When you haven’t played an over-the-board tournament in 15 years, it takes courage to return in a hot blitz event full of underrated juniors in the middle of a pandemic

Gregor Smith

I am not going to lie; I may have been under the influence of alcohol when I decided to enter this tournament. However, it was the Dutch courage I needed to return to the over-the-board tournament scene after a 15-year hiatus.  

I played a lot of tournament chess as a junior, but then barely moved a piece until becoming one of the 12 million worldwide who joined chess.com during the pandemic. So here I was at the “Richmond Christmas Blitz” (prize fund £3,000!) making my comeback, off a rating of 1353 given to me on the basis of a few online-rated games.

Some things were familiar – the cold gym hall filled with chess tables, the hustle and bustle when the draw sheet was put up for each round, and the usual reminders from the arbiters before each round that touch move applied. 

Other things were less familiar: a 4 min + 2 sec time control (digital clocks and increments didn’t exist last time out, and this was a bit quick for my comfort zone); random metal detector searches to see if anyone was playing with their phone in their pocket; and of course playing in facemasks, only to be removed if you wanted to offer a draw.

So how did it go? Here is a whistlestop tour of my 11 rounds. Unfortunately, unlike the phenomenal Peter Lalic, I cannot remember the exact moves in my 11 games. In fact, I can’t remember five consecutive moves in any game. It was all a bit of a blur.

Round 1: Destroyed by a titled player. Blundered a pawn in the opening as Black and didn’t get a sniff. (0/1)

Round 2: A solid victory over a (very) young Richmond Junior. Such a splendid kid – before the game he asked me if I knew the “Dragon” opening (I don’t) and then, after the game, he complimented my handwriting on the results slip (my handwriting is barely legible). His time will come. (1/2)

Round 3: A feeble attempt against another much higher-rated opponent. Rolled out my “Tiger’s Modern” opening (something I found on YouTube), but got too cramped and was slowly crushed. (1/3)

Round 4: Another loss, but a braver attempt. It was probably a drawn endgame, but I managed to blunder a pawn in time trouble and my opponent finished well. (1/4)

Round 5: Another (very) young Richmond whizz. My first big blunder of the day and my opponent had me on the ropes, but managed to flag himself on the brink of victory. I honestly felt terrible for him as he slumped back to his parents. He more than deserved to beat me. That kid will go far. (2/5)

Round 6: A nice win over a higher-rated opponent. This time I got the better of another drawn-looking endgame after winning a pawn and managing to promote my passed pawn on the flank. Swings and roundabouts. (3/6)

Rounds 7 & 8: Two crushing defeats as black for my YouTube defence against stronger opponents who didn’t put a foot wrong. I guess I don’t know the opening as well as I thought I did and continually end up with cramped positions and no plan. I decided at this point that I am never, ever playing it again. (3/8)

Round 9: A rare occurrence where my opponent played 1…e5 in response to my 1. e4 and then proceeded to accept all three pawns in my favourite Danish Gambit. These are such fun games to play; I don’t even mind losing from this position. It’s always a bumpy ride. I managed to set up a scything attack and won quickly. (4/9)

Round 10: This is where the magic happened. A first-ever victory against a 2000+ opponent, Luis Ortiz from Spain. I played the Smith-Morra Gambit (another YouTube special) and reached a comfortable position before finding a nice tactic to win a piece. I then spent the rest of the game preparing myself for the inevitable defeat. We all know that Imposter Syndrome feeling – there’s no way I can actually beat this guy, right! But I did, keeping patient and managing to fork his rooks to end up two rooks to one in the endgame before finishing it off. (5/10)

Round 11: By this stage, everyone was looking a bit weary, but thankfully my adrenaline was rushing high. So high, I even retrieved my earlier retired Tiger’s Modern from the scrapheap after my higher-rated opponent opened 1. f3!? and I didn’t know what else to do. 1… g6, 2. g3 … chess.com comes up with zero games in its database that have followed these moves, and no wonder. What followed was an extremely closed and complicated game, and my opponent strangely went into the tank for three consecutive moves and flagged himself while I still had two minutes left on the clock. Definitely weary. (6/11)

My goal for the day was to beat someone better than me, and to manage to beat three players rated higher than me made the occasion all the sweeter. But the main thing was that it was great to be back.  

Thanks to Kingston club-mate David Maycock for his constant support and words of wisdom throughout the day. He even took the time to talk me through the Philidor Defence in a five-minute break between rounds after I’d played badly against it in round 4. The great thing was I always knew where to find him between rounds – camped beside the Halogen heater!

I learned several lessons from the tournament. Eleven games is a lot of chess: don’t let early disappointments get you down. Always have a plan: too often I didn’t have one, and you don’t have time to think of many options. Even strong players make mistakes in blitz: this was a David Maycock special – always believe you have a chance of winning. My rating performance was 1605 – a considerable improvement on my starting level of 1353.

And, finally, thanks to Paul McKeown and the team at Richmond Junior Chess Club, who ran a seamless and safe tournament in memory of Rik Thomas, one of their coaches, who sadly passed away during the pandemic, and also marking the deaths of two Richmond Juniors’ parents, Suman Chatterjee and Jatinder Sian. Thanks, too, to Orleans Park School in Twickenham, where the event took place. It was particularly fitting to see so many talented juniors so enthusiastic about the game.

Magnus says that playing for the world title has become tedious, but the matchplay system produces champions with longevity and we should resist the seductions of annual knockouts or chess ‘majors’

Stephen Moss

The world championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi was in the end a disappointment. Once Carlsen had won the glorious sixth game, the contest was over, with poor Nepo collapsing in a heap. What an anti-climax. The great Fischer-Spassky match, the 50th anniversary of which we celebrate next year, has lived for half a century in the memory. Indeed, one might argue that it was too vivid – overshadowing most of what followed. The Carlsen-Nepo match will be lucky to last for a fortnight in chess aficionados’ collective imagination.

But the fallout has been interesting. First, the suggestion that Carlsen’s easy win and his fifth title (fourth title defence) means he is now unquestionably the Greatest of All Time (GOAT). With all due respect to Carlsen, who is of course a wonderful player, this is manifest nonsense. You simply can’t compare today’s players – in any sport – with those of the past.

In many sports – cricket, golf and tennis spring to mind – the equipment gets better, so naturally Kevin Pietersen will hit the ball harder and further than Don Bradman. That certainly doesn’t mean he is better. In other sports, football and rugby say, players are bigger, stronger, fitter. In rugby especially they are playing a game that the players who were around when I was growing up and following Wales avidly in the 1960s and 70s wouldn’t recognise. The great Gareth Edwards might struggle a bit against today’s behemoths, but then the great Gareth Edwards would also be spending six hours a day in the gym and would still be great – just in a different way.

So it is with chess players: today’s elite have computers and access to all the games played by their forebears. They stand on the shoulders of these pioneers. How on earth can you compare Carlsen with Philidor or Bourdonnais, Morphy or Steinitz, Capablanca, Alekhine or Fischer, or even with Kasparov, most of whose career was in the analogue era? You can’t: all these players were great in their own ways and their own eras.

Don’t take my word for it. I asked John Saunders, doyen of British chess journalists, what he thought, and he was emphatic that comparisons across the generations were of little value. “The GOAT concept is suspect,” he told me. “It’s not really possible to form meaningful judgments on players from different eras. The basic rules may be the same, but so much has changed – time controls, computers, communications, money, other resources. Carlsen is obviously one of the greats, with a natural gift on a par with Capablanca and Karpov. Then we have the natural attackers – Kasparov, Alekhine. And what to do with Lasker and Fischer? Botvinnik? I think those are my top eight, but I can’t choose between them.”

A top eight without Mikhail Tal – very controversial. But you get the point: all these players are great; they all brought something new and different to the chess party. Identifying a single GOAT suggests the rest are mere sheep, and that is ludicrous. Let’s celebrate them all, perhaps establishing a collective pantheon, but under no circumstances crowning a single all-time champ. That is to misunderstand the nature of sporting evolution.

More intriguing is the suggestion that this title defence might be Carlsen’s last; that he might now bow out, as Fischer did in 1975, as the undefeated champ. He gave an interview to a podcast earlier this week and shocked the chess world by saying this: “It has been clear to me for most of the year that this world championship match should be the last. It does not mean as much any more as it once did. I have not felt that the positive has outweighed the negative. I want to quit when I am at my best.”

Whether he carries through with this threat is moot, and he gave himself some wriggle room: “If someone other than Firouzja wins the Candidates Tournament, it is unlikely that I will play the next world championship match.” In other words, if Firouzja is the challenger, count him in. The whole chess world wants to see a Carlsen-Firouzja match, and much now rides on the latter’s performance in the Candidates. The world championship doesn’t seem to motivate Carlsen any longer, but a match with the young pretender does. “I have to say I was really impressed with his performance in the Grand Swiss and in the European Team Championship,” he has previously said of Firouzja, “and I would say that motivated me more than anything else.”

Carlsen is clearly bored by the world championship format, and may also feel that he could be making more money from sponsorship and on social media than from competing every two years for the world title. His principal objective now seems to be to get above 2900 Elo and, by the sound of it, he would welcome an annual tournament – perhaps featuring the world’s eight top-rated players – to determine that year’s champion.

This arrangement would be very detrimental to chess. The sport benefits by having a long-term champion that the broader public can identify with. Who now remembers all the here-today, gone-tomorrow Fide champions of the 1990s and 2000s. Fide had its own champions at a time when Kasparov broke away from the governing body’s embrace. At first, champions were decided via a match, but then a bi-annual knockout tournament crowned each new champion. Your starter for 10: name the six players who held the Fide title between 1993 and 2006 (answers at end of this blog).

A separate champ every year or two just doesn’t work. They come and go so fast, the public lose all sense of who is top dog. Obviously, the present set-up gives the champion a big advantage: challengers have to slog through the Candidates and will face a champion practised in matchplay. That was in part the undoing of Nepo: Carlsen had been through this four times before. But why shouldn’t the champion have that advantage? Having climbed the mountain he deserves it, and now some other bold Alpinist has to knock him off his perch.

That there have only been 16 official and undisputed – that is the key word – world champions is a huge plus for chess. They form a kind of apostolic succession, to use chess writer Bernard Cafferty’s lovely and very apposite term. Any chess lover worth his or her salt can name the lot. In order of course. Let’s do it aloud: Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Euwe, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Carlsen. The change of world champion really matters. It’s a seismic moment for chess, the changing of the guard, the ushering in of a new era, and matches to determine the title can be dramatic: not just Fischer-Spassky, but Capablanca-Alekhine, Botvinnik-Tal, Karpov-Korchnoi, Karpov-Kasparov. Chess loses that climactic moment at its peril.

A tournament once a year or once every two years – in effect the Candidates but determining the champion rather than the challenger – wouldn’t be the same. It would be exciting, but it would just create a champion for a brief time and then the process would start up again. Rinse and repeat. We would soon grow tired of this. In any case, the Candidates Tournament is already exciting enough: a great event in its own right with the job of producing a worthy challenger for the champion. It is the step beneath the summit, and both stages of the climb are momentous. Leave well alone: whatever Carlsen in his ennui thinks, the system is not broken.

Others have suggested a format, such as that in tennis and golf, where you have, say, four great annual tournaments and a range of satellite events, and those determine the world number one. But chess is not like tennis or golf. Those sports have four “majors” which have been hallowed by a century of tradition. In chess, events come and go as cities and individuals put up money and then lose interest. What would these four great chess events be? Would they be opens or invitationals? It would all be hopelessly messy.

These rival systems may have superficial attractions, but in reality they would produce a panoply of different champions and the public would lose all sense of where true greatness lies. To have a Lasker as world champion for 27 years or players such as Botvinnik, Kasparov and Carlsen dominating their eras gives the sport a flagbearer, a brand name with global recognition. That should not be given up lightly in exchange for the superficial excitement of a maelstrom of different talents competing for the title.

Admittedly the matchplay system means that some very great players never became world champion – Rubinstein, Bronstein, Korchnoi, Aronian, Shirov, Ivanchuk. With an annually crowned king, they would no doubt have been multiple champions. But even their failure to win the crown has its own drama and pathos. To share round the rewards to every “great” player would mean something was lost. Everyone must have prizes. Sorry, but life isn’t like that. When undisputed world champions are so few and getting a crack at the title so hard to come by, it makes winning the crown all the more significant. There is something magical about the golden 16, each handing on the title to the next. Truly an apostolic succession.

The method might seem perverse: people laugh now when they hear that the Wimbledon tennis championship did something similar in the late 19th and early 20th century – playing an entire tournament to produce a challenger to face the previous year’s champion, who would presumably come on court fresh as a daisy to beat a rival who had struggled through a number of tough rounds (this so-called challenge-round format was not abandoned until 1922). But somehow in chess it works. Please don’t change it just because the current champion is getting bored. Let’s hope Firouzja wins the next Candidates, Carlsen is galvanised by the prospect of facing him, and we get a world championship that sets the pulses racing and rivals 1972 for banner headlines. What a present that would be for chess.

FIDE champions 1993-2006: Karpov, Khalifman, Anand, Ponomariov, Kasimdzhanov, Topalov

Reflections on Surrey v Essex, 11 December 2021, at Cheam Parochial Hall

John Foley

Counties were organising major events long before the British Chess Federation was formed. Winning the county championship was regarded as a pinnacle of chess achievement – especially if you were from Middlesex or Lancashire, the most prodigious victors. The continuing importance of counties in the structure of English chess is illustrated by their right to vote on the ECF Council, the national decision-making body for chess. Chess clubs do not get a vote. If a club wants to raise a matter at council, its county must first be persuaded.

There has been a slow, long-term decline in the importance of county matches. The number of participating counties and the number of players per team has declined. The rise of the popular 4NCL weekend format has perhaps been a major factor. However, county chess still has its supporters who are prepared to turn out several Saturdays each year to show loyalty to their geographical locality. In a global age, many people prefer to identify with traditional ways to bind people together. Most sports tend to be organised regionally according to the county concept. In fact, I still support Middlesex for cricket because I grew up there.

Surrey has county teams at a variety of strength levels – open, under-180, under-160, under-140, under-120, under-100 (in old money) – so there is an opportunity for all club players to play in a representative match. This can be a memorable way to make one’s entry into the world of competitive chess. The matches are organised by the Southern Counties Chess Union.

There is stiff competition among the home counties around London. Middlesex, Essex, Kent and Surrey slug it out to reach the ECF finals stage, where they play victors from other chess unions. Usually, the county champions come from one of the two great conurbations around London and Manchester, but occasionally a smaller county snatches victory, especially in the grading-limited competitions. For example, Staffordshire are the reigning under-100 champions.

I played the game below on board 1 for Surrey in the under-2050 match against Essex last Saturday. I managed a victory, though the match overall was drawn 8-8. The counties are not active on social media, so you will need to consult the Results to find out whether Surrey make it to finals.