"Good Luck"

Chess players must respect the sport and their opponents, so the game begins with a handshake or other culturally sanctioned greeting. Commonly players say, "play well" or "good luck". I teach children to say good luck because they can mean it with no harm to themselves. Chess is a game of skill with nothing hidden. Outside of such chance elements in the selection of opponents and color assignment in Swiss tournaments, or of color assignment in single round-robin events, the game rests wholly upon the skills of the players.

The lack of chance contributes in large measure to the appeal of chess. One cannot blame the cards, the dice, or the referees.

True?


Historic Luck

Consider a historic game between William Davies Evans and Alexander MacDonnell in London in 1826. The game opened with a variation on Captain Evans' signature opening.

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.0–0 d6 5.b4 Bxb4 6.c3 Ba5 7.d4 Bg4 8.Qb3 Qd7 9.Ng5 Nd8 10.dxe5 dxe5 11.Ba3 Nh6 12.f3 Bb6+ 13.Kh1 Bh5 14.Rd1 Qc8





From this position, White has a clear win: 15.Qb5+ Nc6 16.Bd5 Qd7 17.Bxc6 bxc6 18.Qxe5+ Kd8 19.Rxd7+ and black might as well resign, as Fritz did when I played it from the diagram position.

Captain Evans did not play 15.Qb5+. Rather, he won the game in more dramatic fashion.

15.Rxd8+ Qxd8





Here we have the position as I encountered it in my tactics training last week. It is one of the problems available in the database I call Kaber's Exercises because I created it from files available at Claude Kaber's Chess Stuff page. The exercises are an excellent training regimen for use within ChessBase, if only I would use them regularly. Many of Kaber's exercises have entertaining questions, such as "play like Captain Evans" in the present case.

I found the correct move, which was the one Evans played.

16.Nxf7!

MacDonnell answered with 16...Qh4, threatening checkmate. Kaber put this position in as a training position with the tease, "play better than Captain Evans." Evans finished off MacDonnell with 17.Qb5+ c6 18.Qxe5+ Kd7 19.Qe6+ Kc7 20.Bd6#. Kaber offers the quicker checkmate 17.Bb5+ c6 18.Qe6+ Qe7 19.Qxe7#.

Kaber also offers as a variation, 16...Qf6 17.Nxh8+/=. Kaber's analysis is wrong. After 17...O-O-O! black has a substantial advantage. The knight on h8 is trapped and its capture will produce material equality. White's king is more vulnerable than Black's, and his queenside knight blocks in the rook, while several moves are needed to free the horse.

Evans' dramatic victory offers tactical fireworks that prevailed due to inadequate defense. Evans benefited from luck: MacDonnell did not play to his full capabilities.


Recent Luck

In the final round of our Club championship last week, I was playing on the top board attempting to upset the likely winner. My miserable play resulted in this position with Black on move:





I'm clearly losing, so in desperation I played 29...Rb8. This clever decoy is an illusion. I get some checks, but they are not enough.

Play continued 30.Qxb8 Qe4+ 31.Kg1 Nf3+ 32.Kf2 Nd4 33.Rxd4 cxd4





34.Rxd4+- would end my little fantasy, but my opponent played 34.Bxd4 instead. The game went on 34...Qc2+ 35.Ke1 Qe4+




My opponent didn't like the looks of 36.Kf1 Qf3+ 37.Bf2 Qxd1+ 38.Kg2, or he didn't see all of the sequence. But with two pawns to the good, White should win this. Instead, my opponent played 36.Kd2?

The game concluded with a forced repetition 36...Qxd4+ 37.Kc1 Qxc4+ 38.Kb1 Qe4+ 39.Kc1 Qc4+ 40.Kd2 Qd4+ 41.Ke2 Qe4+ ½-½

With this draw, my opponent still managed to secure the Club championship, but his taste of victory is bittersweet and he gave up a few rating points. My tactical bluff worked because my opponent did not play to his ability.


A Puzzle

Saturday morning in the first round of the annual Dave Collyer Memorial tournament, I faced an unrated player. He was unfamiliar with the Réti opening, played some odd moves, and the resulting melee went badly for me. I eventually won the game and went on to have an excellent tournament, but I was lucky that my opponent overlooked something when he played 19...Bc5? from this position.






What did he miss?

Queen's Value

Imbalances are the heart of chess strategy, but how many pieces are equal to an active queen? I came to the position below replaying a game from the playchess server against Hiarcs 10. Black to move.





Here I played 24. ... Qg4+ and Hiarcs evaluated Kf2 as at least a half a pawn better than moving to the h-file. So, 25.Kf2 Nh3+ 26.Qxh3 Qxh3 27.Rxe8+ Kh7.





For White's queen, Black has given up a rook and knight. Earlier in the game, Black had given up a bishop for three pawns, then White sacrificed a pawn.

According to the most widely used version of point count chess, White has three minor pieces (9), rook (5), and three pawns (3) for 17. Black has a queen (9), knight (3), and seven pawns (7) for 19. But, arithmetic tells us little. How can a queen play against so many pieces? How many of Black's pawns will fall in the process?

Kings and Pawns

In a Club Championship game this evening I had White in the following position. I played 31.Rxf7+

Did I err?

What alternative plan should White consider?

Winning Chances?

Does White or Black have a reasonable chance of winning from this position?

Carlsen back on top

At this moment, Aronian's one pawn advantage looks insufficient for the win and the other games in the Corus A group have finished. Most astounding was Magnus Carlsen's win over Kramnik with Black! It looks like the teenager has an excellent chance to win this year.

Update: 10:33am PST Aronian-Ivanchuk 1/2-1/2
Yesterday I doubted; today I believe. Carlsen caught Aronian.

Aronian moves into lead

Four of the seven games in the Corus A group were decisive today!

As Black, World Champion Vishwanathan Anand defeated tournament leader and wunderkind Magnus Carlsen, while Levon Aronian won with White against the top Dutch player, Loek Van Wely. Also winning with Black: Teimour Radjabov and Pavel Elijanov. With two rounds to go Aronian moves into first place.

Carlsen still faces Radjabov and Kramnik. It is hard to imagine that he will catch Aronian, but today demonstrated that at least half of the field still has a chance to emerge on top.

Things Run Together

Chess and Politics

In the morning’s chess classes, I found myself telling some youth about certain reprehensible gestures that arose in chess competition. The word reprehensible states mildly my view of the behavior of Veselin Topalov’s manager Silvio Danailov during the World Championship Reunification match in Elista in 2006, and consequently towards Topalov himself. Since Toiletgate, as someone dubbed it, my preference has been to ignore Topalov, which seemed to create only minor inconveniences due to his less than optimal play.

Yesterday, he forced me to take notice. Topalov played a terrific game against Vladimir Kramnik, and every loss by the world’s top player merits attention. Finding the last move of the game served as an appropriately challenging problem for my beginning and intermediate students, while the middlegame complexities following the knight sacrifice offers plenty of material to challenge advanced students.

As I mentioned in my piece on Fischer last week, disregard of a player’s games because I abhor some aspect of his behavior can stand in the way of my own chess progress. I made the error of avoiding 1.e4 for a few years because Fischer favored it—I opt not to play it for better reasons today. Likewise, avoiding Topalov’s games because he needs some behavior modification—or at least the sense to fire his manager—cuts me away from some beautiful chess. Topalov is an exciting player.

Units of Knowledge

Politics creeping into chess is one thing, but the serendipity of today’s lunchtime reading is quite another. A brief statement on a history blog—Historiann: History and sexual politics—where I also had posted some comments caught my attention at breakfast. Monocle Man took issue with the term meme.

meme Richard Dawkins’s 1976 coinage, on the analogy to gene (with a little aid from mime and mimic), for a cultural copying unit, such as the word or melody that is mimicked by others.
William H. Calvin and Derek Bickerton, Lingua ex Machina, end matter

Meme: an idea, project, statement or even a question that is posted by one blog and responded to by other blogs. Although the term encompasses much of the natural flow of communication in the Blogosphere, there are active bloggers and blog sites that are dedicated to the creation of memes on a regular basis.
“Blogjargon,” frEdSCAPEs 0.1

Memes, self reproducing mental information structures analogous to genes in biology, can be seen as the basis for an explanatory model of cultural and psychological behaviour. Their properties and effects are evolutionary conditioned and ultimately seeks to promote their replication.
Henrik Bjarneskans, Bjarne Grønnevik and Anders Sandberg, “The Lifecycle of Memes”

At lunch I was reading Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions, in particular the 1927 essay “An Investigation of the Word.” This essay does not employ the term meme, which was invented a half-century later. Yet, the sentence Borges interrogates from Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote seems to have taken on a life of its own in several languages.

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero recordar
In a place in La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall
As quoted in Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, 32.

Borges’s essay anticipates and intervenes into subsequent conversations regarding post-structuralism, but serendipity connects it to this chess blog (and brushes together again two works I usually keep separate—my history notebook and my chess ramblings):

How many units of thought does language include? It is not possible to answer this question. For the chess player, the locutions “queen’s gambit,” pawn to king’s four,” knight to king’s three check,” are unities; for the beginner, they are phrases he gradually comprehends.
Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, 36.

One wonders if the notion that a player is required to say “check” when attacking the opponent’s king might be considered a meme. Although I do not teach this myth, I hear it repeated by those I’ve taught, as if the fiction replicates itself. I heard it again today in a classroom and let it pass without comment.

Eventful Days

Death of a Legend

Bobby Fischer died at 64 (an "evocative age," according to the Wall Street Journal). He was buried in Iceland in a small ceremony. Iceland, Garry Kasparov reminds us, was "the site of his greatest triumph." I offered some personal reminiscences Friday.


Echoes of Elista

Toiletgate has not ended as we learned when Ivan Cheparinov refused to shake hands with Nigel Short, was forfeited, apologized, and then lost when the game was played.

The official website for the Corus tournament tells us that Kramnik and Topalov did not shake hands, but had one offered, the other would have been obliged.

Also Veselin Topalov had prepared well for his game with Vladimir Kramnik today, deviating from Kramnik-Anand, Mexico City 2007 with a novelty 12.Nxf7! (Cheparinov, Topalov's second, is credited with the discovery)

Black to move



Kramnik might take some comfort from the knowledge that tournament leader Magnus Carlsen also lost today.