Grandmasters of the Chessboard

Earlier this week a prima facie academic tome landed on my desk. In fact the author, as I realised with mounting excitement and anticipation, has made a brave attempt to update Richard Réti’s 1920s classic, Masters of the Chessboard, to the 21st century.

While I was a pupil at Dulwich College — back in the Cretaceous period, when human dinosaurs stalked the earth — I won the annual literary prize. The set topic was to compare Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped with George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

The prize, unsurprisingly, was a book, and I requested Masters of the Chessboard as my reward. The English master deeming a chess book to be insufficiently literary, I instead received Betjeman’s Summoned by Bells. The disappointment instilled in me a lifelong hatred for the poor man’s poetry.

Fortunately, sympathetic parents rode to my rescue and took me to Foyles bookshop, where I added Réti’s masterpiece to my chess library.

Like Nimzowitsch and Golombek, this Czechoslovakian Jewish genius possessed the gift of converting chess annotation into an epic saga. Indeed, Réti’s canvas was vast, since he sought to cover the contribution of the greatest masters, from Morphy to his present day, when Alekhine was world champion.

In Chess Lessons from a Chess Champion Coach (Batsford), the Swedish international master Thomas Engqvist has boldly taken up Réti’s baton. He gives us thoughtful thumbnail sketches of the grandest of Grandmasters, stretching back before Réti’s chosen Big Bang moment. For Réti, modern chess began with Morphy, Anderssen and Steinitz, whereas Engqvist extends his research way back to Ruy Lopez in the 16th century and the dawn of chess as we now play it. He takes the story from Greco and Philidor, via the English School of Howard Staunton (which Réti neglected) right up to Magnus Carlsen.

The notes are highly readable. Due deference is given both to Réti himself and the towering figure of Aron Nimzowitsch, who has come in for some unwarranted flak in recent years from such grandmaster commentators  as Yasser Seirawan and Jan Gustafsson.

“Another reason why the serious student should read all works written by Nimzowitsch, even after gaining a sufficient understanding of the classical principles,” he writes, “is that Nimzowitsch’s precepts will enable your comprehension of chess to reach even greater heights. In my opinion this is much more important than learning from computers, which are very bad teachers indeed and sometimes incomprehensible. Nimzowitsch must be regarded as one of the greatest , if not the greatest, ever teachers and you will notice when you read through the games in this book,  that Nimzowitsch and his concepts will crop up from time to time. It is impossible to ignore him.” Thus Engqvist.

Engqvist also provides the best notes I have ever seen to that quintessential banner game of the Hypermodern Revolution, Réti’s win against the British master Yates from New York 1924.

It is, though, a little known fact that Réti’s extraordinary strategy of placing his knights on f3 and e3 from the Yates game, was anticipated by a full 73 years by the historian Thomas Henry Buckle of the Stauntonian English School.

In the game won by Buckle against Löwenthal from London 1851, Buckle placed his knights in mirror image formation on c3 and d3 and struck at Black’s centre with e4.

Engqvist’s Chess Lessons is an excellent book and I recommend it for its historical, pedagogical and literary values. It is, in fact, a concise account of the intellectual development of chess over the past five centuries. There are, though, some suggestions I would like to make for future editions.

Réti included Marshall, Vidmar, Spielmann and Tartakower in his magnum opus. I would have welcomed chapters on those Titans from the past. Ditto such modern giants as Portisch, Larsen, Gligoric and Stein.

The game between Carlsen and Nakamura — selected to exemplify Carlsen’s style — is so poorly played that it should never appear in any anthology, apart from a collection of egregious blunders.

The game between Alekhine and Chajes, credited to Karlsbad 1929, cannot be so, since neither player participated in that event.

One Anand game appears to have three black rooks, while Tal’s brilliancy against Uhlmann has the wrong result.

These are, of course, quibbles, detracting nothing from a book which deserves a place in every serious chess library.

Instead of the unspeakably poor win v Nakamura in the book, I would have preferred to see this 2016 game which clinched the world title in Carlsen’s favour, where his finely calculated finish thwarts Karjakin’s desperate, last ditch and nearly successful counter attack. A knife-edge finish: Carlsen vs. Karjakin.

Raymond Keene’s latest book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from Blackwell’s. His 206th book, Chess in the Year of the King, with a foreword by The Article contributor Patrick Heren, and written in collaboration with former Reuters chess correspondent, Adam Black, is in preparation. It will be published later this year.

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