A problem courtesy of Sergey Karjakin

On his Twitter feed, Sergey Karjakin offered up this position with

Good morning chess friends! Let's solve a simple position ! White to play and win! 

 

Just giving the first move is not enough! No, I did not figure this one out myself. Ain't chess grand?

USATS: My journey

I'll need to talk to the rest of the team as a whole before I can give more than the thumbnail description that I gave in the earlier post. One additional point I can make is that every single half-point we scored mattered. Without any of them we wouldn't have won.

As for me, this tournament was a mixed bag, results-wise, but quite promising in terms of how I played. In the first round, I played up over 400 points. A loss was the expected result, and I did lose. Fast. I believe my game finished some 30 or 40 minutes before the next game finished. I played the losing move after my opponent's eleventh move, though I played on until move 23. (I had black.)

[NOTE: What follows is a long piece, for a blog post, about my games. I wrote it mostly for myself, but if you want to see it, click for more.]

Chess on YouTube

YouTube.com has a lot of chess videos these days. For example, GM Simon Williams even has his own channel. Here's his latest video, on his game against GM Nigel Short at the Bunratty Chess Festival from last weekend.

Kasparov on the hunt....

Kasparov provides analysis of his victory over Karpov in game 20 of their 1990 World Championship Match. Hat tip to David Llada, who linked to this on both his Twitter feed and Facebook feed.

Karpov, grandmaster on ice!

BRRRRR!

THE HUMAN HORIZON EFFECT

OR

WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER ACCEPT YOUR OPPONENT'S VERSION OF REALITY

Going over games with a computer after a tournament is always enlightening, but not always fun. In this game, I had a very nice attack, but the move that I thought was awesome, 25. ...Rxh3 (and which my friend Garry Day also found when seeing it later) does not actually work!  At the time, the move seemed like a game-ender, and Sam believed the same illusion that I did-but neither one of us looked far enough.

The moral? Even when you see the coming Apocalypse, look for the post-apocalyptic silver lining!

 I also found the game that was my inspiration for the plan, and I included it in the notes. Here it goes:

Click here to see how both players bluffed each other and themselves!

USATS Results now posted to USCF

The results have now been submitted to, and tabulated by, the USCF. Below are the rating changes for our teams. Congratulations to all who gained points, and commiserations to all who lost points.

GB Chapter Before After Diff. Theo Slade 2011 2033 22 Wayne Strickland 1933 1925 -8 Connor Eickelman 1574 1631 57 Tim Bowler 1521 1525 4 PHOG Chapter Jim McTigue 1849 1874 25 Paul Leggett 1819 1847 28 Todd Durham 1733 1748 15 Garry Day 1673 1673 0 GF Chapter David H Raymond 1637 1610 -27 Norm Meintel 1434 1476 42 John Wolfe 1238 1207 -31 Thomas Johnson 546 605 59

United States Amateur Team South, 2016 edition

The 2016 edition of the USATS was held in Tampa, Florida from February 12-14. I'll post more on the tournament later (perhaps even a comment or two about the hotel we stayed in, but probably not), but for now I just want to record that the Clermont Chess Club sent three teams to the tournament, and that we did well.

Our highest rated team was Clermont Chess Club Great Britain Chapter (1785.3 avg.). The team consisted of Tim Bowler and Connor Eickelman from the club itself, and club friends Wayne Strickland and Theo Slade. (Theo and Tim are from Great Britain originally, hence the name.) They had tough pairings, playing two of the top teams, but were still in contention for the Under 1800 prize in the last round. [ADDED: I should note too that Theo played a very tough schedule, against three masters and two experts. Included among the masters were John Nardandrea, who once again led the winning team, and FM Mark Ritter, who won the prize for Best Score on Board One. That was a murderer's row with an average rating of 2163 on the wall chart. That may be the toughest schedule anyone faced in the tournament. I know he was disappointed he only scored 2.5, but overall that was a good total.]

Our second highest rated team was the Clermont Chess Club Pine Hills Original Gangstas Chapter (1777.0 avg.). (Don't ask about the name, or we might tell you.) That team consisted of club regulars Jim McTigue, Paul Leggett, Garry Day, and myself. Somehow we managed to win the Under 1800 prize, no thanks to a late Round 5 meltdown from yours truly. (More on the games in later posts.) The incredible thing to me was that we were actually the leading team for the prize after the fourth round. Still not sure how that happened, but someone's got to win!

And in the Under 1500 division, the Clermont Chess Club Grand Fenwick Chapter (1227.8 avg.) won the Under 1300 prize convincingly with 3.5 match points. The final standings haven't been posted yet, but they had to have been close to finishing third overall. [CORRECTION: The team had three match points and finished in a tie for 5-7 overall. 3.5 mathc points would have tied them for first!] This team consisted of David _H_ Raymond (OUR Dave Raymond, the good one!), Norm Meintel, John Wolfe, and Thomas Lee Johnson. Again a team of all regulars, and I'm particularly pleased with this team's accomplishments. Thomas is fairly new to competitive chess and only had 11 rated games prior to the tournament. John is coming back from a decades long lay-off from the game, though he had two other tournaments under his belt from recent months. It had been two & a half years since Dave played in a tournament prior to his return two weeks ago, and Norm hadn't played a rated game in over three & a half years. Norm played especially well, scoring 3.5 points out of five, and he had one really nice endgame grind that I hope to post later. Nice work from a newbie and a bunch of drop-outs!*

So we scored two team trophies, which was all we could realistically hope for. (Great Britain and Pine Hills were competing for the same trophy.) Paul quipped, "Once again the Clermont Chess Club has demonstrated its dominance of the lower echelons of the USATS!" 

True, but not entirely fair! Unless we were to get the best the club has had through the years (e.g., Mark Ritter Ryan**, Theo Slade, Ray Robson(!)), and maybe recruit a couple of other strong players, we simply don't have the firepower to compete for the top prizes. (Alternately, Connor needs to jump to a much higher plateau.) But this is why they've got sections, and we put up a fight in our class! We do what we can, and that also means putting Garry Day on the team, since Garry's teams always come away with trophies for first place in these events. I doubt anyone has a better lifetime record, percentage-wise. I believe this is now five wins in five tries for Garry.

Good work, gentlemen, and perhaps we can do this again some time!

* I should add that I was returning from almost seven years away from rated chess. I know what it's like, fellas....

** Thanks to Paul for the correction. Sorry to all the Marks involved!

Karpov on Rook Ending "Exploitation Technique"

Karpov on Rook Ending "Exploitation Technique"

While preparing for the USATS (that's "US Amateur Team Championship, South" for our esteemed International readers!) I came across this game in the notes to another game in "Beating the Grunfeld" by GM Anatoly Karpov. While his emphasis was on the opening, it is the rook ending that really stands out to me. This ending is well worth studying (in my opinion) for three reasons:

1) Superior rook activity;
2) Patience in the suppression of counterplay; and
3) Superior and effective kingside pawn play.

For those looking for easy-to-follow themes, I recommend paying attention to Karpov's active king- and if you really want to keep it simple, just follow his g-pawn from start to finish!

Karpov has light notes in the game, but at move 27 he writes "...for twenty moves we have been very close to a draw, but White has nonetheless extracted everything possible from the position; exchanging most of the pieces, he has obtained a superior rook ending. The remainder of the game provides a good illustration of 'exploitation technique' ".

When I originally decided to post this game, I had decided that I was going to add an exclamation marks to 29. g4! and 33. g5!, as I thought it was a very critical idea to the whole ending. Once I found the game in chessbase, I was happy to see that GM Ftacnik had annotated the game, and at moves 29 and 33 he had already added the "!" for me!


You can play through the game by clicking here!

Now it's GO's turn.

Google has announced it has made a breakthrough in programming a computer to play GO. Up until now, programmers hadn't been able to write a decent GO program, at least not compared to human masters. But Google (and perhaps soon, Facebook) has created a program that has beaten the best human player in Europe by a 5-0 margin.

The research has implications beyond an old Chinese board game. The systems used by Facebook and Google were not preprogrammed with specific if-this-then-do-that code or explicitly told the rules. Instead, they learned to play at a very high level by themselves. These techniques can be adapted to any problem "where you have a large amount of data that you have to find insights in," Hassabis said.

One of the programmers also created a similar program for chess:

DeepMind [Google's AI research group] recently hired Matthew Lai, a London researcher who developed a system capable of playing chess at the grandmaster level. His software was able to reason in a way similar to how humans do, a more efficient method than IBM's attempt to crunch every possible outcome before making a move in the 1990s.

Here's more on Lai's prior chess program, Giraffe. Giraffe is impressive, but still not up to snuff with the best "regular" chess programs.

How NOT to play the London System as White

From the Tata Steel Masters Tournament , today in Utrecht instead of the Wijk!

The Gifts Keep on Coming....

The greatest thing about this era of chess is that so much information is given away freely. For example, a week ago IM Johan Salomon tweeted a link to some analysis he had done of a game from 1981 involving Jonathan Tisdall.

My analysis of @GMjtis-G. Lee A beautiful and instructive game! Click to open on phone or in browser! https://t.co/i7GIC5T8kq

— Johan Salomon (@JohanSalomon) January 12, 2016

Older players will remember him for his coverage of various Karpov-Kasparov matches for Chess Life, but he also has the distinction of having not one but two moves included in Tim Krabbé's list of The 110 Greatest Moves Ever Played. The move in question came in at Number 15 on the list. (It should be noted that Krabbé stopped updating his list in, I believe, 1998, so you won't find Kasparov's Rxd4 against Topalov, for example.)

Here's the position in question:

Tisdall - Lee, London 1981

White to move after 14...Qg6

Tisdall remembered this game being played at a weekend tournament. Here's a link to IM Salomon's analysis, displayed using the ViewChess website. And just in case you'd prefer the KnightVision layout I've been using here, I've included that below as well. All analysis is by Salomon, though I have added a text note at the start of the game and made one minor correction in the notes.

Game of the Day: Navara - Giri, Tata Steel Chess Tournament, Wijk aan Zee 2016

Navara played a brilliant attacking game against Giri today, and the Czech GM should have won the game. But on move 40 he seems to have made a wrong turn, and Giri escaped with the draw. Afterwards Giri said, "Generally it's good to be a queen down when you're lost. It's harder usually to convert. With two rooks there are always some chances." The quote, and the game notes below, are from the ChessVibes.com report. Annotations by Peter Doggers. One quick note from me: If Black goes pawn & rook hunting with 20...Bxg2 he gets slaughtered after 21 fxg6 when White is threatening all kinds of nastiness on the f7 square, among other things.

Carlsen - Cauana, Tata Steel Chess Tournament, Wijk aan Zee 2016

Fabiano Caruana explains his interesting game with Magnus Carlsen from today's round at the TATA Steel Chess Tournament in Wijk aan Zee.

Solution Time for the Christmas Position of the Day

Back on Christmas I posted a position from one of John Nunn's puzzle books. Here it is again:

Kudriashov vs. I Ivanov, USSR 1979

Black to move

5rk1/PP4b1/3p2p1/3P4/1R2P2p/5pp1/4r3/R4NK1 b - - 0 1

Nunn gives the solution as 1...Re1! 2 a8(Q) h3! 3 Ra2 g2! 4 Rf2 Rxf1+ 5 Rxf1 h2+ 6 Kxh2 gxf1(Q), the first two moves of which were played before White resigned. (I'll have this and more in a replayable board below.)

I didn't figure it out. I kept trying to make another move work. It seemed to me that 1...Rg2+ was the way to go, but I couldn't figure it out. When I saw Nunn's solution I figured it was the "correct" sequence, and that I had been off my rocker looking at the other move.

But lo and behold! When I put the position into ChessBase prior to publishing, the computer spit out that 1...Rg2+ was indeed a winning move. The trouble isn't with that move, but the follow-up, which runs 2 Kh1 (forced) Rc2!!, and here White is losing in all lines.

Kudriashov vs. I Ivanov, USSR 1979

White to move

I'm not going to pretend to understand how White is losing by force here, but he is. I've included the main lines from the computer analysis below. Improvements can be found along the way, but it appears only for Black.