queen's Gambit Declined yet either (Tears in Rain).

A blogger's work is never done. Especially when there are videos to watch.

Today in Chessminster*

2011-11-02T11:37:00.009Z

1. In which James Myles Hogge, Liberal Chief Whip and MP for Edinburgh East, worries that a Capablanca simul in the Commons will distract attention away from the Land Settlement (Scotland) Bill, and the chess-loving Conservative Leader in the Commons, Andrew Bonar Law, gives a fairly unsatisfactory reply...

Mr. HOGGE (by private notice) asked the Leader of the House, who is responsible for authorising the use of a Committee room of the House of Commons for a chess tournament by a professional player during the discussion of an important land measure for Scotland; whether he is aware that on the last occasion on which Scottish business was discussed the proceedings were interrupted by a river pageant, and whether he is prepared to appeal to those hon. Members who prefer the chess tournament to the discussion of Scottish affairs, to abstain from voting in divisions on subjects of vital importance to Scotland, on which they have not heard the arguments?

Spoilsport Hogge at the National Portrait Gallery

Mr. BONAR LAW I understand, in reply to the first part of the question, that the use of the Committee room was authorised by the Sergeant-at-Arms, at the request of a Committee of Members of the House. The answer to the second part of the question is in the affirmative. As to the third part, I will give an undertaking, so far as I am personally concerned; but it would not be reasonable in this case alone to ask Members who have not heard the debate to refrain from taking part in Divisions. Let me add this, that the choice of to-day for this exhibition of chess is no mark of disrespect to Scotland, as I am informed that the date was fixed before it was known what the business would be.

'What's the big deal?' Bonar Law in Vanity Fair

Mr. HOGGE Has my right hon. Friend considered the question of precedent, and is he prepared to assure the House that in regard to amusements this will not create a precedent? This is the first occasion on which this sort of amusement has been permitted.

HON. MEMBERS No!

Mr. HOGGE I think so. If a Committee of this House wanted a prize-fight during the hours in which the House was sitting, would they get permission?

Mr. BONAR LAW I do not think it is right to ask me to answer any hypothetical question, but if the hon. Member wishes to take part in a prize-fight and makes application in the usual way, I am sure it will be considered.

(House of Commons, Official Report, 2 December 1919, vol. 122, cols. 233-4.)

* Please, for the love of God, if you have a better name for this series, do let me know.

Duffers' Delight V

2011-10-31T08:00:00.347Z

Knights on the rim are Morgan's

Knights on the rim ... you know the rest. Grim. Or dim. Grim and dim.

Well not for my friend and fellow blogger Morgan Daniels they're not. For Morgan, whatever Siegbert Tarrasch might tell him, developing knights towards the centre of the board is naught but some kind of middle-class affectation. For Morgan, sticking them on the edge isn't so much a possibility as it's a requirement. Once I saw him open with 1 P-KN3, 2 B-N2, 3 N-KR3 and then follow up with 4 P-QB3. I asked him why and he replied, "So I can play N-QR3 and N-QB2, of course". Obviously.

My own attitude, I'm afraid, is somewhat more bourgeois. Increasingly so, in fact.

During the 2007/08 season I played both my knights to bishop three less than half the time (18 of 40 games), but by 2010/11 the figure had jumped to 78% (27/35). In the games I've played so far this season it's up again (82%; 31/38) and that's not the end of it. These days, of the knights that I don't develop to their traditional squares I'm only playing about one in eight to rook three which is about half my rate for the last four years as a whole. Guess who's going to be first against the wall come the revolution.

Potty mouth Major Rawls probably would call me fuck face

If the way Morgan and I like to play chess is ever going to come together it's going to be in Mike Basman's old pet line of the Leningrad Dutch. The Basmaniac system, you see, manages to combine my love for defences against queen's pawn openings which are based on an early ... f7-f5 and Morgan's creative use of his knights

1 d4 f5, 2 g3 g6, 3 Bg2 Bg7, 4 Nf3 c6, 5 O-O Nh6, 6 c4 d6, 7 Nc3 O-O

Black gets a standard Leningrad set-up save for the king's knight which has gone exploring. It looks strange - well, it looks strange to me; I doubt Morgan would bat an eye - but according to Basman,

There are many ideas behind [putting the knight on h6]. Firstly, it does not block the bishop's diagonal, nor the KR's line, after castling. Secondly, the black squares of the K-side have weakened; a knight on f7 can defend h6 and g5. Thirdly, sometimes White plays P-Q5 and Black answers ... P-K4; in this case, a knight on f7 can defend d6.

It's not just the king's knight, either. Basman usually followed-up by playing his queen's knight out to the edge too. After 8 e4 for example,

Webb-Basman, British Championship 1973

or 8 Qc2.

Keene-Basman, Hastings 1973/74

Interestingly Raymondo - a leading theorist at the time, lest we forget - achieved nothing more than a short draw despite having months between the British Championships and Hastings to come up with something against Basman's system. A couple of years later Keene even adopted it himself when desperately seeking his final GM norm at a tournament in Spain.

Basman's Leningrad might just be another of his ropey openings, but it's one of his better ideas and RDK's failure to dent it, not to mention his subsequent patronage, is surely some kind of endorsement. That's what has tempted me to give it a punt myself, I suppose, although I've never quite managed to persuade myself to do it. I guess, when all is said and done, it's simply more Morgan's kind of thing than mine: he's got the creativity gene that you need to play this kind of stuff and I haven't.

Epilogue:

Last Halloween, we covered Korchnoi's tale of playing a game of chess with the long-dead Geza Maroczy. This year's ghost story is an encounter between Morgan and Tarrasch.

I've often imagined it: the erstwhile German chesser hanging around at Golden Lane, keeping an eye on the games. He's bound to be there. He's got an eternity to fill, after all, so he's going to take his entertainment wherever he can find it.

Sooner or later Tarrasch is going to find himself at Morgan's board. It's inevitable and when it finally comes to pass our man will feel the old master's presence at his shoulder and will turn, nodding towards his knights as he does so, and whisper,

You see these Siegbert? You see 'em? These are for you.

Basman quote taken from The Leningrad Dutch, Tim Harding (Batsford, 1976)

A Literary Reference : A Long Lunch

2011-10-29T07:55:00.095+01:00

This was all slightly disappointing, from a man who once would willingly have grabbed what sleep he could on a filthy mattress in the back of a van as it cruised down the M1 at four in the morning. So I asked about the game, Mornington Crescent. Ah, he said, people always asked about that. "I say to them, you wouldn't expect me to explain the rules of chess in the interval at a jazz concert, would you? Well, Mornington Crescent is much more complicated than chess."

It had been invented when the programme had a producer whom they didn't greatly like. They had been having a few drinks in one of their hotel rooms, and had heard him coming down the corridor. "Quick," somebody said, "let's invent a game which he won't understand." Which they did.

....

Quite a number of reporters either made their names in Northern Ireland, or went to work there at some stage in a celebrated career. Max Hastings and John Sergeant are among the best known. Tim Jones worked for The Times and was a fine chess player as well as a resourceful reporter. His main problem as a chess player was finding anyone sufficiently challenging to play against. His boredom had resulted in some damage at the critic Bernard Levin's flat while he was playing him in the paper's chess tournament. In the tedium of waiting for Levin to play he took to rocking back and forth on a valuable Chippendale chair. Levin was, apparently, gracious about its broken leg.

Tim had been present at the early riots in Londonderry and was called back to give evidence to the Scarman Tribunal, held in the city itself. He had been told that his session would begin on a Monday afternoon, so he refrained from drinking. He wasn't called that day, so he abstained the next day too. By Wednesday lunchtime he was giving up hope, so had a generous and restorative lunch. When he had to give evidence that afternoon, things did not go entirely to plan. At one point the brief for the tribunal asked him if he could confirm that he had seen a rioter throw a brick - here he pointed at a map - at this location here, which had hit a soldier standing at that location there.

Tim agreed.

"Are you aware, Mr Jones, that that is a distance of one mile?"

Simon Hoggart, A Long Lunch: My Stories And I'm Sticking To Them, John Murray, 2010, p.102-3, p.119-20.

[A Literary Reference index]
[Thanks to Tom]

Bad book covers XXII

2011-10-28T07:55:00.002+01:00

Back to Basics: Strategy, Beim, Russell Enterprises, 2011

[Bad book covers index]

Untitled simul post

2011-10-26T08:00:00.268+01:00

The Nigel Short simul tour comes to an end in Gatwick tomorrow afternoon. It's obviously been a hugely popular event - 177 games played in the first leg, 51 games played as of Sunday in the second - and a great success. In fact, the only bad word that anybody has had to say about the tour itself comes from the star of the show:-

The little brat kept offering me draws by thrusting out his arm, which induced great mirth from his Dad as my displeasure increased ... Afterwards two parents quietly informed me that they were almost certain that his father had been communicating moves to him from a hand-held computer.
Nigel Short: New in Chess 2011, #3

Receiving multiple, frequently inappropriate, draw offers is part and parcel of chessing with munchkins, but silicon-assisted cheating is an entirely different kettle of pawns. Fortunately, Short makes clear that the incident was very much a one off with the vast majority of his opponents being impeccably behaved.

Come on then, I'll take you all on

Photograph from ChessVibes

It's good to see the 'big event' simul making a comeback. The 1970s was the Golden Age for such things, just as it was for just about everything else to do with chess, and thirty years ago a succession of leading Soviet Grandmasters made their way to London to take on the cream of the British juniors.

At the top of today's blog we see CHESS reporting the Karpov's simul in 1977 (this, by the way, is the one that made it all the way to the front page of The Times - see WwwK XVI). Let's take a closer look at who Anatoly was playing ...

... and, while we're at it, who was there taking on Spassky a couple of years later?

Good to see Boris putting his back into it. Anyhoo, if you were at any of this year's simuls and took photographs, please keep hold of them. The S&BC Blog might be needing copies when we publish Untitled simul post II circa 2045.

STOP PRESS:
An extra date has been added to the tour. Nigel Short will be at Drunken Knights' London HQ - The Plough in Museum Street - tonight from 7pm. I gather all boards have been filled, but spectators are welcome so do go if you find yourself in town and at a loose end. I wouldn't mind popping along myself, although, in the circumstances, probably best that I give this one a miss.

I don't call you f**k Face ....

2011-10-24T08:00:00.748+01:00

Wed Oct 19, 2011 7:58pm

Note to Jonathan Bryant:
My name is Nigel Short and not Nosher. I don't call you f**k Face but, if I did, I expect you would find it insulting. Please show a modicum of respect.

Offence. There seems to be an awful lot of it about these days. Last week's big event, the Ricky Gervais shitstorm - rather reminiscent of kafuffles involving Frankie Boyle and Jimmy Carr, I thought - has already been replaced by the news that Hitler really hated being called a NAZI. (Yes, really.)

As you see, your humble scribe has also been busy causing offence. I’m not sure quite how I managed it, to be honest, but the Gervais business was all about a word beginning with 'm' and mine and Adolf’s start with 'n', so perhaps these things run in alphabetical order.

Doesn't like the N-word

Doug Stanthope, a comedian known for his especially acerbic style, once wrote that nobody has the right to be offended. I don't agree with this. Not in general and not here.

It's entirely reasonable that Short is offended by Nosher if he chooses to be. It makes no difference whatsoever that his response was rather over the top and neither is it of any consequence that he has his own extensive history of not showing respect to those around him.

In contrast to Stanthope, in the world according to me people have every right to be offended and while I also feel that everybody else has a corresponding right not to give a damn, in this particular case I do care. It bothers me that Short took umbrage at my use of his nickname not despite but because I had no idea he didn't like it. As Robin Ince puts it in an excellent article on Ricky Gervais' use of the word 'mong',

I do not mind offending people. I’d just like to think that if they cornered me in the bar I could explain the reason I was offensive before they punched me.

Well, now I know. I think it's a great shame that Short hates his moniker, but that's the way it is. From this day forth, then, TheChessPlayerFormerlyKnownAsNosher it shall be.

Every Picture Tells A Story: The End, Part 2

2011-10-22T11:00:00.015+01:00

Blog 20. We finish with a joint effort by Martin Smith and Richard Tillett.

It is a year (almost to the day) since our first Every Picture Tells a Story blog appeared and now it is time to sign off this series. However, our work continues – there are articles to write and a talk to give next March to the Hereford local history society, and more research to pursue.

We thought we would finish with the man at the centre of our story, the little-known artist Thomas Leeming, who painted himself as the standing figure in his picture of the gentlemen chess players of Hereford.

The artist…

Five days after Leeming’s death on 24 May 1822, at the age of around 33, a short anonymous obituary appeared in the Hereford Journal, which we discovered at Hereford Library on one of our visits to the city. It remains the only commentary that we have been able to find about him, either by a contemporary or by a later writer, and it tells us much about his painting, the range of his work, and his standing as an artist at the time of his death.

The author of the obituary was almost certainly Edwin Goode Wright, the proprietor of the Hereford Journal and one of the chess gents in the picture. He was an admirer of Leeming’s talents and may have commissioned what we think is the first version of the picture (the one held at Hereford Museum and Art Gallery). We think he also commissioned the portrait of “Mrs E G Wright” that Leeming exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1821.

… and his obituarist?

Leeming was, the obituary tells us, “an artist of great natural talent, which he had improved by study, and matured by practice, and as a miniature painter, he would probably in a few years, have been at the head of his profession; if his life had been prolonged”. Hmmm. “Great natural talent” perhaps but the few miniatures we have tracked down, though competent, fall a long way short of the exceptionally high standards set by the best London portrait miniaturists of the time. We doubt he would ever have bridged the gap.

“The productions of his pencil were remarkable not only for their striking resemblance, but for their delicacy of finish, and expression of character, which so few artists attain.” Sadly, as far as we are aware, no drawings of his survive.

“He also excelled in portrait and landscape painting in oil and watercolours, and has left numerous records of his genius, which bear flattering testimony to his skills and taste.” We have found only one, rather average, landscape and one, considerably better, full-size portrait (the one of John Grosvenor discussed in blog 19). We’ve not found any watercolours, unless you include a modest wash sketch held in the collection at the Hereford Museum and Art Gallery.

“As a copyist, he was perhaps excelled by few in England.” That may well be true. He certainly did a splendid job with his copy of Valdés Leal’s Christ Carrying His Cross (blog 10) and we would love to track down the copy of Raphael’s School of Athens which, according to the obituary, was unsold at the time of his death.

Here, then, was an artist of talent who was, to quote the obituary again, still “arriving at that perfection”. In his short career he maybe spread himself too thinly: working in London, Hereford and Oxford; running a London house and, from 1817, supporting a wife and family; with poor health to contend with in his last years. The odds were stacked against him in a cut-throat market where miniaturists were two-a-penny, and without high-end clientele you were likely to struggle. His style was resolutely traditional, which may have suited his middle-of-the-road customers but failed to impress the London elite. Perhaps, as his obituarist implies, he was robbed of the time necessary to achieve his full potential. But even with twenty or thirty years more – such contemporaries as Lawrence, Constable and Turner lived into their sixties - we are not sure that his reputation would have blossomed, nor that posterity would have judged him more kindly.

And what of Thomas Leeming the man? The final sentence of the obituary is all that we know of his personality, but it tells us much:

“He also possessed a talent for music, and was warmly esteemed and respected by an extensive circle of friends in different parts of the Kingdom, to whom his excellent heart, gentlemanly conduct, and unpresuming manner, had greatly endeared him.”

A fine fellow then, who gave us what we think ranks among the finest and most significant chess pictures of its – or indeed any – time with its lively portraiture, skilful composition and ordering of the characters, fidelity to the facts of chess, and evidential value to the history of the game.

We end our series with the version he painted for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1818.

Every Picture Tells A Story Index
Chess in Art Index

How Occupy Wall Street keeps itself occupied

2011-10-21T07:55:00.005+01:00

Zuccotti Park, New York City, Friday 15 October

[With thanks to bat020 on the spot]
[Occupy Wall Street]

This is the end X

2011-10-19T08:00:00.049+01:00

Philidor 1777

I met up with Angus at I Love Coffee on Streatham High Road again last Friday afternoon. It’s become a bit of a regular fixture. A drink (tea for me – I don’t love coffee), perhaps a custard tart and two or three hours of studying endgame positions.

This week’s topic was queen versus rook. Has anybody out there had this in a real game? I found it absurdly difficult. Sure, there's only a king and a single piece each, but they're the most mobile pieces on an open board so there are still dozens of options each move. Finding the right path - even in what pass for the simplest positions - is next to impossible at first.

Where to begin with this ending? How to do a Svidler and go from this,

to this?

Curiously, de la Villa doesn't include queen against rook in his otherwise very good 100 Endgames You Must Know. Your choice is Nunn's comprehensive, but tough to digest, Secrets of Pawnless Endings or something less dense, but infinitely more accessible, like Nick Pert's Killer Endings (review part I, II). For those just starting out, by the way, my suggestion would be the latter and move on to the former as and when the need arises.

Angus and I started, as is usually recommended, with the Philidor position - the set-up you see at the head of today's blog. Black to move loses so White's first task is to work out how to triangulate in order to return to the same position except with Black to play. The second step is to calculate the win, either delivering mate or winning the rook, against all of Black's tries. Most of them are rather straightforward - for example, against 1 ... Rb2 or 1 ... Rg7 White has an immediate fork with 2 Qd4+ - but some are pretty tough, especially if you haven't looked at this sort of position before. 1 ... Rf7, 1 ... Rh7, 1 ... Rb3 and 1 ... Rb1: they're the moves that are the hardest to break down.

Angus and I got there in the end and then moved on to some harder positions although nothing like Gelfand - Svidler (mate in 22 from the starting position; mate in 14 at the point Gelffie claimed a draw under the fifty-move rule) or Svidler - Howell (mate in 15 from the starting position). It was hard work, and I don't know what the chances are of either of us ever getting this ending in a rated game, but we improved my chess knowledge a little bit which can't be a bad thing.

Tea, custard tarts and a little bit of chess learning. What's not to like?

TITE Index

The Interesting French Exchange XV

2011-10-17T08:00:00.140+01:00

[Back to a spot of chess today. Normal service will be resumed in due course, no doubt - JMGB]

Montag's hands picked up the Bible. He saw what his hands had done and looked surprised.

'Would you like to own this?'

Faber said, 'I'd give my right arm.'

Montag stood there and waited for the next thing to happen. His hands, by themselves, like two men working together, began to rip the pages from the book. The hands tore the fly-leaf and then the first and then the second page.

'Idiot, what're you doing!' Faber sprang up, as if he had been struck. He fell against Montag. Montag warded him off and let his hands continue.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

I waited more than a quarter of a century to read Fahrenheit 451. I did Lord of the Flies for O level, but I had friends in another class who got Ray Bradbury's novel instead. My teenage self thought it sounded interesting and made a mental note to get hold of a copy when I had a moment ... and I finally bought one a couple of weeks ago.

The day after I finished the book the latest copy of CHESS plopped through my letter box. I opened it up to find Keith Arkell talking about his game with Jack Rudd at the recent Jessie Gilbert celebration tournament in Coulsden. Keith tells of how he'd intended to play 3 Nc3 after 1 Nf3 Nf6, 2 c4 e6, but had accidentally pushed his queen's pawn instead.

My hand just kind of automatically played 3 d4

he says.

Montag doesn't seem to have been a chesser. I wonder if Ray Bradbury is/was. Be their owners GM or amateur hacker, chesser hands seem to do their own thing on a regular basis. It's certainly happened to me several times, most recently at last month's Sunningdale Open when in this position

I tried to play 27 ... Bg4 with the thought in the back of my mind that I'd always be able to defend the bish with ... h7-h5 should the need arise at some point in the future. My hands had other ideas, though, and it was only as one of them was pressing the clock that they let me know that they'd pushed the pawn and left the bishop back on d7.

Not that letting our hands take over once in a while is necessarily a bad thing. Recently our friend Richard James was netchessing and found that his desired 2 d3 against his opponent's French Defence was corrected by his hands to 2 d4. Consequence one: an accidental IFE. Consequence two: a FIDE Master spanked.

Modest Mr J will tell you that a three minute game on the internet doesn't mean that much, but beating a titled player - regardless of the format - is more than your present writer has ever managed. Perhaps I should start things off and then, like Montag, let my hands continue? They seem to want to get involved so maybe I should just let them get on with it.

TIFE Index

Frideswide And Reggie's Charming

2011-10-15T11:00:00.086+01:00

Back at the beginning of September we added Robert Coombes to the list of noteworthy Broadmoor chessers: Richard Dadd, Edward Oxford, and Reginald Saunderson. And a few days ago I hinted we'd reprise Reginald Saunderson, so here goes (we’ll add a new name or two next time).

But before we go any further we’ll take a short detour and visit Dublin and its environs. We can get an unexpected insight into Broadmoor chess from this unlikely vantage point, and we will do so in the company of the redoubtable Mrs Thomas Rowland (1843 [or 1851, see note] -1919).

It’s a fair bet you’ve never heard of her (nor I, till quite recently). She deserves better, being, as she was, a capable though not top-flight player and most obviously a woman in the world of late 19th and early 20th century Anglo-Irish chess.

Née Frideswide Fanny Beechey, her grandfather was the Royal Academician Sir William Beechey (1753-1839) who your two Thomas Leeming sleuths once briefly suspected was TL's mentor, and you can see the stylistic similarity here and here, perhaps.

But you may wonder how Sir William found time to paint at all, given he was so busy fathering 21 children - 21! One of them, Richard Brydges Beechey (he too was to become an artist), was Frideswide's father. Sir William sired five children by his first wife, and with his second Richard came out as number 9 - though by then Sir W. had probably lost count.

The artistic touch was with Frideswide as well; she did floral watercolours. She was also Irish women’s chess champion, a problemista of considerable talent….

…..and a serial chess columnist.

Just look at her form: she had a hand (or two) in columns in the Mail and Warder, Cork Weekly News, Irish Figaro, Irish Fireside, Kingstown Monthly, Kingstown Society, The Visitor, and The Irish Times. That’s as well as writing a couple of problem books - the delightfully titled "Chess Blossoms" (1883), depicted above, and "Chess Fruits" (1884) - and a biography cum game collection of W.H.K. Pollock (1889), and more.

From 1905 to 1914 she also edited, sometimes jointly with her husband, a slim chess magazine "The Four-Leaved Shamrock" whereby she kept up her pretty line in botanically inclined titles.

The Four-Leaved Shamrock displays its USP

In those days before partition the whole of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and Dún Laoghaire, a few miles to the south of Dublin, was patriotically known as the above-mentioned “Kingstown” (reverting back in 1921 to the Gaelic); it had an active chess scene centred on the Rowlands. In the summer of 1911, to capture the national mood, they loyally produced a souvenir cover to celebrate the coronation of George V.

You can see that it featured a specially composed problem with a regal arrangement of the pieces. I'll leave you to find the key move, though it will inspire none but the most rabid monarchist to grab the bunting, rush into the street and party.

The King's Crown by T.R.D.
White to play and mate in two moves

So to get to the Broadmoor connection: here are the first two paragraphs of a piece written by Mrs Rowland herself in the June 1911 number. From its base near Dublin The Four-Leaved Shamrock found its way into some surprising corners.

REMINISCENCES

Passing a new agency a few days ago I was arrested by a poster with the heading of BROADMOOR, and my thoughts wandered back to the year 1903, when a match England v Ireland was being organised, and the chess paper having got inside the precincts of Broadmoor, many of the inmates enthusiastically entered the lists - some on the English side and some on the Irish. The first win was scored to "Broadmoor", and his opponent was a champion of an English county, and this is how he won. Broadmoor was white and he started 1 PK4, and sent a number of conditional moves, to which the champion unwaringly agreed. Then came the second instalment with more conditional moves, also agreed to. Alas too late the champion discovered that his game was hopeless, and resigned on the 25th move!!

Very good problems were sent to me occasionally, and one of the Irish inmates was so keen on correspondence play that he carried on 71 games simultaneously, very few, if any, of his opponents being aware of his detention. He was a bright, pleasant correspondent and a strong player, and for a couple of years sent me each season tin boxes of beautiful strawberries by post. But the excitement of too much chess proved fatal to its continuance. Suddenly all communication ceased, and I afterwards heard that the management had to curtail the play, for on dull damp days when they could not get out, the chess proved too exciting and the results were not satisfactory.

Extraordinary.

Mrs Rowland reminisced?

And who could that “bright, pleasant correspondent” have been, that strawberry charmer who played wittily on the lady's "Chess Fruits", that obsessive poor-weather chesser who tested the Asylum's regime to the limit?

How about another wager: it was Reginald Treherne-Bassett Saunderson, whose last taste of freedom was in Dublin’s fair city itself, where he fled after his murderous episode in 1894.

And just a last curiosity from the 1903 England - Ireland correspondence match (in which Frideswide, on board 48, beat the Reverend Robert Bee - she reports the detail in her Irish Times column of 7 May 1904) which owed everything to the Rowlands' organising zeal. Board 25 for Ireland was one Charles Heaviside (who beat an Arthur Schoinberg). Whether or not he was the brother of the scientist Oliver is unclear, but he is interesting in his own right for also being an inmate: of Richmond District Asylum, Dublin.

Acknowledgment and notes

Again, thanks to Dr Tim Harding for his generous leads on The Four-Leaved Shamrock and Broadmoor. He also provided the Heaviside detail. See his page for Irish chess mags. etc.

The British Library has an almost complete set of TFLS.

For more on the Rowlands see this excellent blog, from which the second Frideswide photo comes (if indeed it is she). There are two different dates on the web for her birth. While it seems indelicate to probe such a matter concerning a lady, if a proper historian could put us right it would be appreciated.

As usual, all the inevitable errors are my responsibility.

Here is the last part of Mrs Rowland's June 1911 article.

"The articles in "Answers" are exceedingly interesting, and perhaps later on the writer may tell us something about "Chess at Broadmoor." He says, "Probably in no other institution of its kind in the world does one meet with such interesting characters as in Broadmoor." Here is an extract from the second instalment: "The man with the snow white beard and hair is not yet fifty, but for the last ten years he has been an inmate of this institution, winning the respect of all with whom he comes in contact. He is detained during the Sovereign's pleasure because in a fit of madness he shot his aunt. He has a comfortable income, writes regularly for many of the high-class magazines, and even the editors do not know that the brilliant contributions they receive from this man are penned in Broadmoor."

What Dadd Did

What Dadd Did Next
What Dadd Did Later
What Dadd Didn't Do
The Dadd Is In The Detail

How To Beat Your Dadd At Chess
Dadd, Oxford. Saunderson. Who's next?