Chess- England 0 Hungary 1

This was the scene this afternoon on Southsea seafront where Zoltan was taking on allcomers.

Quick game, five minutes, I said. 

Is okay. I play quicker than you, he said, giving away the advantage by playing with black. Fair do's to him.

His d6 reply to my customary d4 was unusual, as was his subsequent row of five pawns on his third rank. It was real rapid-fire gun-slinging stuff and he made the first blunder.

I was in cruise control, or at least carrying the tray of drinks across the slippery floor.

I'm not sure how I gave back the advantage. Twice I, very sportingly, stuck with moving a piece I'd touched when he might have let me off but if I'm going to win I want to win proper.

It would have been insulting to ask for the draw in an endgame where he still had a bishop to my one pawn advantage.

We shook hands after maybe five minutes under the unforgiving sun.

Are you here next week?

If it's a nice day, I'm here next week.

You're Hungarian.

How you know I am Hungarian?

Because you're called Zoltan.

 

So, first game across the board in many, many years. I very nearly had him, too, but having missed him once I might not get the same chance again. He's probably any good. 

 

Bodhana Sivanandan

 There was something unearthly about the way 10yo Bodhana Sivanandan looked at the three passable opponents she beat, as was inevitable, all at the same time on Chess Masters. It wasn't arrogance and it wasn't insouciant. She knew but there was something sinister in her innocent knowing. German might be able to concoct a word for it but the English language doesn't have one.

One might have thought that chess required some years of study, of building a database of opening theory and strategy but she hasn't had time for that.

One's sympathy has to be with her opponent here,

 who doesn't do much wrong and is clearly any good but is left out of time and facing checkmate while Bodhana has 45 seconds of her 3 minutes left.

There's something matter-of-fact about how she whips through the process of winning, briefly and intensely thoughtful once or twice but mainly dispatching the result as if it were a dance routine she knew.

Such precocious talent needs looking after because imbalances can occur in other parts of what we were once told was a triangle of life meaning something like social, intellectual and emotional. Bobby Fischer might have been better served by not being quite as good at chess.

 

Meanwhile, with my 2000+ ratings at Blitz and Rapid forever banked at Lichess, I've restored 1700+ at Bullet and 1800 at Classical and that's good for me. Maybe one day I'll inch one of those latter two to a better all-time high point but we all have our limits.

Thalia Holmes wins BBC Chess Masters

Not having been a devotee of Strictly Come Dancing, Bake Off, the ice-skating show or any other such thing, I wasn't expecting too much from Chess Masters but, as ever, I'm happy to be proved wrong.

The dense mixture of short time limit games, puzzles and simultaneous games against Grand Masters made for a rigorous challenge but one of the dozen of them had to win. Easily the most terrifying of those was the inevitability of being thrashed by 9yo Bodhana Sivanandan while she did the same to two others but one only had to last longer than one or other of those did.

I'd made Caitlin Reid favourite early doors, being the most impressive in the first group but soon put Thalia alongside her after she came through the second.

One can't help but notice the diversity of the chosen participants that covered male, female, ethnicity, age most diligently when, one can't help but notice, most of the best cherss players in the world are male and, now, aged 18-40. But it was by no means a championship. It was 'representative' in the same way that I represented the Civil Service without being demonstrably among its top 16 players.

They weren't all that good. I very much doubt if I'd have won it but I'd like to think I'd have been better than a few of them. What it showed, at least at such a level, is that chess games are lost by mistakes more than won by superior know-how. Even in the final, the resilient 63yo Richie had the opportunity to checkmate in, I think, three moves but he missed it, ended in deep time trouble and Thalia effectively got lucky.

It was all about 'pressure' and who didn't blow it. I didn't think Caitlin would, she looked like the cool, class act but she did. So it was a bit of an old-fashioned Grand National in which one needed to stay the distance and be lucky, a big part of which is dependent on others making crucial mistakes.

I don't know if it will go round again into another series. I'm not sure that chess can get by on such thin pretexts as the glitz, glamour and noisiness of Strictly but it was worth a go. Well played, the chess.

And I'm glad to report that I've got back to 1800 at the 2 mins+ 1 second discipline at Lichess, am safely above that at 'Classical' and those 2000+ ratings at the time limits in between are banked and not to be risked so, as far as chess goes, everything's right with the world.

Chess Masters

 Anything and everything will get its turn at being a 'Reality' TV show if it waits long enough. There was the increasingly horrible Big Brother, 'business' in The Apprentice, then cookery, dancing, needlework, Traitors. It took a while for the brainstorming sessions to find chess but they will try anything once and see if it flies.

I didn't have high hopes of it but gave it a go. Sue Perkins is brought in as somebody vaguely 'highbrow', perhaps having won Maestro on which she was judged to have waved her arms most stylishly conducting an orchestra but I don't think Claudio Abbado lost any sleep over it. It also had David Howells- someone who genuinely can play- selling himself for the money on offer like Lang Lang surprisingly did in The Piano. Or perhaps they both did it through dedication to their art, for the legacy benefit of others.

 

It wasn't as bad as it might have been. The players all have to have epithet nicknames like Killer Queen and, as is customary, a 'back story' if at all possible. It's never allowed to appear dull for a moment. Even though Round 1 was only with 10 minutes each on the clock there was no way we'd be shown a game in real time. It was just an opening position, a crucial position and the end with players apparently engaging in friendly conversation during such a quick-play discipline. I've never played in such an atmosphere even with 90 minutes on the clock and Fischer and Spassky didn't in Rekjavik either. It was more about personality than positional analysis and yet one got an idea of what had happened, could take sides and it served as entertainment.

Six players started out in programme 1 and only one was eliminated. Another goes next week after which I think another six turn up to provide eight 1/4 finalists. Of this first batch of six I'm expecting the most successful of them to be female.

You won't learn any more about how to play chess watching this than watching Match of the Day would make you a better footballer. I can't see it gathering great audience figures beyond the likes of me and I'm not part of any obvious demographic that any marketer would aim at.

It would be interesting to know what ratings the participants have or could achieve at LiChess, officially with FIDE or anywhere else because I'm not convinced they're that good. Maybe I could have been a contender except I don't have a personality to sell.

Reality TV hasn't done poetry yet. I'd be even worse at that-

What is it you like about poetry? 

I never said I did like it.

And how often do you write poems?

Hardly ever.

 

But chess is on the telly for the first time since Kasparov-Short in 1993 as best as the telly can by now accommodate it. It's marginally a good thing but in the end it matters little whether it's chess, origami, composing an opera or making a scientific discovery that such shows are themed around. You get largely the same show whatever it is.

World Chess - Gukesh

Maybe even I could have won it from there and it was certainly worth ploughing on with a pawn advantage when the computer analysis was showing the draw at 99% but I would never have got myself into that position at 6.5-6.5 in a best of 14.

Ding was at a big time disadvantage but offering the exchange of rooks was clearly a brainstorm and that's precisely what Gukesh was playing on in the hope of. So, 18 years old and World Champion. There's not really much else for him to do already but he's not the best player in the world so maybe he can aim at being that.

The big drama clashed with the 12.55  from Warwick where another odds-on favourite got badly turned over.

 

I am, though, at an all-time high in three of the four disciplines at Lichess, having reached 1807 at Bullet and so it might be Classical for a long time now to try to put that at a personal best, too.