Now and again this site alludes to my brief glory days as a chess player, or at least an avid chess follower. So yesterday I was pleased to be invited by Grandmaster Nigel Short to the 2012 London Chess Classic at Olympia.
This huge event features all sorts of different chess events going on in parallel, but the centrepiece is the Classic Competition involving nine of the world's top players in an all-play-all event. Here they are.
Their games each day involve eight players in pairs, with the ninth taking a rest and helping with the commentary. They sit in silence in a big auditorium with a sizeable crowd of overwhelmingly male chess fans eruditely watching the moves on large screens above their heads. The games each usually start with some brisk moves as the players move through familiar opening sequences then slow down as deeper strategies and schemes unfold. They each have 2 hours for 40 moves, followed by 1 hour for 20 moves, followed by 15 minutes + 30 seconds per move for the rest of the game. So until any final scramble (if it gets that far) the whole game can last six hours of intense solitary concentration.
While the games unfold live (if that is the right word to describe an almost immobile scene, enlivened only by a player now and then getting up to have a brief wander round) on stage, in adjacent commentary rooms Grandmasters explain to people what is going on in each game and try to guess what the next moves will be. Computer technology makes this a dynamic and lively process. Nigel Short himself - former World Champion contender and still a powerful top 75 player - is a witty and far-sighted commentator, off-handedly spotting deeply lurking possibilities and weaknesses far beyond anything the rest of us can begin to fathom.
Nigel kindly introduced me to American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, now one of the world's very top players and contender here at London. Hikaru chatted amiably about the way he had beaten leading woman player Judit Polgar earlier in the event. In a complicated but very open endgame involving pieces but not many pawns on both sides, Polgar had not seen coming a subtle checkmating pattern and had to resign when the ghastly truth suddenly dawned on her. Play through the game here, and then marvel at how Nakumura somehow visualised the final position quite a view moves previously when it just was not obvious or even imaginable - except by him.
Yesterday I arrived some time into the round 6 games, soaring world number one Magnus Carlsen from Norway was patiently manoeuvring against Polgar. Play through the game until you get to move 19: Nigel Short was sneering at the Polgar knight on square g6 (which looked OK to me) but, he said, was doing nothing useful.
As the game unfolds Carlsen too seems to be doing nothing much, but doing it well. By move 33 after various exchanges Polgar looks to be a solid pawn ahead with a dynamic position. Yet Carlsen suddenly pushes forward, establishing his knight and rook around the Black king. When his other rook arrives in support, Black gets squished to death. The Black knight is stuck.
Polgar resigned, as in the final position there was no way to avoid the white pawns moving up the board followed by an exchange of rooks/knights, leaving White to get a new queen and quickly mop up. It all seems so smooth and inevitable when you play the game back afterwards. But the profound sense of position and sharp tactical judgment needed by Carlsen to achieve that are supreme, and show why he is now right at the top of the world's chess tree.
Anyway, if you have got this far you might as well remind yourself of the stellar 1956 game in which 13-year old Bobby Fischer defeated Donald Byrne with a staggering sequence of tactical moves culminating in the famous if not miraculous queen sacrifice 17 ...Be6, after which White collapses under withering cross-fire from Black's minor pieces. The Game of the Century.
As Fischer (maybe) once said, words applying to chess but also to diplomacy and many other professions: "There are no good players - only good moves".
