Snakes and Leaders
During his recent visit to the USA to cement relations with President Joe Biden, the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, was visibly impressed by the chess club in a Washington school. Pupils were not only actively involved in playing the game, but were also printing 3D sets in rather fetching blue and white livery. Sunak praised the initiative, while encouraging UK schools to take up chess in order to foster mental improvement. Here, the indefatigable Malcolm Pein of Chess in Schools and Communities (info@chessinschools.co.uk) has worked miracles by encouraging the British educational system to look favourably on chess as an extracurricular adjunct to scholastic excellence.
Meanwhile, British politics is beginning to resemble more and more those games in which opposing sides take turns to make their moves. Sunak blocks Johnson’s peerages, Johnson’s Queen (the spurned Nadine Dorries) accuses Sunak of lying, Sunak’s rook (Grant Shapps) claims that the Boris issue is passé. Boris calls the Commons Privileges Committee a kangaroo court, said marsupials react with a draconian (though largely irrelevant) punishment. If not chess, then perhaps a game of Snakes and Leaders?
Checking my literary sources on the nature of play (Friedrich Schiller, 1759-1805, Hermann Hesse, 1877-1962 and Johan Huizinga, 1872-1945), I learn, reassuringly, that games and play are an essential ingredient of culture and civilisation.
Schiller wrote: “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays. “
While Hesse in Magister Ludi — more correctly known as The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel) explained that play involves making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics. Finally, the Dutch historian Huizinga argues in Homo Ludens that play is a free activity. Play stands quite consciously outside ordinary life, as being not “serious” but, at the same time, absorbing the player intensely and utterly.
We have reached that point from American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s (1908-1970) pyramid of the hierarchy of needs, where play has become more important than survival. The broad base of Maslow’s pyramid embraces food, shelter, light, heat, protection and proceeds to the more luxury items such as art, politics, spirituality and beliefs.
Play and games come near the top of that pyramid. Thus, in the West, by and large, with the potential threats of starvation and lack of shelter essentially solved, we can safely entertain the claims of, in Rod Liddle’s phrase, the Scandiwegian doom goblin, Greta Thunberg. For example, she has conspicuously failed to criticise China and India, two of the world’s prime polluters, on a par with her attacks on western institutions.
Thus, anyone demanding the immobilisation of our Spitfire squadrons, on the grounds of environmental concern, during the Battle of Britain, would have been locked up. Now we can play with the Shangri La notions of achieving net zero emissions within fifty years, and still be taken seriously.
Furthermore, much of what passes as uniquely modern extravagance enjoys a firm historical basis. Thus the Roman Empire at various times enacted statutes prohibiting conspicuous consumption in the guise of so called sumptuary laws. In medieval times there were sanctions against mobility of population, while the Duke of Wellington inveighed against railways, on the grounds that they encouraged the lower orders to move around excessively. Even the arbitrary redefinition of language and meaning has its roots in Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, who avers that his words mean exactly what he wants them to mean. No more and no less.
When civilisations reach the point on the Maslow scale, where play can take the place of survival, all such things become accessible to the infinite creativity and at times perverse ingenuity of humanity.
So my conclusion is that not conspiracy, not cock up, just the unlimited power of human thought, once permitted its freedom from the shackles of the exigencies of basic existence and survival, to play with the imagination to produce some decidedly counterintuitive notions.
One dubious form of play that seems to have a grip over many people is the conspiracy theory. Unlikely bedfellows in any organised conspiracy include:
Elders of Zion;
World Economic Forum;
The Great Reset (ditto);
The Bilderberg Meeting;
The Great Replacement;
World Health Organisation;
Wokistas of all hues;
Fainéant Metropolitan Police;
Just stop oil protestors and roadblockers;
Bill Gates;
George Soros;
Global energy giants/Big Oil;
Russia;
China;
Big Pharma;
Urban terrorists;
and, of course, the
European Union.
and, of course, the
European Union.
My point is that the disappearance of so many historic concerns has freed us from ancient fears about survival and thus permitted us the luxury of our imaginations flourishing in all
sorts of weird and not so wonderful manifestations. The threat of the cyber-toothed tiger, or AI (reputedly on the agenda for the Biden/Sunak talks), seems to me to be of an entirely lesser order of menace, than the roar of the sabre-toothed version, lurking outside the primeval cave.
This week’s game is a win of mine against a Soviet Grandmaster, and four times world championship candidate. Geller’s focus on chess as a game was indeed intensely and utterly absorbing, given the absence, in that dirigiste USSR society, of the Maslowian outlets for creativity and freedom of thought which we largely still take for granted in western democracies.
Efim Geller vs Raymond Keene
Rated tournament, London, 1975
French Defence: Tarrasch. Closed Variation
- e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nd2 Nf6 4. e5 Nfd7 5. Bd3 c5 6. c3 Nc6 7. Ne2 cxd4 8. cxd4 f6 9. exf6 Nxf6 10. O-O Bd6 11. f4?!
A dubious move which restricts the scope of his dark-square bishop.
11… O-O 12. Nf3 Bd7 13. Kh1 Qb6 14. Ne5 Be8 15. Ng3 Ne7
To reinforce the f5 square against White’s projected f5. Black also prepares the exchange of light-squared bishops.
- Be3 Bb5 17. f5
The thematic advance, but Black can safely win a pawn.
17… Bxd3 18. Qxd3 exf5 19. Nxf5 Nxf5 20. Rxf5 Qxb2 21. Raf1
Threats on the f-file force an advantageous simplification.
21… Rac8 22. R5f2 Qc3 23. Qxc3 Rxc3 24. Bd2 Rc2 25. Bg5 Rxf2 26. Rxf2 Ne4 27. Rxf8+ Kxf8 28. Bc1 Bxe5 29. dxe5
The ending should be an easy win for Black, but I did not choose the most accurate path.
29… Nf2+ 30. Kg1 Nd3 31. Be3 a6 32. Bd4 g6 33. Kf1 Ke7 34. Ke2 Nf4+ 35. Kf3 Ne6 36. Bf2 Kd7 37. Ke3 Kc6 38. Kd3 Kb5 39. Be3 Kb4 40. Bc1 b5 41. g4 Kc5 42. a3 d4 43. Ke4 Kc4 44. Bd2 Nc5+ 45. Kf4 Kd3 46. Bb4 Ne6+
That was the square I wanted for the king.
- Kf3 Kc2 48. Ke4 d3 49. Kd5 Nf4+ 50. Ke4 g5 51. h4 h6 52. hxg5 hxg5 53. Kf5 d2 54. Bxd2 Kxd2 55. Kxg5 Ke3 56. Kf5 a5 57. g5 b4 58. axb4 axb4 59. e6
- g6 Nxg6 60. Kxg6 b3 61. e6 b2 62. e7 b1=Q+ 63. Kf7 Qb3+ 64. Kf8 Qb4 65. Kf7 Qf4+ 66. Kg8 Qg5+ 67. Kf8 Qf6+ 68. Ke8 Ke4 wins.
59… Nxe6 60. Kxe6 b3 0-1
The backwards skewer will win White’s new Queen:
- g6 b2 62. g7 b1=Q 63. g8=Q Qb3+ wins.
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.
A Message from TheArticle
We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.
