Justified!

Okay, you'll be wondering how I think this is appropriate to the club blog, but I have justifications and rationalizations, emanations and penumbras on my side! This happened in Russia, therefore it must be relevant to chess players!

This starts slow but finishes strong. Trust me, you'll want to see this through.

Well that was unexpected. pic.twitter.com/1KT1QXa1KJ

— Only In Russia (@CrazyinRussia) July 8, 2016

A peculiar result

Back in February, club stalwart Garry Day had an unusual result at the USATS: he played five games, at the end of which his rating was completely unchanged.

Over the last weekend, club semi-regular Theo Slade had an even more peculiar result: over eight games at the World Open, his rating was also unchanged. Perhaps this is more common because of the new rating formula they instituted a few years back?

Theo is having a busy summer, BTW. He played in the Summer Solstice Open and the Orlando Sunshine Open in back-to-back weekends at the start of June, and he's playing the World Open and the Philadelphia International Open back to back this week. If you've got the FollowChess app on your phone or tablet, you can follow his games live.

Move of the Day: 2016 July 8 edition

Courtesy of Mr. Staunton:

One of those extraordinary moves which one views with a shudder of horrified admiration. https://t.co/vRUri86CIv pic.twitter.com/ByXCn5M2i8

— Howard Staunton (@HowardStaunton) July 8, 2016

Unfortunately, Mr Troff's inventiveness does not seem to have helped him. Here's a link to the game at Chess24.com, which is still going as I type.

Update: After some fairly large swings, game drawn!

Milan Vidmar & two opposing views

Peter Doggers has written a report about the recently concluded 20th Vidmar Memorial tournament, won by Andrei Volokitin. It includes the following information about Milan Vidmar:

The Netherlands had Max Euwe, Germany had Emanuel Lasker and Slovenia had Milan Vidmar (1885–1962). In those days chess was usually not a profession, and Vidmar had his own career as well. He was a doctor in mechanical engineering and worked at the University of Ljubljana. The Electric Power Research Institute there still bears his name.

But of course Vidmar was also an absolute top class player in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. He played for the top prizes among bigger names such as Capablanca, Alekhine and Rubinstein.

Vidmar was one of the players who was awarded the grandmaster title by FIDE in 1950 for being recognized as having been world class when at their peak. In the same year, Vidmar was the chief arbiter at the Olympiad in Dubrovnik; he was also the arbiter at the 1948 world championship tournament in Moscow.

That's more than enough for a memorial tournament, isn't it?

I had to laugh, for I remembered what Jan Timman had to say about an earlier version of this tournament in his book The Art of Chess Analysis (originally Het groot analyseboek in Dutch):

The Vidmar Memorial Tournament is held every two years. For some reason or other, the fifth in the series, in 1979, attracted me immediately. Not that I have ever played through a game of Vidmar's - at least, never a game he won; but probably I have seen a number of his losses printed among the collected games of Alekhine, Capablanca, and Euwe. Frankly, this splendid tournament is a rather exaggerated mark of honour for a not very brilliant chess player. - (pg. 185)

Incidentally, The Art of Chess Analysis is available from Amazon for $8.53 - a steal! I highly recommend this book - unless, of course, you are a big fan of Milan Vidmar! 

Added: I decided to see if I could find a game Vidmar won in any of my printed books. The obvious place to start was 500 Master Games of Chess by Tartakower & du Mont. Sure enough, they've got seven games of Vidmar's in the collection - and he lost the first six of them! But the seventh game (from Berlin, 1918) was a game he won, as Black, against no less worthy an opponent than Rubinstein. Not only that, Tartakower & du Mont claim this game featured the first use of the Budapest Defense in a "Master's Tournament". The link takes one to the site ChessGames.com. In the comments (which are worth a read) they mention that this was Vidmar's most famous won, his second most famous being a win against Max Euwe! But in Timman's defense, few players put games they lost in their games collections, Fischer being the most famous counter-example.

And now a game that just happens to be completely INSANE!

(Fans of Beavis & Butt-head will know the tone of voice I'm going for!)

I'm once again working my way through Lars Bo Hansen's book, Foundations of Chess Strategy. In the notes to the game Korchnoi-Kasparov, Lucerne (OL) 1982, Hansen mentions the rather insane game Hulak-Nunn, Toluca IZ 1982. About this game Hansen writes,

I refrain from trying to attach any signs or evaluations to this hyper-complicated outing....

He's not kidding! I'll post the whole game below (along with a few brief notes), but I want to call attention to one position in particular:

Hulak-Nunn, Toluca IZ 1982

Black has just played 32...R(a7)a8. As I looked at the position I started wondering why the sequence 33 Qh6 Rg8 34 Rf3, with the idea of Rf3-g3-g4-h4 wouldn't work. The best I came up with was 34...Qa1 35 Rg3 Bd4 36 Bxd4 Qxd4 37 Rg4 Ra1 38 Qxh7+ Kxh7 39 Rh4#. 

I'll leave it to the reader to figure out where I went wrong (several places, in fact), or you can check the notes below. The whole game is crazy, I highly recommend it!

Congratulations due....

... to Theo Slade. I just noticed his results from the 8th Summer Solstice Open, held the first weekend in June in Coral Springs, Florida. I imagine he is probably disappointed in his overall result (1.5/5), but his draw against GM Sandro Pozo Vera must have been some salve on any wounds. It's always nice to take points from players rated more than 500 ELO higher than oneself!

"I'm going to build a wall! It's going to be a great wall!"

UPDATE: Hints & solution in white font below the fold.

I broke discipline yesterday and looked at Facebook for a while, lured there by Emil Sutovsky's statement about the Israeli Olympiad team on Twitter. Looking at Sutovsky's feed, I saw that he presented the following study by Hasek, with the comment:

Cute one from the Czechoslovak composer Hasek. White to play. The idea is clear - but how to make it work? Not obvious, and very aesthetically pleasing solution. Don't publish a solution, just leave a smile if you are sure you got it right.

Hasek, date unknown

White to play & draw

I saw the initial idea quickly, and then saw how it failed. I didn't figure it out on my own, I must confess, and needed a hint. Feel free to use a computer program on it, as Stockfish didn't help at all - the hint came from a commenter to the Facebook post, and then I had to figure out what he meant.

Warning: The title of the post may or may not be misleading.

Hints & solution below the fold in white font.

Pictures, cont.

The other day I mentioned Lars Grahn's Twitter feed, full of old pictures. Here's an example, a picture from a very famous game.

Euro Team Championship, Skara 1980. A classic. Karpov vs Miles: 1.e4 a6!? 2.d4 b5. 46 moves, 0-1. Photo: Lars Grahn pic.twitter.com/ZSA3xkpSX5

— Lars Grahn (@larsgrahn) July 1, 2016

Rumbles from Russia

Or from the Chess-News.ru website, in any event. They have an article claiming that Kirsan is losing support rapidly, and will be impeached at the Baku Olympiad. We'll see if it amounts to anything, but if he is in fact losing the support of the Russian Chess Federation, it will likely be the end for him as President of FIDE. 

Can't say as I'll miss him, but remember this Axiom for Life: It can always get worse! Kirsan was worse than Campo, and the next one could well be worse than Kirsan. However, if the Russian billionaire & Pres. of the Russian Chess Federation Andrey Vasilievich Filatov steps into the role, it could well be an improvement.

So now that I've added the Official Commentator Waffle Language, I'll sign off! (Yes, there is an Official Commentator Booklet, full of useful items on how to waffle, obfuscate, and otherwise cover one's posterior. Much of it has been cribbed from the Official Economist's Commentary series.)

PS Do people prefer this larger font or the normal sized font I usually use?

A violent attack!

So nice to be on a chess blog where that title means something good has happened!

Monster tactics from white it the game Nygren vs Thybo! 🔥🔥
Bc4! Nxf7! Rxb7!! Re1! Rxe5! #vismachess pic.twitter.com/qEKjfBNDOZ

— Johan Salomon (@JohanSalomon) July 1, 2016

Disappointing news for the Israeli Olympiad Team

Via David Llada's Facebook feed I saw the following message from Emil Sutovsky:

(HEART)BREAKING NEWS:
Israeli Team without Gelfand, Smirin and Sutovsky? Yes, and it is not about the generations' change. And, in the case you wondered, NOT about money (if you read till the end, you'll be surprised to learn, what amount has decided the fate of the Team). It is about an attitude towards the professional chess in our country. It is about the ultimate wish of the ICF leadership to show - who is the boss. They decided not to send a team for Euro-2015, and we had to swallow it. This time they decided that there should be a lower payment for the players in the Olympiad - and we are supposed to accept. Just because it was THEIR decision. They claim that the players are too greedy. How come that we have been always assembling the strongest team all these years? It is really pathetic. We don't have a proper national championship. We haven't had a proper classical round-robin GM event for over a decade! Players are totally neglected and forgotten by the Federation throughout the year, and only before the Olympiad/World/European Teams, they recall we exist.

In spite of all that, we have always reached the compromise. We were close this time as well, but ICF leaders ruined it all, insisting on us to succumb to their demands or quit the Team. I have played in the Israeli National Team for 20 years. I am always proud to play for my country, and I am proud to bring it several medals (including gold for absolutely best result among all the participants in the Olympiad 2010 and EuroTeams 2003). And now people, who hardly contributed to the Israeli chess recognition, set me an ultimatum. Either you accept it or you are out of the Team. At the end of the day it was a total difference of the "whole" 5000 NIS (about 1300 USD) that Israeli Chess Federation insisted on being cut. Simply pathetic. Of course, it was about showing "who is the boss". Succumb or quit. They pressed on the players, on the team captain Alex Kaspi (who resigned his post but stood firm with us), they angered Boris Gelfand to the extent I saw him only once (and I saw him in many different situations!). They knew very well, that Chess Olympiad is a very special event for any player. What they did not know, that the dignity is even more meaningful for some. Please, support and share if you don't want to see it happening again.

A very interesting position from the club tonight

A slow night at the club this evening, but at the end of it Jim McTigue and I played a game in 25 minutes with the usual five second delay. (Actually, we turned the clock off when we were both down to a couple of minutes and had a rather complicated endgame on the board, well before the position below.) The whole game was interesting, and I'm sorry I didn't record it. I may try to put more of it together tomorrow, but I'll probably forget most it by then.

That said, I did manage to get a couple of pictures of our hard fought endgame. Here's the most interesting position.

McTigue-Durham

Black to play

Can Black save the game?

I'll try to get back to this in a few days, or less.

Pictures

The Swede Lars Grahn has been tweeting lots of old pictures of chess players lately, mostly from the 1970s & 1980s. It you're interested in such things, check out his Twitter feed. Events of particular note have been Tilburg 1977, the European Team Championship from Skara 1980, and the Seville World Championship Match from 1987. I imagine those people my age & older will be particularly interested.

And now some actual chess!

Tonight a study from Herbstmann, as relayed in Eugene Znosko-Borovsky's classic work, The Middle Game in Chess.

Tournament Players PROTIP: The Gold Standard

Tournament Players PROTIPs have existed far longer than tournaments in the chess world. In fact, the earliest surviving book about the game, Luis Ramírez de Lucena's  (c. 1465 – c. 1530) Repetición de Amores y Arte de Ajedrez con 101 Juegos de Partido ("Repetition of Love and the Art of Playing Chess") from 1497*, contains advice on the practical matter of how to conduct a game of chess. And that advice set a standard yet to be surpassed.

If you play at night with a single candle, place it at your left-hand side, so that it does not disturb your eyes; if you play by day, place your opponent facing the light, which gives you a great advantage. Also, try to play your adversary when he has just eaten and drunk freely. For to play a long time it is best to have eaten lightly. To avoid getting dizzy during the game, you should drink water, but by no means wine. and play only short sessions, and for a stake small enough to avoid the possibility of the loss weighing on your mind.

Gold, baby, GOLD!

* From the Wiki entry linked above: "Commentators have suggested that much of the material was plagiarised from Francesc Vicent's now lost 1495 work Libre dels jochs partits dels schacs en nombre de 100." To my surprise, Edward Winter doesn't seem to have much on Lucena.

PS The full version of the quote (translated, obviously) was hard to track down, though I've seen the quote (both in part and complete) several times. Eventually, and strangely, I found the text above on a page from the South Australian Chess Association's old website, on a list of South Australian Chess Champions.