England's open team narrowly missed out on medals at last week's European Team Championships in Budva, Montenegro, but there was new success for 22-year-old Lan Yao, a rising star in women's football. Lan Yao's unbeaten 5.5/8 on the English women's second board earned her the bronze medal, as well as her first international masters standard at men's/open level, and was achieved against a high-class field.
In the final two rounds, Lan Yao drew with former world champion Anna Ushenina of Ukraine, then defeated Sweden's Pia Cramling, the No. 1 woman in Western Europe for decades, by making effective use of her two bishops. Her ratings gain of 26 Fide points means she is now England's No. 1 woman, ahead of popular commentator Jovanka Houska.
Lan Yao learned to play chess at the age of six, trained in Shanghai and performed well at the Girls' World Cup before earning her history degree and MA in education from University College London. Her chess heroes are the Hungarian Polgar sisters, and in addition to winning the British women's title two years in a row, her record also includes draws with GMs Keith Arkell and Danny Gormally, as well as a landslide victory against a strong Russian GM.
For the England open/men's team, rounds six and seven (of nine) brought with them a rare sense of deja vu of the 1980s, the brilliant decade that saw them take silver medals behind the Soviets at three consecutive Olympiads, and gold with only half a minute was denied. game point in Dubai 1986. At the time, chess was being shown on mainstream television as spectators queued to watch a world title match in central London.
England defeated the Netherlands in round seven and then drew 2-2 with co-leaders Germany, before 1.5-2.5 defeats to Serbia and Armenia saw them drop to sixth place.
Serbia, led by two Russian transfers, won gold. It was the country's best result since the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, which used to regularly win an Olympic medal under the leadership of the famous Serbian trio Svetozar Gligoric, Aleksandar Matanovic and Borislav Ivkov.
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Germany, for whom 19-year-old Vincent Keymer broke into the world's top 15, won silver, while Armenia, a small country of three million whose top GM Levon Aronian emigrated to the US, added European bronze to their silver Olympic medals for 2022.
World number 1 Magnus Carlsen took one gold on the individual board with 6.5/8, gained a fraction of a rating point despite some setbacks against 2500-rated opponents, and achieved an impressive final victory in the style of Anatoly Karpov. Carlsen will not play classical chess again this year, but will go to Toronto next week for the final of the online Champions Tour, and then to Uzbekistan where he will defend his World Rapid and Blitz crowns from Boxing Day.
Almost the entire England team performed well, with Nikita Vitiugov sixth among top boards, David Howell fifth among second boards and Luke McShane fourth among fourth boards.
Vitiugov showed calm assurance and almost always seemed to be in control of his position. Howell's deep strategic games focused on a favorable ending in which he could grind like a grandmaster, while McShane, whose 4.5/7 was the best percentage on the team, was resilient and imaginative. Fatigue caught up with Michael Adams in the final round after four weeks of competition at the Over-50 World Cup and the European Championship, as did lack of practice for Ravi Haria, who was selected after a year's absence from tournaments.
England might well have secured a medal if not for Gawain Jones, who has rarely competed since the tragic death of his wife six months ago. Hopefully, Jones will be available again for the biennial World Team Championships and the 180-nation Olympiad in Budapest in 2024. Olympiad medals look out of reach against the heavyweight trio of India, China and the US, while the World Teams issue in which England will compete in 2019 ranked second after Russia, only ten countries have been chosen to participate.
England's problem going forward is that the top four plus Jones are all over 30, with Howell the youngest at 33. Over the past two years, England's new generation in their early twenties has rarely reached grandmaster standards or consistently performed above 2500 . .
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Other recent talents like Yang-Fan Zhou and James Adair gave up serious chess after narrowly failing to become GM. The most likely candidate now is probably Shreyas Royal, 14, who will make his next GM Norm attempt at next week's London Classic.
What could be done? The most influential spark for the English chess explosion of the 1970s and 1980s was undoubtedly Jim Slater's speech at the Hastings opening ceremony in 1972-73, when the financier announced £5,000 for the first British grandmaster and £2,500 for the next five. achieve the title.
Slater's choice of six awards was deliberate, as there were seven obvious candidates at the time and he wanted to create some competition, but not too much. Paradoxically, the only one to miss out was William Hartston, who produced the performance of his life in that Hastings, falling just half a point off the GM norm when he lost his last two games to Bent Larsen and Wolfgang Uhlmann, who held the top two places with Hartston third.
In 2023, General Managers need much more than just the title, although some financial recognition at that level would encourage more talent to continue playing chess seriously beyond their early 20s.
At the moment, the 2022 British champion Harry Grieve is 22 years old and rated 2466, possibly the only Englishman under 25 with a chance of 2600 in the short term. Royal and, replacing the Englishman, the Scottish Frederick Waldhausen Gordon, 13, who already has his first IM standard, are long-distance contenders.
Payouts of £10,000 and £5,000 to the first three English players under 25 to achieve 2,600 ratings could make a significant difference to this bleak forecast over the next decade. The American Samford Fellowships, which have awarded more than $2 million in grants since 1987, have led to more than two dozen high-quality GM careers.
Of course, this is very unlikely to happen. Neither the new government grant of £500,000 nor the English Chess Federation's income from chess trusts could be used in that way, while corporate sponsorship for English chess has dried up since its heyday in the 1980s. But if a sufficiently generous private donor ever comes along, the XXX 2600 Grandmaster Award should be very high on the priority list.
3895: 1 Re8+! Rxe8 2 Qxg7+! Kxg7 3 Nh5+ and 4 Rxh3 victories.
