The tournament book tradition has given us many classics, e.g. Bronstein on Zürich 1953, Alekhine on Nottingham 1936 and, more recently, Jan Timman on Curacao 1962. Nowadays, tournament books are a rare guest among the countless opening guides, chess tutorials and personal game collections. Still, a serious tournament report has many advantages over these other genres.

If a single game is like a newspaper column, and a game collection is like a short story, a collection of all games from one tournament is, in my view, like a full-grown novel, with different story-lines and intricate plots, small personal dramas and highlights, seemingly trivial details and an intricate plot leading up to a satisfying or thought-provoking finish. I would like you to see Mihail Marin and Yuri Garrett’s Reggio Emilia 2007/2008, published by Quality Chess, as an intriguing and well-written novel, rather than ‘just another’ chess book on the market.

On of the characteristics of a good tournament book is that all games are seriously analysed. As Garrett, the tournament’s technical director, writes in the introduction, in the current book, 25 out of the total of 45 games are analysed by at least one of the combatants, 3 of them present the views of both players and the remaining 20 have been annotated by GM Mihail Marin.

One of the very nice things is of this is that quick, ‘boring’ draws are also seriously analysed. This is something you don’t see in regular game collections or in New in Chess magazine, but I’ve always found it very instructive to see how the big guys make these draws, especially with such an outstanding explicator as Marin commenting them:

Korchnoi-Almasi
Reggio Emilia (2) 2007

How realistic are White’s chances of retaining even a tiny edge? In the absence of knights, there is no way to take advantage of the relative weakness of the d6-square. Speaking about “ifs”, under certain circumstances a knight jump to f6 would have been devastating. The way it is, I see only one (highly unrealistic) possibility: exchange all the rooks in order to avoid any form of counterplay, install the queen on e4 to dominate both wings, and advance (by some miracle) the b-pawn to b5, in order to put the black pawns placed on dark squares in potential danger. Admittedly, there is no way all this could happen.

16.Bxb7 Maybe Korchnoi’s initial intention was to keep control of the long diagonal with 16.Qf3. However, in this case he would have lost control of another important avenue, the d-file, after 16…Bxe4 17.Qxe4 Rad8 18.Rad1 Rd7! followed by …Rfd8. This would also have led to plain equality.

16…Qxb7 17.Qe2 Rfd8 18.Rad1 Qc6 19.f4 g6 20.Qg2 This is the only way to try to activate his position, but the almost complete simplifications that follow lead to a dead draw.

20…Qxg2+ 21.Kxg2 h5 22.Kf3 Kf8 23.Ke4 Rxd1 24.Rxd1 Rd8 25.Rxd8+ Bxd8 26.h3 Ke8 27.g4 hxg4 28.hxg4 Kd7 When this position was reached, Korchnoi said in a loud voice, “What can I do?” A draw was agreed.

Of course, the tournament not only consisted of solid draws, but also of some very spectacular and beautiful chess. And again, Marin takes us by the hand towards a crystal-clear understanding of the games.

Almasi-Marin
Reggio Emilia (5), 2008

28.e6! White sacrifices his central pawn to clear the e5-square for his knight and make the e-file available for his rook. Black’s contorted piece coordination, which was quite functional in the closed position before Almasi’s breakthrough, will soon lead me to defeat. (…)

28….Qxe6 29.Ne5 c6 To tell the truth, I was still optimistic at this point, especially since, judging from his physical reaction, I knew Almasi had overlooked this defensive resource. My pleasant state of mind was not altered by his next strong move.

30.Bd2!! I would have enjoyed playing one of my favourite type of defensive positions – an exchange down – after 30.Nxg6 hxg6. Then Black has practically no weaknesses and his structure is much better than White’s. Moreover, if the black knight reaches the e4-square, White would be in trouble.

In this fragment, we see Marin at his best. He honestly describes his emotions yet manages to stay objective all the time, enabling him to explain the technical details without ever becoming boring or repetitive. He also shows a constant concern for the reader trying to make assessments of the arising positions. Marin even comes to the rescue in annotations by the other participants, when they have not been explicit enough to Marin’s satisfaction. The very first game of the book is a good example: Zoltan Almasi analyses his victory over Pentala Harikrishna in a solid, but rather clinical fashion, so Marin jumps in at several points in the analysis to add useful comments like “It may seem that Black has regrouped his forces harmoniously and his kingside counterplay is developing without problems. However, White’s space advantage in the centre and on the queenside should not be underestimated.”

Reggio Emilia 2007/2008 (it started on December 29, 2007) was in many ways perfect for a tournament book. Not only were there a number of world-class players such as Vugar Gashimov and David Navara, but also the legendary Viktor Korchnoi was present, as well as two rising stars from Asia (Pentala Harakrishna and Ni Hua), and of course Mihail Marin himself. As is good practice in a literary review, I won’t give away the ending of the ‘novel’, nor any other spoilers. In the end, however, it’s the moves and the games that tell the story of this tournament, not the results.

I thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself into this tournament (even though I had never seen a single game from it before), identifying with the players and the problems they were facing during the games, and I suddenly felt it as a real loss that such books are hardly ever written anymore these days. I think a tournament book is the closest a chessplayer can come to identifying with fictional characters, and it’s a true pleasure to be able to enjoy the excitement of chess for once without having to think about improving my own game or updating my opening or endgame knowledge. This is simply top level chess entertainment.

Apart from the tournament itself (the heart of the book) there are numerous interesting extras in Reggio Emilia 2007/2008, such as excellent interviews with the players, a history of the Reggio Emilia tournament (including some memorable games from past editions) and a sympathetic description by Garrett of how this particular tournament was organised. Garrett is a keep observer who not only loves to watch the games but also the players themselves:

It was also interesting to witness the cultural differences between the players, ranging from Almasi’s assertive comments to the hesitant and modest ones by the Chinese warrior, Ni Hua (…). Gashimov whispered his fascinating comments, which were charcterized by a wildly tactical approach (albeit with that raw touch so typical of the young player who has yet to fully exploit his potential).

I hope readers will consider buying this very charming book; perhaps it will energize publishers to publish more serious tournament reports. It’s too beautiful a tradition to be written off already.

Links

• Get yourself a copy of Reggio Emilia 2007/2008
• Read more book reviews

I got interested in this question after seeing an advertisement for a truly magnificent chess set called the ‘Endangered Parrots of the World Chess Set’. Created by Grant Dawson Collections in the United States, it is “hand made from certified sustainable North American hardwoods (walnut and maple), food safe natural finishes with recycled glass ball feet, and features 32 lead-free pewter playing pieces finished in 24k gold or sterling silver.”

The set is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, but it’s not exactly cheap: if you’re interested, you can buy it here for the nice sum of $5000. It’ll buy you this:

Endangered Parrots of the World Chess Set

That’s much more expensive, for instance, than the slightly less serious Freshwater vs. Saltwater Fish Chess Set or the various Animal Chess Sets that are sold on the internet. (”Endangered species will live on, healthy and free, in your own controlled temperature living room. Beware if you lose a piece or you could be in trouble with the Feds.”)

This is all good fun, of course (in fact, I can’t help mentioning a marvellous – if not really environmentally ‘correct’ – Through the Looking-Glass chess set, with pieces vanishing as soon as they are captured!) – but what about regular, Staunton-style chess sets?

I personally became interested in deforestation and sustainability issues after a visit a few years ago to Easter Island (which was completely deforested by its original people) and after reading Jared Diamond’s influential book Collapse (2005) about the collapse of great civilizations in the past and present, which deals about deforestation in great detail. As Diamond writes:

More than half of the world’s original area of forest has already been converted to other uses, and at present conversion rates one-quarter of the forests that remain will become converted within the next half-century. Those losses of forests represent losses for us humans, especially because forests provide us with timber and other raw materials, and because they provide us with so-called ecosystem services such as protecting our watersheds, protecting soil against erosion, constituting essential steps in the water cycle that generates much of our rainfall, and providing habitat for most terrestial plant and animal species. Deforestation was a or the major factor in all the collapses of past societies described in this book.

I tried searching for the word ’sustainable’ on a couple of well-known chess vendor sites such as The House of Staunton and the online shop of the London Chess Centre, but got a No products matched your search criteria in all cases. (One of the very few hits I got at all on Google was for a recyced chess set on Cool Gadgets.com. Pretty cool indeed, but hardly useful for even the smallest-sized chess tournament.)

I looked for more information online on the type of wood that’s used in chess sets. Again, it’s not easy finding out about this. On one site, I learned that “rosewood is a very popular type of wood used for chess men.” This would be bad news, since rosewood is in fact a tropical hardwood which is hugely overexploited. Still, a quick look at some retailer’s sites show that this is indeed one of the most commonly used wood for chess sets. According to the BBC,

The most reliable way to choose environmentally friendly timber and wooden products is to look out for the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) logo. The FSC is a charity which certifies wood, paper and other tree products that have come from sustainability managed forests. (…) Wood from trees native to Europe, such as pine, oak, beech and birch, pose lower environment risks than those from tropical and subtropical trees such as mahogany, teak, rosewood and ebony.

The widely-used Digital DGT wooden boards are made of rosewood. On the website of the USCF Shop, too, most chess sets (both pieces and boards, and both ‘tournament’ and ‘luxury’ sets) seem to be made from rosewood, ebony or mahogany. And on this site, too, the word ’sustainable’ doesn’t return any pages. (There are ecologically sustainable types of rosewood, such as Santos Palisander, but again it is unclear (at best) whether this palisander type is used for the chess boards advertised on these websites.) In fact, one of the very few websites that explicity features ’sustainable chess sets’ is the English ShopWiki, which links the so-called Negiel Decorative Staunton Wooden Chess Set:

Folding wooden chess set by Negiel, comprising of an ornate stained wooden chess board and traditional Staunton style weighted chess pieces. Quality product made in Europe from carefully selected high quality sustainable wood.

The sustainable Negiel Staunton chess set doesn't look so bad, does it? (Apart from the wrongly placed king and queen, that is.)

It’s also quite cheap (certainly compared to the Endangered Parrots one!): £44.99, and it will be in stock from April this year on. But again, on the above-mentioned online shops, you’ll search in vain for the Negiel chess set, as far as I can tell.

I phoned Joris van Vuure of Chess and Go Shop Het Paard in Amsterdam, one of the largest chess equipment sellers in The Netherlands, to ask him what, if anything, he knew about sustainable chess sets. “Well, to be honest I’ve never thought about it,” Joris van Vuure told me. “Our customers – including the Dutch Chess Federation – simply never ask for it. They are obviously interested in the price and quality of the chess sets, but not their sustainability. Our top-selling chess sets are mostly made of mahogany, palissander or boxwood. Boxwood pieces are usually painted, which you can easily recognize because the black pieces are really black, whereas the others have a natural dark wood colour. I personally thought boxwood is sustainable, but I’m not sure.”

In fact, the sustainability of boxwood (or buxus as it says on the chess sets) is questionable. It’s an extremely hard type of wood which makes it very suitable for many things, including chess pieces, but it’s often overexploited and its sustainability really depends on where the plant was cultivated. Even if some boxwood would deserve to get the benefit of the doubt (Het Paard sells a lot of them, which is a good thing!), rosewood, mahogany and other tropical hardwoods wouldn’t.

Van Vuure says their shop would be interested in marketing explicitly sustainable chess sets, possibly even with an FSC logo, but he doubts whether customers would want to pay more for them. “In fact, many of our customers explicitly say they want nice wooden products rather than plastic ones, which obviously look cheap and actually have a bad image environmentally speaking. It’s a complicated issue, but if we could market it in a good way, without confusing customers, why not?”

Exactly how bad is it that we chess players mostly use unsustainable wooden chess sets, and what can be done about it? To quickly answer the first question: I have no idea – but it certainly doesn’t help. As often with these things, it’s clearly better in any case to be part of the solution, instead of the problem. Besides, I’m pretty sure more chess sets are being sold each day than expensive musical instruments made of the same materials, so there’s another clue. Finally, while unsustainble furniture at least looks really nice, I really wouldn’t be able to spot the difference between a maple chess set and a boxwood one. Nor would I much care: as long are the pieces are heavy (which can be achieved in other ways as well) and they don’t look too distracting, it’s all perfectly fine by me.

The second question seems tougher. I can advice you to buy a sustainable chess set next time, and you can tell your chess-playing friends, but even if you’d be willing to follow my advice, when will that be? And how effective will that be in the grand scheme of things anyway? It’ll also look decidedly pedantic to complain with your local club staff about the nice sets they just bought to please their club members: gee, thanks for the support!

This is an example of what marine scientist Jennifer Jacquet, who studies the overfishing problem, calls horizontal agitation:

Horizontal agitation is peer pressure combined with a pejorative element of what is socially or environmentally unacceptable. One friend lambasts me if she sees me with a disposable coffee cup. Another one does when I drive instead of walk. A British colleague in fisheries told me he could no longer bear dinner with his “middle-class friends” because they would pester him about the hypocrisy of his seafood consumption.

Although horizontal agitation can be beneficial, as studies have shown, Jacquet thinks there’s a better way: vertical agitation.

Choosing a MSC-certified fish over another is not going to relieve overfishing — not when one trawler today can remove 60 tonnes of fish from the ocean in a single haul. The way to get big changes quickly and maximize the effect of our scrutiny is with vertical agitation.

Vertical agitation means working higher in the demand chain. Rather than consumers hassling consumers, vertical agitation implies consumers hassle mega-consumers (chefs, managers, retailers, universities) or government. Today’s conservation movement, like the industries it seeks to revolutionize, must make big changes quickly. It can do this best with vertical agitation. (…) [A] colleague, Claire Nouvian, managed to arrange a meeting with President Sarkozy and vertically agitated him into supporting a CITES listing of bluefin tuna.

In terms of chess sets, the problem is obviously not as big as, say, slavery or the extinction of the bluefish tuna. Nor will buying sustainable chess sets alone save the world’s rainforests. But, as Joris van Vuure says, why not give it a try? At least unsustainable chess sets are not subsidized by FIDE! Chess organizers and federations could use nicely made plastic chess sets only (there are nice plastic sets, I’ve seen them myself!) or they could ask retailers about sustainable wooden sets. They might even be subsidized because of it!

Retailers, especially small ones already offering that little ’something extra’ to customers, should in my view seriously consider importing (and marketing) more sustainable wooden chess sets made of, for instance, oak or beech, even if perhaps they don’t always look as posh as some of the tropical of subtropical hardwood products. After all, in no-nonsense tournament chess, nobody ever really looks at the pieces for their beauty, do they? As long as they’re not distracting, surely it’s the chess that matters, not the board and pieces?

Finally, FIDE (Gens una sumus) itself should also be listening closely. Since they seem to have a liking for introducing weird new rules, here’s a suggestion for them: order all FIDE-rated tournaments to play with plastic or sustainable wooden chess sets. And they shouldn’t just do it because they like new rules, either. Like most ’sustainability’ initiatives, it could actually save them real money in the long run. What with all the financial troubles of our dear World Chess Federation, might this not be music to their ears?

This is the last part of a ‘triptych’ on recent chess improvement books – you can find the other two reviews here. I’ve written before that in my view there are really too much ‘improve your chess’ books on the market; fortunately, some of them are very good and you may be surprised to hear that I like Andres Hortillosa’s Improve Your Chess at any Age as well.

Actually, the book is every patzer’s childhood dream: an entire book (170 pages, beautifully published by Everyman Chess) dedicated to your own games, where you get to write about your thoughts on chess in general and during the games; your favourite style and your ideas on chess development theory! Too good to be true, right? Well, as we say in Dutch, chess publishers may be good, but they’re not crazy, and Hortillosa has a little more up his sleeve than just patzer analyses and ditto philosophies.

Yes, it’s true: Andres D. Hortillosa is a ‘mere’ 2199 FIDE player who just wrote a book on how he improved over the years at a, shall we say, riper age than most of us start to play chess. And yes, most of the games and game fragments are from Hortillosa’s own games. But why is that necessarily a bad thing? On the very first pages of the book, the author presents himself as a modest guy with good intentions, wisely anticipating some of his future critics but not bending over backwards to please them. He also says some pretty sensible, if not terribly spectacular, things about chess improvement targeting an audience of players with a rating below 2000. My first impression after reading the introduction was that perhaps this somewhat oddly-titled (and marketed) book deserved the benefit of the doubt.

This feeling was confirmed by some of the stuff in Chapter One, where Hortillosa paves the way for his theories on chess improvement and shows some of his past games. Again, note that his commentary, though not exactly grandmasterly, is certainly sensible, down-to-earth, and will definitely evoke a pang of recognition with most club players:

Hortillosa-Hartsook
Denver 1994
1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 e6 3.Bg5 h6 4.Bxf6 Qxf6 5.e4 Nc6 6.c3 g5
To my mind this move is a little committal, although a number of strong players have used this advance. Karpov played …g6 in one of his games, although that was without …Nc6.

Amateurs including myself tend to make inflexible moves. We tend to forget that pawns do not move backwards. And once they are fixed on a square, they are subject to attack and they tend to leave you with limited options.

This may not be a huge shocker to advanced chess players, but anyone who’s ever trained weaker players knows what it feels like to constantly have to remind your pupils to ‘keep your hands off these pawns already!’ It’s a very good point and one that shows Hortillosa may actually have something to offer club players that truly strong players often don’t: to speak to them in their own languages and with examples from their own level of play. I myself have often been frustrated by how strong players often take stuff like this ‘for granted’. Hortillosa, you can be sure, never does. Here’s another example from the same game after Black has played 13…e5 (and before White played 14.d5):

Amateurs, when confronted with situations like this one, tend to resolve tensions rather hastily. I guess amateur thinking dislikes complexity so there is a strong tendency to simplify at the first opportunity. So, it is either capture on e5 or advance to d5. I can opt to maintain the pawn on d4 with Ndb3, but it will invite Black to harass the knight on b3 with …a6-a5-a4. (…) In general, however, one must learn to play comfortably with contact-tension on the board. Keep the tension as long as tolerable. See if you can force your opponent to waste a tempo in resolving the tension. For example, avoid capturing defenceless pawns right away. Often, a developing or centralizing move is the better choice.

Again, I was impressed by how well Hortillosa points to something weak players often struggle with. I could quote countless examples from my own games where I incorrectly resolved the tension in the game (as well as, fortunately, examples where I successfully put the pressure on by increasing pawn tension!). This is good, useful stuff.

In Chapter Two, Hortillosa elaborates on his ideas on chess improvement and thinking, the sum of which he calls, with a clear undertone of self-mocking (thank God!), ‘The System’. His approach here is more theoretical, but fortunately, he never becomes too vague (or too pretentious) for comfort. Again, what Hortillosa writes won’t sound too novel to people who’ve already read their Rowson, Watson and other chess philosophers, but one of the charms of Improve Your Chess at any Age is that there’s a real sense of personal involvement of the author in much of what he claims:

After this reflection, I concluded that my chess was totally devoid of any semblance of a thinking process. (…) I am passionately drawn to fixing things including those that work to make them even better. It was not hard to see my chess requiring more than just cosmetic repair; it needed total replacement. Disgusted with the status quo, I formulated a chess thinking process inspired by the combined philosophies of Cleanroom Software Engineering and Six-Sigma, which are known for their strong emphasis on error prevention.

To be honest, I didn’t always find Hortillosa’s opinions on thinking processes too convincing. For instance, one of the things he claims is that chess tactics puzzles often miss their mark because they focus on the finding of the solution instead of creating a practical game-situation where a (tactical) resolution can be created (’Anyone can solve a puzzle, but can anyone play the moves leading to the puzzle?’). I think this is only partly true: sure, it’s important to know the ‘context’ of a tactic, but solving puzzles does sharpen the mind and it definitely creates a reservoir of ‘chess tactics knowledge’ in the brain which may be extremely useful in later games, as many chess prodigies have clearly demonstrated.

In a chapter called ‘Are Openings Really Important?’, Hortillosa makes some valid points on studying opening theory (’stronger players are better in confusing us with sidelines than we are at confusing them’) and he gives a couple of great (and often quite hilarious) examples of why having your opponent fall for an opening trap doesn’t always guarantee victory. The main part, however, is explained in ‘The System’, the author’s answer to the question ‘how we prevent these errors from cropping up?’ Hortillosa gives a checklist of eight points you should always be aware of during play. These include things like ‘2. Search for specific threats’ and ‘5. Search for candidate moves’ – good advice, to be sure, but surely Hortillosa doesn’t expect players to answer these eight questions at every move?

Indeed he doesn’t, and here again is the book’s charm: the author shows modesty and self-knowledge by condeding that, of course, ‘the system has some implicit assumptions. One such assumption is knowing when to invoke the system.’ He follows up naming the exceptions, and especially the moments in a game when it does make sense to invoke ‘the system’. (He also gets kudos for questioning ‘the viability of the system’ altogether, ’since evidence is severely lacking’.) The points he makes are useful all the same, and I liked the two examples that illustrate them – but disappointingly, the rest of the book hardly mentions the eight points again explicity and instead focuses on thorough and at times engaging analysis Hortillosa’s tournament games from 2008 and 2009.

The result of this is perhaps the book’s only real problem: it’s overlong; I’d say it’s at least 50 pages too long. Like all chess enthusiasts, Hortillosa just loves to talk about his own games and to describe the thoughts that went through his head during them – and he knows he’s pretty good at it – but it’s just too much. Sometimes the explanation of ten perfectly normal opening moves is spread out over two and a half pages, and we get comments like this:

MacIntyyre-Hortillosa
Pawtucket 2008
Position after 7…Nf6

I normally do not continue with …Nf6, especially when … e6 has been played. Looking at this game one week later, I could not remember what I was afraid of that led me to post the knight on f6 instead of following generally established wisdom, which dictates playing it to e7. I was probably mixing systems here, a known defect in amateur play. When … e6 is played, Black normally should follow through with … Nge7. These two moves are a natural pair.

You’d think this was already more than enough explanation for a very common opening manoeuvre in a game that will last 60 moves in total, but Hortillosa has only just started:

Most strong players including the late world champion Botvinnik would prefer …Ne7 even with the pawn on e5. The advantage of posting it on e7 is that the natural break f7-f5 is ready to go whereas in the position where the knight is on f6, Black has to waste a tempo before he can play …f5. (…) One data point on the board that rules out …Nf6 in favour of …Ne7 is White’s h2-h3…

And this isn’t even the end of it. I’m not saying Hortillosa doesn’t make some valuable observations along the way, but such lenghty commentary does appear a bit self-serving to me. More importantly, the games in this section, while entertaining, don’t very well explain how Hortillosa’s ’system’ got him the results he achieved. My impression is Hortillosa simply had a lot of time on his hand, studied a lot of chess, received professional training (from IMs and GMs) and made very deep analysis of his games. And lo and behold, he made considerable progress. No ’system’ needed at all!

With that in mind, the rest of Hortillosa’s book does ultimately become ‘just’ any amateur’s dream: a great way to show a lot of, at best, fairly interesting tournament games. They’re all very well analysed, they do contain a lot of useful prose, interesting digressions good advice, but in the end they’re still games played by a 2100 player with an interesting message. It’s an interesting experiment in the sense that this (modest) game level may actually be helpful to players of that level (if only because their mistakes are so recognizable). Personally, though, I prefer playing over games by the big guys, but there you go.

That said, Improve Your Chess at any Age may well offer a glimpse at the future of chess publishing 2.0: everyone has a chess engine these days, so why not publish a book with your own chess games? Andres Hortillosa, at least, has written a very sympathetic version of this new concept, and I think lots of club players will enjoy his writings and recognize (and improve upon) many well-known issues in it.
In the end, Hortillosa’s book should not make us jealous, but inspire us to analyse our own games even better and to formulate our thoughts and mental blockades more transparantly. Hortilossa has given us a pretty good example of how it can be done – at any age.

Links

• Get yourself a copy of Improve Your Chess at any Age
• Read more book reviews

The Max Euwe Challenger tournament is being held in the picturesque Cafe Batavia 1920, right at the corner of Central Station. It is a modest, round robin tournament for ten local heroes and promising young talent, where spectators can spend a typical Amsterdam afternoon at the bar, ordering special Dutch beer or enjoying a typical Dutch meal. The tournament lasts until February 28, and the games can be watched live from 14.00 CET here.

The tall 'Gebouw Batavia 1920' cafe

The Batavia 1920 cafe is located in the oldest part of Amsterdam, close to the infamous red-light district. While the area is currently heavily under construction due to a new subway network, it hasn’t lost all of its Golden Age splendour.

A view from the backside of the cafe: the 13th century Old Church, the oldest building in Amsterdam

Highest rated player this year is semi-retired IM Li Riemersma (2431), who is one of four participants living in the Dutch capital. Other notable chess figures are Israelian IM Yochanan Afek and Rumanian WGM Alina Motoc, the girlfriend of Dutch GM Erwin L’Ami. Dutch youngsters like FM Christov Klein and WIM Lisa Schut will no doubt try to achieve some norm here. Two Indians are also playing: Gurpreet Pal Singh and 13-year old Khosla Shiven.

Dutch talent Christov Klein

Lisa Schut taking a moment to herself

Koshla Shiven's board happens to be opposite ... a typically Dutch 'coffeeshop'

The opening round was a bad day for the ladies as both Lisa Schut and Alina Motoc lost their first round games against FM Arno Bezemer and IM Xander Wemmers respectively. Christov Klein, on the other hand, was succesful against Afek while young Shiven drew Henk Vedder, who is a well-known figure in the Dutch chess scene.

In the second round, things heated up as Lisa Schut crushed rating favourite Riemersma in a nice attacking game, young Shiven beat Bezemer and Wemmers won his second game in a row, defeating Afek. Wemmers, who confessed that he hadn’t prepared for his game against the well-known endgame composer and subsequently managed to convert a worse middlegame into a win, is now in the clear lead.

Xander Wemmers - Yochanan Afek: 1-0

Gurpreet Pal Singh - Alina Motoc: 1/2-1/2

At the bar, the games are closely watched by visiting GM Dimitri Reinderman and friends

Meanwhile, a rather more unique chess activity could be witnessed in another famous Amsterdam area called De Pijp. There, in art gallery Juliètte Jongma, an exposition was opened by Dutch artist Guido van der Werve. Van der Werve, who acquired international fame with his incredible short movie Number Eight, also known as The Icebreaker, now showed his latest movie Number Twelve, a film about a game of chess being played at the New York Marshall Chess Club between Van der Werve and GM Leonid Yudasin, played on a chess piano, designed and constructed by Van der Werve himself.

The chess piano

The chess piano produces a note (or two notes) whenever a move is played on the board. The eight files of the chess board represent the scales of the notes on an octave, while from queenside to kingside the key changes from minor to major. This fantastic object inspired Van der Werve to a musical composition which can be played and read both as a piece of music and a real game of chess. (In fact, a King’s Gambit accepted.) The Number Twelve movie is a recording, at the Marshall Chess Club, of that musical game between the artist and Yudasin, accompanied by a real orchestra. It also features scenes from Mount St. Helens and the San Andreas fault line.

At the current exposition in Amsterdam, which can be seen until April 4, photographs by Van der Werve are also on display. These were all inspired by moments from Van der Werve’s game against Yudasin.

One of the chess-music inspired photographs by Guido van der Werve

There was also a small blitz tournament, all games being played on the chess piano, in which yours truly participated as well. It was an extraordinary experience, not only because one has to actually press the squares while moving, just like pressing a key on a piano – making castling a particularly interesting and enjoyable event – but mainly since many moves strangely produce real musical harmony and sometimes the first hint of a melody can even be heard. A small video will be added as soon as possible.

The blitz tournament was enjoyed by the (mostly non-chess playing) audience as much for the music the players produced as for their speed of play (Henk-Jan Visser vs. Frenk van Harreveld)

Van der Werve is a musician himself and it’s clear that his chess piano is really an ode to formidably made chess boards (with beautifully made, wooden, heavy pieces) as well as ultra high-quality musical instruments.

Oh, and finally, this weekend the Chess Championship of Amsterdam also started in yet another historical area, De Watergraafsmeer. Politicians often say their work is a lot like chess. After this weekend’s resignation of the Dutch government, one can only hope some of its ministers will visit Amsterdam a bit more often to see the real thing.

Mijn recensie van het vorige Matten-nummer begon ik met de constatering dat er sinds de opheffing van Schaaknieuws niet veel meer te beleven was op Nederlandstalig schaakgebied. Dat is niet meer helemaal juist. Niet alleen is er de nieuwe website schaaksite.nl, een initiatief van Kees Schrijvers met columns, verslagen en analyses, maar ook schrijft Richard Vedder sinds enige tijd zeer lezenswaardige schaakboekrecensies op schakers.info en zijn niemand minder dan Yochanan Afek en Hans Böhm een nieuwe, laagdrempelige serie over de schaakstukken begonnen. Het eerste deel, De Pion – De Ziel Van Het Schaakspel, werd onlangs gepresenteerd. Hoog tijd dus voor weer eens een Nederlandse (dubbel)recensie.

Matten 7: Eindelijk op topniveau!

Matten 7, uitgegeven door New in Chess, staat dit keer helemaal in het teken van schaken en vrouwen, en de introductie van dit enkele thema voor (bijna) alle artikelen is een gouden greep van de redacteuren, want dit nummer is zonder twijfel de leukste Mattten sinds haar oprichting in 2006.

Ik wil beginnen met het interview dat Karel van der Weide had met de schaaktweeling Marlies en Laura Bensdorp. Hebben we in het verleden Van der Weide als schaakliterator regelmatig kritisch gevolgd, de rol van interviewer vertolkt hij met verve. Het interview, met de goed gekozen titel Zelfstandig en Weerbaar, is vlot geschreven, scherp en tegelijk bedachtzaam van toon en levert veel interessante en soms onthullende antwoorden van de schaakzusjes op. Sterk is vooral dat Van der Weide in dit interview nu eens niet zijn eigen (inmiddels overbekende) opvattingen over een onderwerp als het vrouwenschaak herhaalt, maar de zusjes alle ruimte geeft hun punt te maken:

Het aansnijden van het onderwerp [vrouwenschaak] leidt bij Marlies tot enige verontwaarding. Hoe de KNSB met damesschaak omgaat, valt volgens haar zeker nog te verbeteren. De ‘publiciteit’ rond het afgelopen NK in Haaskbergen sterkte haar in die opvatting. De persdienst had toch op z’n minst een paar foto’s op internet kunnen zetten?! Laura vult aan dat vrouwen sowieso op een heel andere manier naar schaakverslaggeving kijken. Reportages op ChessBase en New in Chess worden eerst beoordeeld op de kwaliteit van de foto’s, anders beginnen de zussen niet eens aan de tekst! Marlies vervolgt dat ze zich vreselijk ergerde aan een uitspraak van Hans Böhm tijdens datzelfde NK. Hij zei dat hij hoopte ‘geen damespartij te hoeven bespreken’. Marlies: ‘We zijn minder goed dan de mannen, maar het is altijd zo negatief’.

In zo’n fragment toont Van der Weide dat hij wel degelijk kan schrijven: hij observeert, verwoordt en interpreteert goed, durft op te schrijven wat hij hoort en mixt alles met pittige soundbites van de dames zelf. Ook prima: het interview is ideaal van lengte, lang genoeg om de diepte in te gaan en toch kernachtig genoeg om niet te gaan vervelen.

Langer van stof is een ander vermaard interviewer, Dirk-Jan ten Geuzendam, in een sympathiek vraaggesprek met Corry Vreeken – het interview is langer, maar de 82-jarige Damesgrootmeester honoris causa heeft logischerwijs ook meer te vertellen dan de nog geen dertigjarige dames Bensdorp. Ook Ten Geuzendam slaagt erin de geïnterviewde opmerkelijke uitspraken te ontlokken – curieus vond ik bijvoorbeeld dat Vreeken aan het eind van het gesprek, dat veel gaat over ouderdom en nog meer over herinneringen aan het verleden, bekent nog wel degelijk te schaken: op internet. Relevant en stijlvol is ook Ten Geuzendam’s inleiding over schaken en sanatoria in de literatuur, die mij herinnerde aan een andere beruchte schaakroman die zich afspeelt in een sanatorium: Murphy van Samuel Beckett.

Beckett had trouwens misschien beter gepast in het stuk van Peter Boel over die andere grande dame van het Nederlandse schaak: de in 2007 overleden tienvoudig Nederlands dameskampioene Fenny Heemskerk. Eigenlijk vond ik Boels stuk nog boeiender, waarschijnlijk omdat het persoonlijker, soberder en diepgravender van toon is: waar Corry Vreeken vooral smakelijke anekdotes vertelt, beschrijft Heemskerks dochter, die zelf ook behoorlijk schaakte, openhartig de manische depressies van haar moeder en de moeilijkheden die dat opleverde voor het gezin én Heemskerks schaakprestaties. Het resultaat is een betrokken en aangrijpend portret van een Nederlandse schaaklegende.

Diepgang wordt zeker ook niet vermeden in John Kuipers’ stuk De ziel tussen duister en licht over Erika Sziva en Johan van Mil, een relaas dat in zijn eerlijkheid en onopgesmukte tragiek soms bijna pijnlijk om te lezen is. Iets luchtiger, maar eveneens zeer onderhoudend, is het interview dat Danielle Pinedo hield met Peng Zhao Qin. Pinedo stelt goede vragen die getuigen van mensenkennis (’je aanpassingsvermogen is je redding geweest’, ‘ben je nooit bang geweest dat je familie de dupe zou worden van je vlucht?’) en Peng geeft open en uitgebreid antwoord op de vragen.

Sterk is ook het opzettelijk wat raadselachtig gelaten stuk van Jan Timman over zijn trainingservaringen met Judit Polgar, en Matten’s huisfilosoof Dirk Poldauf houdt een genuanceerd en goed beargumenteerd ‘enerzijds-anderzijds’ betoog over het vrouwenschaak als speciale discipline, waar ikzelf mij in elk geval uitstekend in kon vinden:

“Op korte termijn zou het afschaffen van toernooien voor alleen maar vrouwen een traumatisch effect kunnen hebben en ertoe kunnen leiden dat sommige meisjes zich bij het ontbreken van de kans op snelle lauweren van het schaken afwenden. Op de langere termijn zou het waarschijnlijk echter tot een normalisering in de verhoudingen in het toernooischaak leiden (…).”

De korte rubrieken Het Notatieformulier (Rob van Vuure) en De Foto (Allard Hoogland) zijn ook nu weer leuk om te lezen, en ook Het Gedicht dat Paul van den Hout schreef voor Frans Naerebout (’Verliezen doet hij immers nog maar zelden,/ want juist zijn stille kracht wordt onderschat’) is mooi en toepasselijk, op zijn minst voor wie Naerebout gekend heeft.

Is het dan alleen maar hosanna voor de nieuwe Matten? Niet helemaal. Lex Jongsma schreef een wisselvallig en wat rommelig stuk (met de al even rommelige titel ‘Mag ik u mijn Dame aanbieden? Het Dameoffer en het Paard in de Zak’) dat aanvankelijk over De Groene-hoofdredacteur Martin van Amerongen lijkt te gaan, maar opeens overspringt op Reuben Fine, dameoffers en iets ‘uit eigen werk’. Jongsma’s aanstekelijke manier van vertellen komt op papier een stuk minder tot zijn recht. Ik kon mijn aandacht er in dit artikel niet bijhouden: te veel van de hak op de tak, te veel onuitgewerkte invallen, overbodige uitweidingen en te stellig geformuleerde opinies (’Nu was Freud een genie, en Fine een schaker van wereldkampioenstatuur, en een zeer geacht en goed verdienend psychiater, die weliswaar nooit meer toernooien speelde, maar het schaken allerminst verleerd had: bij een enkele malen herhaald bezoek aan het Amsterdamse koffiehuis/schaakcafe op het Leidseplein eind jaren zestig, in de pauzes van een …’ Enfin, enzovoorts.)

Vergeleken met deze woordenbrij zijn de twee bondige stukken over Jan Timman, van Hans Böhm (‘Madame Chaudé de Silans’ over hun reizen naar Frankrijk) en van Franka van der Loo (over de fascinatie van Laurie Langenbach) een lust voor het lezend oog. Pikant is de foto van Langenbach voor Timman waarop ze in ‘een decolleté tot haar navel’ staat afgebeeld met op de achterkant de woorden ‘Op de overwinnning!’.

Ach ja, en dan is er nog Guus Luijters, als altijd kwistig strooiend met boek- en filmtitels en Grote Namen uit de Kunst en Literatuur. Luijters weet niets van schaken, is niet geïnteresseerd in schaken, schrijft niet over schaken. Dit keer roept hij wat over Graham Greene en de onlangs verschenen laatste roman van Nabokov (The Original of Laura), ‘koortsig proza, waarin zowaar een keer geschaakt wordt’, zonder ooit iets diepzinnigs of verrassends ter tafel te brengen. Raadsel waarom Luijters iedere keer weer gevraagd wordt voor een bijdrage aan Matten; ik begin inmiddels te vermoeden dat de redacteurs het zelf ook niet weten.

Tot slot: een fascinerend portret van de Pools-Nederlandse schaker Salo Landau door Adri Plomp – het enige artikel dat niet over vrouwen gaat. Choquerend zijn iedere keer weer de antisemitische stukken die Aljechin, wiens secondant Landau was in 1935, in de Tweede Wereldorlog schreef; maar de door Plomp beschreven gebeurtenissen rond de dood van Landau in de oorlog, zijn nauwelijks met droge ogen te lezen. Het is volkomen terecht dat de Matten-redactie er ondanks het themanummer toch voor gekozen heeft dit boeiende artikel nu op te nemen.

Met Matten 7 is het tijdschrift eindelijk helemaal op het niveau dat past bij de al tijdens de oprichting uitgesproken ambities van de redactie. Proficiat!

Wij presenteren … De pion – De Ziel van het Schaakspel

Er is een nieuw project van Hans Böhm en Yochanan Afek: een serie boeken over alle stukken van het schaakspel, uitgegeven door Trion Sport. Het eerste deel heet De Pion. Uit Böhms voorwoord:

Elk stuk van het eeuwenoude schaakspel verdient het om apart gepresenteerd te worden. Dit boek is het het eerste in een serie van zes – en we beginnen met de pion. Nog nooit zijn van dit kleine stuk zoveel speelfacetten, aanvallend en verdedigend, bij elkaar gebracht. Per thema – zestig in totaal – geven we vier voorbeelden. Door de presentatie, vier diagrammen op de linkerpagina en uitleg op de rechterpagina, is dit boek een ode aan de pion maar ook een leerboek.

Uit de inleiding wordt overigens niet helemaal duidelijk voor wie de serie nu precies bedoeld is. Voor mensen die ’slechts’ geïnteresseerd zijn in schaken? Of ook voor schakers die het leuk vinden problemen en schaakpuzzels op te lossen? Gezien het niveau van de stellingen denk ik eerder het laatste – en dat is goed nieuws voor gevorderde schakers!
Böhm schrijft dat hij te rade is gegaan bij schaakhistoricus Leo Diepstraten om een beeld te krijgen van de ontstaansgeschiedenis van de pion als schaakstuk. Afek heeft voor zijn selectie van fragmenten en composities inspiratie opgedaan uit vele verschillende bronnen. Kortom, dit is een degelijk project geschreven door twee schakers die weten hoe ze hun passie over het voetlicht moeten brengen, en dat is te merken.

De historische inleiding is een pakkend en levendig geschreven stuk met relevante citaten en interessante feiten over de evolutie van de moderne schaakpion, die over het algemeen ook nog eens accuraat beschreven is. Ik kwam één foutje tegen: het zogenaamde Göttingen manuscript stamt volgens de laatste wetenschappelijke opvattingen niet uit 1471, maar uit de vroege 16de eeuw, zoals ik vorig jaar leerde op een symposium in Valencia over de oorsprong van het moderne schaak. (Zie J.A. Garzón, The Return of Francesch Vicent, 2005, p. 399 e.v.) Ook in de bijbehorende beschrijving van de ontwikkeling van de rochade kan wellicht de nodige nuance worden aangebracht, maar ik wil geen muggenzifter zijn. Het historische gedeelte van het boek is leuk en informatief, en daar gaat het om.

Het leeuwendeel van het boek bestaat uit de al genoemde fragmenten en composities, ingedeeld in relevante thema’s. Het eerste thema is ‘De vertraagde pion’ en het eerste voorbeeld is meteen al behoorlijk pittig:

Remise. De eindspelkenner herkent direct een overeenkomst met de beroemde studie van Réti over het ‘kwadraat’, en inderdaad is deze studie van T.Gorgiev uit 1930 daarop gebaseerd, al noemen Afek en Böhm dit niet. De oplossing:

1.c6! (niet 1.a4 h6! ‘en zwart wint het tempospel’ of 1.a3 h5!) 1…h6 2.a3! h5 3.a4 h4 4.a5 h3 5.a6 h2 6.a7 h1D pat. Of 1…Kc7 3.a4 [sic, bedoeld is 2.a4] 3…Kxc6 4.a5 Kb5 5.Kb7 Kxa5 6.Kc6 h5 7.Kd5 ‘en de witte koning zit in het kwadraat (h1-h5-d5-d1) en dus remise’.

Oef! Hoe fraai en subtiel de studie ook is, voor een eerste voorbeeld in het boek vond ik dit tamelijk zware kost, vooral omdat de bijbehorende uitleg nogal summier en weinig specifiek is. Mensen die dit boek kochten omdat ze ’schaken een leuk spelletje vinden’ zullen zich toch misschien wel even op hun achterhoofd krabben wat nu precies de definitie van een ‘kwadraat’ is (is dat altijd h1-h5-d5-d1 of alleen in dit geval?). Schakers die Afeks werk kennen weten dat zijn niveau hoog is, maar geldt dat ook voor argeloze kopers?

De voorbeelden zijn trouwens niet allemaal zo pittig, al zijn ze ook nooit echt makkelijk. Uit het hoofdstukje ‘De kamikazepion’:

Wit aan zet.

Dit is een fragment uit de partij Tal-Zdravko Milev, München 1958. De eerste zet is fraai en in het kader van het thema niet al te moeilijk te vinden, maar daarna wordt het toch lastiger:

1.d5!! exd5 2.Tfe1! Kd8 3.Db3 c5 4.Pxc5! en wit won in enkele zetten (al schrijven Böhm en Afek dat de partij hier ‘abrupt eindigde’).

Afek en Böhm geven als alternatieven voor zwart op de tweede zet 2…dxe4 3.Dxe4+ De7 4.Dg4 en vervolgens – zonder nadere toelichting! – de tamelijk complexe variant 2…Le7 3.Pf6+! Kd8 4.Db3 Kc8 5.Lf4! Dxf4 6.Txe7 Tb8 7.Dh3+ en wit wint. Hier sta ik toch wel even van te kijken. Ten eerste wil ik na het spectaculaire 3.Pf6+ toch ook wel even weten wat er volgt op gxf6 gevolgd door rochade, dus ik zocht de partij op in mijn database en kwam toen pas te weten dat zwart helemaal niet meer mag rocheren aangezien de koning op zet 14 een stuk op d7 geslagen heeft en daarna weer teruggegaan is naar e8. Dat hadden de auteurs er toch wel even bij mogen zetten! (Dat wit toch wint als zwart had mogen rocheren, doet daar niets aan af.) Daarnaast is pas 3…c5? de beslissende fout en kan zwart nog aardig partij geven na 3…Kc8, al blijft wit ook dan goed staan.

Uit deze twee voorbeelden blijkt dat de auteurs hun taak op een tamelijk rigoureuze manier hebben opgevat: het gaat ze puur om de ideëen die door de thema’s worden geïllustreerd: het visuele aspect. Ze lijken minder geïnteresseerd in de uitleg van het waarom, en dat is jammer, want gaat het daar uiteindelijk niet om? Misschien is dit een knieval naar het ‘grote publiek’, dat mogelijkerwijs niet zit te wachten op een diepgaande uitleg, maar op zoek is naar ’snel vermaak’. Zou het zo zijn? Zou een oppervlakkige lezer wel geraakt worden door de schoonheid van Gorgievs studie, maar niet geïnteresseerd zijn in de precieze uitwerking?

Toch valt niet te ontkennen dat Hans Böhm en Yochanan Afek met De Pion een zeer vermakelijk en aanstekelijk boekje hebben geschreven, dat zich zowel goed leent voor ‘in bed’ als voor diepere (zelf)studie. Welk stuk volgt? Het Paard? Ook dat belooft wat.

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Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov, most famous to chess players for his 1930 novel The Defense, held a lifelong fascination for chess, publishing problems and writing about the subject on various occasions. (Though it is very unclear how strong he really was as a chess player.) Of chess problems, he wrote that they are ‘the poetry of chess’:

They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity.

His three early sonnets, including the original Russian text, linking, according to Roycroft, “chess, chess problems, chess history and sex”, can be read here. Underneath the article, there’s an interesting comment by professional Russian translator Sarah Hurst on some translational issues. It struck us that in the first sonnet, Philidor’s opponent is called ‘Dyuser’, which Roycroft translates as ‘Légal’. We have not been able to find the reason for this, since the full name of Légal (he of the mate) was Legall de Kermeur. Perhaps one of our readers knows more about this mysterious (to us) ‘Dyuser’?

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, gaining international fame with his novel Lolita (1955) as well as his strong and highly-esteemed opinions on literature and art. His poems, however, are generally regarded as being of lesser importance. His last unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, was recently published posthumously.

(Update: Apparently ‘Dyuser’ stands for ‘Du Sire’ or ‘Dusserre’, which could in fact refer to ‘Sire de Legal’, although this is questioned by other scholars.)

In what ChessCafe calls “a battle between Spain and the Netherlands”, Dutchman Herman Grooten took an early lead over Viktor Moskalenko “and never relinquished it”. Both finalists were reviewed on ChessVibes, while the third shortlisted Zuke ‘Em author David Rudel published an article on our site about one of the book’s main lines of the Colle, leading to interesting discussions in the comments.

In our review of Chess Strategy for Club Players, we praised Grooten’s ability “to explain things are that sometimes (or rather often) taken for granted in analysis. (…) Grooten does exactly what many students want from any author: give a clear and logical overview and subsequent evaluation of the position at hand.” ChessCafe reviewer Steve Goldberg praised it as “an outstanding positional primer” and reknown chess author and book reviewer Jonathan Rowson said of it: “I like the book, which appears to be one of the best in its genre.”

We’d like to congratulate Herman Grooten and New in Chess for winning the ChessCafe Book of the Year 2009 Award with their wonderful contribution to any club player’s library.

Links

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A few weeks ago I visited an exhibition in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, Spain. The exhibition featured some very explicit classic Japanese erotic paintings (there was actually a warning sign at the entrance of the exhibition, prohibiting visitors below 18 years of age) which served as a source of inspiration for Picasso and his contemporaries. Though I had seen some of these paintings before, I was amazed how deeply such works from a competely different culture had influenced some of Picasso’s works. For me it was yet another proof that what makes a true artist is his ability to be inspired by literally everything around him.

A contemporary of Picasso’s, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) is without a doubt the most famous chess-playing painter of all time. In fact, apart from being obsessed by it, he was a rather strong chess player, who played in the French Championship (in 1924) and scored real results against some of the world’s chess playing sub-top of the 1920s and 1930s. It was Duchamp who famously said that, “while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” A new book by Francis Naumann, Bradley Bailey and Jennifer Shahade focuses on Duchamp’s artistic life as a chess player and his chess life as an artist. Marcel Duchamp – The Art of Chess, published last year by Readymade Press, is an inspiring little book, beautifully illustrated and beautifully printed, which made me realize Duchamp is not only my hero but also an example and a teacher with an important lesson.

The Chess Game (1910)

The three authors focus on different aspects of Duchamp’s chess-art life. Francis Naumann, an art scholar and curator in New York, describes the development of Duchamps artistic works as if it were a game of chess, starting with the learning of the rules (1902-1912) and the opening (1912-1918) and so on, until the endgame which ended in Duchamp’s death in 1968. My first impression of this method was that it was hardly original, life being described as a game of chess having been tried from medieval storytellers to Garry Kasparov. But when I read on, I found out that this method actually fits Duchamp’s life quite well, and there are several others who have noted the parallels.

In 1951, [art collector Walter Arensberg] wrote to Duchamp: “It’s curious how I get an impression when I look at our paintings of yours from the point of view of their chronological sequence of the successive moves in a game of chess.” Duchamp responded: “Your comparison between the chronological order of the paintings and a game of chess is absolutely right… but when will I administer checkmate or will I be mated?”

Here we already see the way Duchamp looks at things: from a broken angle, taking the common analogy somehow literally to the domain of chess and giving it quite an original twist at the end. Naumann himself drily notes that serious chess games (such as Duchamps played regularly), “rarely progresses to such a dramatic terminal point; the losing player usually resigns first.” It shows Naumann’s no-nonsense approach to his subject and he goes on to describe in great detail the various aspects of chess as a major influence on Duchamp’s work.

Portrait of Chess Players (1911)

From the well-known post-impressionist The Chess Game (1910) and the Cubist Portait of Chess Players (1911), Naumann takes us to the infamous Nude Descending a Staircase No.2 (1912) and he prepares our mind for this work with the following quote from Duchamp:

In chess there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain. It’s the imaginging of the movement or the gesture that makes the beauty, in this case. It’s completely in one’s gray matter.

Again, we see how relevant chess is as a metaphor to describe Duchamp’s artistic works: what chess player wouldn’t recognize what Duchamp is hinting at here? In chess, it’s not about the beauty of the wooden pieces but about the potential movement of the pieces. And so it is in Nude Descending a Staircase, which is not a painting of a nude descending a staircase, but rather, as Duchamps put it:

Painted as it was in severe wood colors, the anatomical nude does not exist, or at least cannot be seen, since I discarded completely the naturalistic appearance of a nude, keeping only the abstract lines of some twenty different static positions in the successive action of descending.

Nude descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912)

Naumann coins the possibility that, since The Nude is restricted to wood colorings, “tracing its origin to a chess piece is not entirely implausible, particularly when we consider the fact that the queen is the most mobile piece on the board, a feature reinforced by her rendition in multiple form.” Again, to his credit, Naumann is not forcing his ideas upon the reader in order to fit the analogy of chess and art too rigorously, but merely suggesting possibilities and ways of thinking to enhance aesthetic pleasure. Reading Naumann’s essay, I increasingly felt drawn into Duchamp’s world where one thing can so easily be linked to another that you really feel like you’ve entered Wonderland or went Through the Looking-Glass, where a slightly puzzled but intrigued Alice remarks:

Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas-only I don’t exactly know what they are!

An even more ambitious approach is taken by art professor Bradley Bailey, who makes the case for the idea that in Duchamp’s huge The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even – also known as The Large Glass – (1915-23), “chess is a critical and largely unrecognized thematic element.”

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-1923

Bailey, it seems to me, makes more bold assumptions than Naumann. In his description, for instance, of the famous photograph (taken in 1963) of Duchamp and nude model Eve Babitz playing chess, he writes:

Duchamp and Eve Babitz playing chess (taken by Julian Wasser, 1963)

The chess table – complete with a double-faced chess clock for authenticity – was set up in front of [a replica of] the Large Glass, such that the board seems almost a continuation of the Large Glass beyond the frame at its bottom. (…) The brilliance of this photograph lies in the fact that it incorporates three of the major themes of Duchamp’s art and life in a single image: art, eroticism, and strategy. Achille Bonita Oliva reads the image as an erotic stalemate, which echoes the theme of sexual frustration in the Large Glass.

Such statements can, of course, be read with rigorous skepticism, but that would be missing the point of art in the first place. Art – and modern art in particular – is associative by definition, and Bailey’s essay is one long associative excercise, obviously backed by solid research, references and a vast amount of art experience. I did find his writing slightly more academic than Naumann’s, and I suspect readers unfamiliar with the way art conaisseurs tend to talk about their passion will probably be put off a little by all this erudition and huge display of knowledge, ranging from medieval manuscript to World War architecture. All the same, Bailey makes a convincing case that The Large Glass does indeed contain more than a haunting hint of chess and it more or less proves the work is so rich that such a lenghty essay can be written about this work alone.

A final, not unimportant question is how good a chess player Duchamp was, anyway? Edward Lasker (not to be confused with Emanual Lasker) called him a “master among amateurs” and said that “it there were official rankings of United States chess players in the 1920s and 1930s, Duchamp have certainly ranked among the top twenty-five.” WGM Jennifer Shahade, who analysed Duchamp’s games and picked 15 for the book (chosen for “their quality and their importance to Duchamp himself”), takes a more nuanced position on the question:

In analyzing dozens of his games, I saw flashes of tactical brilliance as well as deep understanding of strategic concepts, such as open files and pawn structure. Duchamp also had weaknesses. He sometimes played too passively against strong players and he occasionally lacked precision, especially towards the end of the game. Yet it was clear to me in annotating the fifteen games to follow that this artist, who excelled in so many styles, also mastered the ultimate in conceptual art: chess.

Shahade’s analyses are accurate and easy to follow, with a focus on weaker players. This is perfectly reasonable as it is the only way of presenting Duchamp’s chess games to a broad audience. The game layout and diagrams are somewhat tougher to follow, since they are based on Duchamps own Design for Chessmen (Buenos Aires 1918). It’s an interesting concept, but still one that doesn’t exactly help following the game from the book only. Especially the king is a strange piece in Duchamp’s design: it looks more like a pigeon with a crown to me – but then again this probably shows I’m still in Wonderland where Duchamp wants me to be anyway.

Here’s an example of Shahade’s game comments, combining general statements and concrete analysis:

F. Michel [sic; in my database, his name is listed as 'Edmond Michel' - AWM] - Duchamp
Strasbourg 1924

13…c5

The American Bobby Fischer famously said, “You gotta give squares to get squares,” but in this case Duchamp gives more than he receives. The d5-square is now available to White’s knight, which gives White a recurring, simplified motif. The d5-square is a quasi-outpost. Although the pawn on e7 can slide to e6 to force the knight away, the advance would weaken Black’s dark squares and his d6-pawn.

Shahade refrains from mentioning the stronger alternative 13…a5! as indicated by D. Primel in the ChesBase MegaBase and prefers to talk about general ideas. As said, this can easily defended, but the chess player in me sometimes wished for just a little more depth. What I found impressive in both Shahade’s and Naumann’s part of the book, though, is their restraint in hinein-interpreting: they do not indulge in far-fetched and hard-to-prove pseudo-theories of how Duchamp was magically inspired by chess and art respectively; instead, they take the rational approach and describe his efforts in a cool yet sympathizing way. The effect? The focus is on Duchamp’s creations themselves and not on their interpretation – or their interpretors.

The beauty of many Duchamp paintings, and indeed in his chess games, for Duchamp the chess player was in some respects quite ahead of his time, the beauty of all this is in the eye the beholder: Duchamp is providing the rough material and the spectactor is invited to let his head “be filled with ideas”. I find this to be an important general lesson: art and indeed all creative effort is not about making things accurate or even reasonable – that’s the realm of science. It’s about generating ideas, now matter how wild or far-fetched, and enabling new associations to be made in one’s gray matter. This is also how chess can become art: when it transcends the completely rational.

Reading about Duchamp inspires me to try and do the same, to achieve something more than just chess prose or good journalism. The stuff in The Art of Chess provides an excellent playground for this, both to Duchamp fans and to chess players who had never heard of him. If you’re interested in having your chess mind turned upside down in an artistic way (or your artistic mind in a chessy way!), this is the book for you.

Update Feb 10: Jennifer Shahade, incidentally, has also played against a (male) nude as part of her Duchamp research project. You can watch the video here.

Links

• Get yourself a copy of Marcel Duchamp – The Art of Chess
• Read more book reviews

When I was just starting out as a chess player, I noticed my opponents often shifted in their chairs as they sat thinking behind the board. I sometimes imagined I could read their thoughts as they bended over the board or leaned backwards with their hands behind their head. Now he’s thinking about e4-e5, no doubt about it. Ah, now he sees the trick I’ve planned after that … oh wait he played it anyway! I never figured out a system to make it work. But new research suggests there may yet be a thing or two to be discovered.

I suppose many chess players find the notion that the way you sit behind the board can reveal clues as to what you’re thinking of, decidedly silly. Behaviour behind the board looks completely random and decided by circumstantial factors. But when you think about it, it’s not so stupid at all. After all, we’re primates communicating not only through words, but with gestures as well. It may be an urban legend that 93% of human communication is body language and only 7% is speech-related, but the fact is that body language is vastly important in communication, and gesticulating predated language by millions of years in human evolution, as can still be seen clearly with monkeys and apes.

According to many popular science books, body language is even the best way to learn about human psychology: there are several well-known body-signals such as crossing one’s arms across the chest (putting a barrier between the speaker and listener), making eye contact (seeking positive confirmation or showing interest) or averting one’s eyes (a sign of, among other things, disbelieve, shame or fear).

This week, The New York Times featured an article about how the body takes abstract thoughts literally in surprising ways:

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time. As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore.

In the studies described in the article, people found heavy books more important than lighter ones, and they could improve their mathematical skills by making specific gestures and rotating their hands:

Among students who have difficulty with equations like 4 + 5 + 3 = __ + 3, for example, performance improves markedly if they are taught the right gestures: grouping together the unique left-side numbers with a two-fingered V, and then pointing the index finger at the blank space on the right. To learn how to rotate an object mentally, first try a pantomime. ‘If you encourage kinds to do the rotation movement with their hands, that helps them subsequently do it in their heads’, says Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago.

What about chess? After all, mathematics, music and chess are linked in special ways – Glenn Gould showed us how music can move the body in unconscious ways – so, while not exactly arithmetics, I suppose calculating variations in chess is still somewhat similar to calculating sums. This opens up all sorts of fascinating possibilities.

Anish Giri in his game against David Howell at the 2010 Corus Chess Tournament in Wijk aan Zee

Do you see your opponent moving his fingers in a specific way? Perhaps he’s calculating a long forced line! See him moving his head or moving his hands underneath the table? He may be thinking about some long term positional stuff like gaining space or how to improve his piece coordination! On an even more abstract level, an opponent leaning forward means he’s thinking about his next move while an opponent leaning backwards indicates he’s evaluating your last move.

Tal’s body language in the picture is less easy to read. At first, the pointed thumb would suggest calculating stuff, but then the thumb is not moving whereas we know Tal was constantly calculating sacrifices in his head! In other words, his pose was a way of confusing his opponents – and I suddenly understand how he could become world champion! Perhaps the secret all strong chess players share is not that they know chess better than the rest of us, but that they can, in a manner of speaking, read our thoughts and anticipate on it?

Wouldn’t that be a huge consolation to us patzers? It’s not our fault – our bodies give us away! In the same fashion, some people use popular psychology to excuse their behaviour – hey, I’m from Mars and you’re from Venus, so we really shouldn’t even try to understand each other. Well, we chess players know better, of course. Still, next time you’re playing a game, think about how you and your opponent are sitting behind the board for a minute.

Do you see any relation with the position on the board or the stuff you’re thinking about? Then perhaps it’s time to become a little more self-conscious. Stop thinking about the position, put your thumb under your chin, look straight in your opponent’s eyes and brilliant sacrifices will enter your head before you know it.

The Corus Chess Tournament takes place January 16-31 in Wijk aan Zee, The Netherlands. Next to hundreds of amateurs, three Grandmaster Groups (A, B and C) with 14 players each play a closed round-robin. The rate of play is 100 minutes for 40 moves, then 50 minutes for 20 moves and then 15 minutes for the rest of the game, and 30 seconds increment starting from move 1.

Corus Chess Daily News

Corus Chess Newsflashes

Games round 13

Game viewer by ChessTempo

Round 13

13:20 CET
The board is on fire in Short-Smeets, despite the fact that it started as a Petroff. (This tournament once more confirmed that it’s not just the opening that’s boring, but more what the players are doing with it!) It’s easy enough to follow the start: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3. d4 Nxe4 4.dxe5 Bc5 5.Bc4 Nxf2 6.Bxf7+ (wow!) which was in fact mentioned in one of the our ChessVibes Openings issues. Our main line was 6…Kf8; in the game 6…Kxf7 7.Qd5+ Kg6 8.Bg5 got Smeets thinking.

Carlsen takes up Caruana’s Ruy Lopez carefully, in Steinitz style while Kramnik and Karjakin are in a theoretical Queen’s Indian. Negi can still spoil Giri’s tournament, but in another Petroff the 15-year-old tournament leader looks OK after the opening.

13:44 CET
Smeets has only just made a move after 8.Bg5! Meanwhile, Shirov must be happy with the Najdorf hybrid (mixing a Bg5 and Bc4 setup) that he has on the board: it looks perfect for playing for a win today. Nakamura will be pressing Tiviakov a bit with the pair of bishops, but Black’s position looks quite solid.

15:10 CET
Things are heating up in the A group! Kramnik decided to make a draw against Karjakin, securing a good tournament, and Ivanchuk and Leko have called it a day already as well. But what about the other games? Of course all attention in the press room is focused on Short-Smeets, a true Romantic classic! After 10.Nd2, the computer supposedly prefers 10…d6 11.Ndf3+ Kg4! 12.h3+ Kg3! with completely unclear consequences. Several prominent players have already said they’re rooting for Short, not so much because they like the Englishman personally but because they like the way he’s playing the game, reminding them of Morphy and Anderssen and taking us all back to the 19th century. Time trouble will probably decide the game, however.

Shirov and Carlsen, both playing White, are still trying to win, although objectively, Dominguez doesn’t seem to have much to complain about. Carlsen-Caruana is a mess, only time will tell who’s better here. In the meantime, Anish Giri has made a draw to make sure he’s promoting to the A Group next year: a formidable achievement from the young Dutchman!

16:05 CET
With the time control coming up, the tournament can be decided any minute now. Carlsen seems to have an inferior position against Caruana, and Shirov’s attacking chances seem very realistic all of a sudden, so who knows what kind of upsets we’ll see this afternoon.

Meanwhile, Loek van Wely drew his game with Anand even though the experts claimed he was lost at some point, so this is definitely a small Dutch success. The same can be said for Jan Smeets, who managed a draw as well. His opponent Short apparently couldn’t find the win (and neither could the computer) so he decided to repeat moves with his clock ticking away. A disappointing end of a very promising game but perhaps this round will go down in history anyway if Shirov would miraculously manage to win the tournament after all! We’re sure many chess fans are rooting for him very hard right now…

16:45 CET
Well, the tournament will definitely end in dramatic fashion after Shirov accepted a draw in a completely winning position! We have exclusive video footage of the last minutes of the game and we’ll bring it to you as soon as possible, but for now we should mention Shirov’s last seconds were ticking when he accepted the draw, obviously not having seen the move 31.b4!!

Immediately after the game, Karjakin came up to him to tell him about it, but Shirov still couldn’t believe it. However, it may just be his lucky day after all, since Carlsen’s position against Caruana looks very, very bad, probably losing. This would mean Kramnik, Shirov and Carlsen will share first prize. Who would have thought?

On a more quiet note, Chao added another win to his successful tournament; the Chinese beat Peng. Robin van Kampen is best Dutchman in this group. In B, Erwin L’Ami lost his first game of the tournament against Naiditsch.

17:26 CET
It’s official: Magnus Carlsen drew his game with Caruana and has won the 72nd Corus Chess Tournament with 8,5/13. Alexei Shirov and Vladimir Kramnik share 2nd place with 8 points. In a tight knight ending, Carlsen defended successfully and now has added the most prestigious chess tournament to his victory list. Carlsen and Giri will be doing the press conference and we’ll have coverage of that later on, of course.

17:55 CET
Carlsen says the knight ending against Caruana should be a draw, although both players thought that Black had great winning chances during the game. According to Carsen, his best game of the tournament was against Karjakin. He also said Shirov reacted ‘remarkably calm’ to the fact he failed to grab 1st place by playing 31.b4, and that Anish Giri played ‘great chess’ in this tournament, especially in his game against Nisipeanu.

Corus 2010 | Schedule & results Grandmaster Group A

Corus 2010 | Schedule & results Grandmaster Group B

Corus 2010 | Schedule & results Grandmaster Group C

Corus 2010 | Round 13 Standings Grandmaster Group A

Corus 2010 | Round 13 Standings Grandmaster Group B

Corus 2010 | Round 13 Standings Grandmaster Group C

Magnus with the trophy and cheque

Anish Giri, what will he do next year in group A?

Li Chao, convincing winner of the C group

A surprising guest at the traditional closing party in Hotel Zeeduin was top soccer player Edgar Davids who came by because he likes chess and wanted to meet Magnus in person

Links

• Official website
• Games in PGN via TWIC: Group A | Group B | Group C