Vincent Keymer, the German chess prodigy, is amazing—but will he ever beat Magnus Carlsen?
It is inconceivable that a twelve year old could write a work of imaginative fiction of the vast breadth and depth as Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The experience of life and emotion and the ability to express them could hardly have been accumulated by one so young. However, there are three areas of intellectual endeavour where lack of years and emotional maturity appear to be no impediment to prodigious creativity
Those three areas are music, mathematics and chess. In each case the relatively inexperienced brain seems capable of grasping inner harmonies, not immediately visible to adults or in fact visible at all to those not possessed of the mysterious gift.
Without taxing one’s memory, in the realms of music and maths, the names of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Ruth Lawrence readily spring to mind. In chess Morphy, Capablanca, Reshevsky and more recently Sergei Karjakin are noted prodigies, who all defeated masters and even grandmasters of the game before their teenage years. Perhaps the best-known of all is Bobby Fischer. Born in 1943, Fischer won the so-called “game of the century” against the US expert Donald Byrne aged just 13 in 1956. Three years later the enfant terrible of world chess fought his way through the then Soviet-dominated system to become the youngest ever candidate for the world championship.
This month, if reports from Germany are to be believed, a new youthful chess genius has arisen. Vincent Keymer is now 14 and was born in 2004. At a tournament in Baden Baden last month, Vincent almost held world champion Magnus Carlsen to a draw, losing only after 81 moves and eight hours’ play. A few days after I had published the moves in the chess column, the news pages of The Times were waxing lyrical about the teenager’s prowess and golden prospects for the future.
So, how did Vincent even come to be challenging the world champion, let alone almost draw with him? Last year Vincent swept to victory in the selfsame tournament, the Grenke Classic, but in the B group. This success was sufficient to qualify him for this year’s Grandmaster section, where he faced a baptism of fire. His opponents included Carlsen, the reigning world champion, the former world champion Viswanathan Anand and last year’s title challenger in a hard-fought match series in London, Fabiano Caruana.
How did Vincent fare, having climbed the Everest of world chess tournaments? In fact, not so well: he finished at the bottom after losing his first four games, to the palpable consternation of his Hungarian coach Peter Leko. Leko himself is a former world title challenger, who, however, failed to do full justice to himself 15 years ago by adopting an overly cautious approach when within reach of victory against the incumbent of the time, the Russian Vladimir Kramnik.
Keymer hails from a distinguished chess culture. In the 19th century Germany and Austria gave the world many of its greatest grandmasters, commencing with Adolph Anderssen, victor of the “Immortal” (Simpson’s, London, The Strand, 1851) and “Evergreen”(Berlin 1852) games, astounding displays of sacrificial chess. Then followed Wilhelm Steinitz (the first official world champion), Johannes Zukertort, Siegbert Tarrasch and Emanuel Lasker (world champion 1894-1921): all products of the Austro-German school and all Jewish. Lasker was driven into exile by the Nazis, and since the Holocaust chess in Germany has never regained its former greatness, despite the uniquely high professional level of teams in the Bundesliga, the chess equivalent of the English Premier League in football.
The German flag was carried, if not as fully aloft as before, by the postwar generation of grandmasters, the strongest of whom was Robert Hübner. Born in 1948 and springing to prominence as a teenager in 1965, Hübner’s play was characterised by ruthless logic and a fierce determination. He hardly ever lost a game. A distinguished papyrologist away from the chessboard, his academic career precluded the total devotion to chess typical of his Soviet rivals. In the early 1980s, he came within an ace of qualifying for a world title challenge against the Russian world champion, Anatoly Karpov.
Hübner’s Achilles’ heel was an excessive sensitivity to the slings and arrows of everyday life. On the verge of an historic breakthrough, in his qualifying final against the great ex-Soviet defector Viktor Korchnoi, Hübner cracked. The psychological pressure broke his nerve and he forfeited the match. Hübner was never to reach such heights again.
Where does Vincent Keymer slot into this illustrious pantheon of German grandmasters? To be frank, it is too early to say, but it is not too early to say where this prodigy, brilliant as he no doubt is, fits into the rankings of the best junior players in the world.
On the world chess federation junior ranking list he is ranked at an unimpressive 52nd place. True, many of those juniors ahead of him are up to five years older. Nevertheless, there is a powerful crop of players of the same age, or even younger, whose ratings considerably exceed that of Vincent.
The overwhelming evidence is that the leading juniors come from much further east than Germany. If we are seeking to identify a future world champion, then I suggest we disregard the hype emanating from Berlin. Instead, we should look to countries such as Iran, India and China for the world chess champions of the future.
Ray Keene is an International Grandmaster and chess columnist of The Times and the Spectator.
