Christmas treats for chess-lovers

I had hoped this week to pose an exciting question, such as: does Santa Claus play chess? Or unearth a startling revelation, for example, a reindeer chess piece discovered in Lapland, which can only move when dragging a sleigh piece behind it, much as the (real) Xiangqi (Chinese chess) piece, the cannon, can only capture through another piece. No such luck, sadly, so I shall instead focus on items to fill the Christmas stocking for chess enthusiasts.

At the more popular end of the scale of expertise, the obvious choice is to take advantage of the chess craze surrounding the Netflix TV series, The Queen’s Gambit, and download How to Play like Beth Harmon, the heroine of the narrative. The download comes with the added plus of being free of charge, and includes material for complete beginners, thus acting as an introduction to a record breaking on-screen chess epic, as well as entry level instruction for those unaccustomed to the rules and moves of the Royal Game.

Then we come to the classics, books which inspired me as a teenager. Secondhand copies exist, of course. However, an invaluable service has been rendered to the chess community by the publishing house co-founded by Julian Simpole, (teacher of prodigies Josh Altman and Shreyas Royal, as well as budding Grandmasters: Luke McShane and David Howell) in tandem with Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, in the form of Hardinge Simpole Publishing. Hardinge Simpole is a publisher which has adopted the preservation of major English language classics as a kind of mission statement.

In my regular columns for The British Chess Magazine I have often expressed my admiration for the games and writings of Aron Nimzowitsch, exploits which exerted a significant influence over my early personal development as a chess player. Nimzowitsch excelled at chessboard strategy, long-term planning deriving from the particular openings which he developed, including 1. e4 e6; 2. d4 d5; 3. e5 against the French Defence, 1. Nf3 d5; 2. b3 in the form of the Nimzowitsch Attack, and of course his signature Nimzo-Indian Defence: 1. d4 Nf6; 2. c4 e6; 3. Nc3 Bb4. Nimzowitsch’s magnum opus is his book of chess strategy, My System. Usefully, Hardinge Simpole Publishing offer a full menu of chess desiderata.

Somewhat paradoxically, given the diametrically opposite nature of their styles, another major influence was Nimzowitsch’s fellow Latvian, and also citizen of Riga, Mikhail Tal. In contrast to Nimzowitsch, Tal was primarily a tactician. I first became aware of Tal’s extraordinary power and energy from his victory in the 1959 Candidates Tournament which decided the challenger to the throne of World Champion and Red Czar of The Soviet Chess Imperium, Mikhail Botvinnik.

The book which introduced me to the Wizard of Riga, as Tal came to be known, was Harry Golombek’s first hand account of that selfsame Candidates Tournament. There, Golombek himself acted as Chief Arbiter, a most signal international honour for the distinguished British Master, later to become Grandmaster Emeritus. The book had, in fact, been originally published in a somewhat primitive offset format, which looked for all the world, as if it had been produced in the editor’s back room on a duplicating machine, which it probably had.

The arte povera design of the initial book belied the depth, elegance and insights of Golombek’s contents, writing which had already earned Golombek numerous accolades for his books on Reti, Capablanca, and the World Championships of 1948, 1954 and 1957. One of life’s great pleasures over Christmas would be to play over Reti’s elegant masterpieces from Golombek’s book Reti’s Best Games of Chess, with an accompanying glass of Dow’s Port 1977, listening to Schubert’s “Trout Quintet” and, possibly, with a large wedge of Colston Bassett Stilton.

It is also interesting to compare Golombek’s reportage of the 1948 Championship (which I used to carry around with me as an aspiring youngster) with his treatment of the 1959 Candidates.

Golombek enjoyed a unique gift for conveying the drama of battles on the chessboard, elevating chess commentary to the bardic literary level of the Icelandic epic sagas which Golombek had studied for his Doctorate. Tal’s performance, 61 years ago, must be rated as one of the most outstanding tournament performances of all time. Against the leading grandmasters of his time, excluding of course Botvinnik (waiting in Moscow to discover the identity of his challenger), Tal’s restless energy notched up a huge plus score, including thirteen wins and just three draws out of sixteen encounters against Bobby Fischer, Svetozar Gligoric, Fridrik Olafsson and Pal Benko. Against Fischer, Tal scored 100 per cent. Indeed, Tal could also easily have defeated Benko in the one draw permitted him, had he not agreed in the final round to split the point in an overwhelming position, where Benko could have safely resigned. Tal once said that there are two types of sacrifice, sound ones and his! Oddly enough, Tal triumphed in 1959 largely through sound attacks, creating a tsunami of energy and dynamism which simply blew away the opposition. The waves of kinetic force in Tal’s conduct of his games brings to mind those lines from Shakespeare’s Othello  Act III, Scene 3, one of the most impactful descriptions of raw energy ever to appear in English literature:

“Like to the Pontic sea,

Whose icy current and compulsive course

Ne’er keeps retiring ebb but keeps due on

To the Propontic and the Hellespont”

The contrast with the elite of 1948 is dramatic. Eleven years before Tal’s advent, the top players were heavily into deep strategic manoeuvres and the battles unfolded, by and large, at a relatively slow pace. Tal, on the other hand, demolished even the greatest with a Napoleonic élan, rarely seen before on the chessboard.

Golombek’s book, 4th Candidates’ Tournament, 1959 remains in print in a much-improved edition, both visually and in terms of design. Hardinge Simpole Publishing have also reissued Peter Clarke’s anthology of Mikhail Tal’s Best Games of Chess, which takes the Rigan Wizard’s meteoric career up to and including the World Championship match victory against Botvinnik, which crowned Tal, albeit briefly, as World Champion. I found Clarke’s book just as inspiring and instructive as Golombek’s account of the 1959 Candidates Tournament. In fact, it was the book which taught me to play Tal’s signature defence, the Modern Benoni, which rewarded me with fifteen straight wins from my first fifteen games with it.

At the next level of difficulty, for the truly serious enthusiast, I can recommend the entire series of Garry Kasparov’s epic, My Great Predecessors (published by Everyman). This takes the reader on a journey through the best games, annotated in profound detail by the former champion, of every champion and proto-champion from the days of Philidor, via Lasker, Alekhine, Fischer, Karpov to Kasparov himself and beyond. It is a chess course and education in itself. Much as Gustav Mahler claimed that all human life was present in his third symphony, so Kasparov could justly assert that all significant chess life was present in his multi-volume anthology of exploits at the pinnacle of the chess Everest.

A recent addition to the treasure house of chess literature is the anthology Magnus Carlsen’s Sixty Memorable Games (published by Batsford), a self-evident homage by the always reliable American Grandmaster Andrew Soltis to the Bobby Fischer classic, My 60 Memorable Games. Soltis takes the reigning World Champion’s career right up to 2020, when elite chess pivoted towards being played online, a predominantly rapid play discipline, in which the infinitely adaptable and tenacious Norwegian reigns as serenely as he did in the formerly prevalent face-to-face over the board classical version of the game.

Finally, I come to one of the most significant volumes on chess ever written, Game Changer (New in Chess), by the duo of Grandmaster Matthew Sadler and our own flesh and blood Beth Harmon, Natasha Regan. This is the story of AlphaZero, the computing champion devised by Demis Hassabis CBE and his team from Deep Mind. The person who can fathom how AlphaZero decides on its chessboard strategies holds the key to the future. To me, the moves of probably the strongest chess playing entity the world has ever seen, or is likely to see, resemble one long stream of rule breaking paradoxes: unfathomable sacrifices, attacks launched from seemingly unpromising corner squares such as h1, and transitions to endgames when material in arrears. Game Changer contains within its pages the Holy Grail of chess understanding, waiting for some new Galahad to unravel its mysteries and deploy them in action on the competitive chessboard.

This week’s game, an imperishable tour de force of dynamic movement, by an early master of the game, also resurfaces as a victory by the fictitious mistress of chess, Beth Harmon, in Queen’s Gambit. It was a favourite of the immortal Bobby Fischer. I once saw him demonstrate the moves, with evident glee, to a somewhat bemused El Comandante Fidel Castro in the lobby of the Havana Libre (formerly Hilton) Hotel, during the chess Olympiad of 1966. In this game we see the crisp efficiency of Fischer, combined with the vibrant dynamism of Tal, over seven decades before either of those modern maestros even saw the light of day.

Here is the game of Paul Morphy versus two chess enthusiasts who played in consultation: French aristocrat Count Isouard de Vauvenargues along with the German noble Karl II, Duke of Brunswick at the Paris Opera House in 1858.

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