Speed Chess Maxim

A well-played game of speed chess deserves to be lost.

Blog Roll additions

Chess Improver Blog by Nigel Davies & co.

Kingpin Magazine, Edited & Published by Jonathan Manley, dedicated to chess satire, when possible.

When is a child too young for chess?

An excellent article.

Too Young for Chess

by Hugh Patterson

Another example of the need to fight to the bitter end

Dennis Monokroussos (can you tell he's a favorite chess writer of mine?) is now writing a column for a site called World Chess. His most recent column features a brilliant, if flawed, game between two obscure Dutch amateurs from the 1930s. In it, the player of the white pieces (Chris de Ronde) goes for a wild attacking idea while in deep time trouble. His opponent (Hendrik Kamstra) goes wrong in the complications, which isn't surprising given the difficulty of the game.

Read all about it there.

Comments, reviews, serendipity, and a complete anecdote!

One problem with running the blog is that I'm using g-mail for the attached email account, and for some reason I've had trouble getting g-mail accounts to work with Outlook. And since I don't check my g-mail account that often, I can miss comments on older posts.

Seirawan Chess

We've discussed chess variants at the club recently. One of the newer ones is called Seirawan Chess. It features two new pieces: the hawk and the elephant. The hawk has the combined powers of a knight and a bishop. The elephant has the combined powers of a knight and a rook. The new pieces are not on the board at the start of the game. Instead, whenever a piece moves from its initial square, either the elephant or the hawk can be placed on the vacated square. If either piece has not been placed by the time the other eight have all moved, it may not enter the game. Pawns can be promoted to either of the new pieces.

This variant is also called SHARPER Chess, as it was developed jointly by Yasser Seirawan and Bruce Harper, but Seirawan Chess seems to be sticking as a name because, let's face it, Yaz's name has more marketing power.

It should also be noted that House of Staunton sells the extra pieces, though they describe the pieces as having different moves than do Seirawan & Harper.

Anyhow, the link to Seirawan Chess above has a section on endgames that shows the powers of the new pieces (against c- & f- pawns, for example, the elephant is better than a queen in certain simple positions), and Yasser has also done an introductory video that can be seen on YouTube.

If anyone wants to give this a try at the club some time, let me know. I figure we can use pieces from another set to distinguish the hawks and elephants.

Recommended: New In Chess

New In Chess magazine is the best chess magazine in the world. I'm sure there are other good magazines, and there have been other good magazines in the past. (For example, I loved Yasser Seirawan's Inside Chess magazine, which was fantastic, especially its early incarnation as a bi-weekly.) But NIC is in a class by itself. The production values are outstanding, the content is incredible, and if you're a reasonably strong club player almost every page in the magazine has something worthy of note. The only downsides are that it is somehat expensive and comes out only 8 times a year, but personally I think the pluses outweigh those concerns.

I'd go into more detail, but I want to keep this short, especially since most people have probably seen a copy at some point. And the point is the same no matter the length: New In Chess magazine is an incredible product.

Move of the Day: June 17, 1974 edition

Way back when during the Nice, 1974 Olympiad, the Soviets faced the West German team on June 17th. On the first board, Anatoly Karpov, the then current wunderkind of the Soviet Chess Machine, faced off as White against long time West German Number 1 Wolfgang Unzicker. A typical slow Closed Ruy Lopez followed. Eventually, the following position was reached:

Karpov vs Unzicker

After 23...Qd8

I discovered this position in the 2015/6 issue of New In Chess. Parimarjan Negi wrote about it in his column Parimarjan's Chess Gym. I'll turn it over to him:

A well-known position. Black is ready to exchange rooks along the a-file, after which it will be much harder for White to generate anything on the queenside. Here Karpov played the amazing:

24. Ba7!

This absolutely paralyzes Black's queenside. The rest of the game is elementary technique, as White brought his other rook to the queenside, seemingly with the intention of penetrating via the a-file, but ending up completely suffocating Black, who was keeping himself ready for the bishop retreat that never happened.

An awkward seeming move, but a pretty idea! The rest of the game is a slow, steady squeeze. The whole game is in the viewer below.

Good advice, and not just for children!

From ChessKid.com, advice on what a player should review before every move - threats from the opponent!

Checks, Captures, Queen Attacks!

Checks! Every move you should be looking for your opponent's threats. What more important threat is there to look for then a possible check against your king? After all, any check you miss might be checkmate! [I missed a mate in one just the other night. - TD]

...

Captures! Certainly the second most important thing to look for every move is a capture(s). If you miss a threat for your opponent to take one of your pieces, especially if its for free, you will be in big trouble . So stay focused!

...

Queen Attacks! For our third and final piece of advice on how to "avoid blundering (which means missing something BIG)" and build "Prophylactic Thinking", we are going to discuss Queen Attacks.

The reason looking for threats on your queen is the third most important thing to do is simple: she (the queen) is the most powerful piece on the board!

 Read the rest there. 

Dumpster Diving

I've played tens of thousands of games of chess on the internet, perhaps hundreds of thousands. For the most part the games are even worse than my real life games, but occasionally something entertaining pops up. Below, for your pleasure and/or ridicule, is such a game. I played my usual Catalan-style opening mess, and things got entertaining. Handles have been changed to protect the guilty.

For a game in three minutes I'm fairly happy with it, from an entertainment standpoint.

BONUS: Position of the day material!

Analysis

Position after 27 Nd6

Anish Giri: Trash-talker extraordinaire!

 On Twitter a few days ago, Tarjei Svenson pointed out a probable typo in New In Chess:

Carlsen was 6 years old, I doubt it was in 1996, Loek! @NewInChess pic.twitter.com/tkHfWijCap

— Tarjei J. Svensen (@TarjeiJS) November 7, 2015

Giri replied with:

.@TarjeiJS @NewInChess I noticed it, but found nothing strange with @MagnusCarlsen 6, mating Loeky in a sicilian.

— Anish Giri (@anishgiri) November 7, 2015

In the words of the Powerpuff Girls, "HARD CORE!"

Faster it is.

I posted a link to Greg Shahade's call for faster time controls the other day. Looks like he'll get his wish, at least for one top tournament. The Zurich Chess Challenge in early 2016 will feature a "time control of 40 minutes per game with additional 10 seconds for each move," per their web site. The six participants will be Viswanathan Anand, Levon Aronian, Anish Giri, Vladimir Kramnik, Hikaru Nakamura, and Alexei Shirov. You can read more about it there.

h/t Chess24.com

Test Time

From the Giri-So blitz tiebreaker at the Bilbao VIII Chess Masters Final. Assess the position.

Giri vs So

White to move after 38...Nxe1

Assessment will be added in a few days.

Attica! Attica!

The other day I posted the game Morozevich vs Vachier-Lagrave, Biel 2009. That game featured a rook trapped in prison behind its own pawns and king. Today I was looking at New In Chess 6/2015 and saw a new composition that Timman has just published. This problem also features a trapped piece, and it seems that freeing that piece is the key to winning the game.

Timman 2015 (after Simkhovitch)

White to play and win

4q3/4P3/4P3/4k1p1/p3BbP1/PpP2P2/1P6/QK3R2 w - - 0 1

Solution below.

A call for faster games!

From Greg Shahade, Slow Chess should die a fast death. 

Slow chess should disappear and be replaced by rapid chess. Rapid chess should not be rapid chess, it should be chess. What should the standard time control be? Something like 30+5 second increment sounds perfect to me. And when I suggest 30+5, please note that I’m choosing a time control this slow only to appease the masses. I think 15+5 is more appropriate.

Why is slow chess so horrible? There are so so many reasons. But the main one is the simplest:

People don’t like to play slow chess!

Now wait you might tell me, “I really do love to play slow chess, and so do all of my friends”.

I have an answer for you: “No you don’t”.

The main thing Shahade misses is that slower time controls DO allow for players to get deeper into the positions. We've seen that at our club. We can get interesting games in 15 minute games, but there's a limit to how well we can explore them. Heck, sometimes we can tear into one of those games afterwards and spend an hour going over it! How much better would the game be if that kind of time were spent during the game?

And watching some of you in tournaments recently I can definitively state that longer games allow some of you to get much deeper into a position. Here I'm thinking of Jim McTigue in particular, as with his recent game against Lauren Kleidermacher, but it applies to others as well.

Ultimately, the market has spoken on this front, both at the top level and down at our modest levels - people like slow games for tournaments. There are any number of chances to play at more rapid time controls, both in tournaments and in clubs. I don't think Alex Zelner's rapid tournaments do any better than he game 90 tournaments attendance-wise, at least not when I was regularly playing in them. So I don't think we need to get rid of the slower time controls just yet.