Quality Chess Blog

Last week’s question was: “Who will win the London Classic?” I expected a clear majority for Magnus Carlsen, and he did indeed top the poll, but it was a narrow win ahead of Levon Aronian. With only 3 rounds completed, it is too early to say who will win the Classic, but Not-Topalov appears a safe bet.

This week I continue my quest to learn all about our readers’ opening repertoires. I already asked what you play against 1.e4, so this week it’s: How do you meet 1.d4? The options that spring to my mind are: King’s Indian Defence, Grünfeld, Nimzo-Indian (plus something against 3.Nf3 and 3.g3), QGA, QGD, Slav, Semi-Slav, or Other.

As ever, please use the comments box to say what you mean by Other, or anything else that’s on your mind.

Boris and I joked to each other about when people would pick up on the fact that we would write more than one book together, something that became very clear to me the moment he presented the material he wanted to go over in the first session we did together.

It happened already on the day that the Forward Chess book was released. There is a comment in the book that refers to “a later volume”. Someone asked me on Facebook if this meant that there would be more books. It does. For a start, we are working on Dynamic Decision Making in Chess. We have talked about the structure of the book and have already recorded Boris’s part of a few games. I am especially keen on the notes to game six in his match in 2011 in Kazan against Alexander Grischuk. At least I am trying to be, because I am currently writing them down!

You may be wondering – does this lead to a delay in Thinking Inside the Box? I have to confess that it will. I am working on many projects; helping out a bit here and there. It fits well with my private circumstances at the moment. I need to build up the energy for tackling this big, big project I have in my head and my notes…

Generally, it is known what a chess player earns for playing in a tournament. The first prize is listed and the appearance fee is usually enough to cover travel and a bit more, with accommodation and food often supplied by the organisers. For lower-ladder GMs such as myself, this is frequently all that is offered, although I get £300 for one tournament I frequently play and £500 for the Danish Championship.

I have always felt blessed that people pay me to play chess. I have never been a devoted professional and the organisers are usually working for free in Northern Europe, because they like chess and the sponsors are entirely philanthropic.

But there are serious players out there as well. People who make their living from playing chess. They go from open tournament to open tournament, struggling to make ends meet.

The best players go from this nomadic existence to a super-league of highly-paid tournaments. In his interview about Norwegian Chess, Topalov explained his relaxed attitude to chess these days as “last prize is $15,000”, which is certainly a better prize than I have ever received…

I talked to a top 20 player once, who said he got £5000 in appearance fee for his latest tournament, but rushed to tell me that this was of course very, very good. Life outside the top tournaments is doable, but it is not gilded.

But what about Magnus Carlsen, World Champion, fashion icon and national hero? Surely this must be good business? Obviously, we would never be able to find out what Anand, Kramnik and Topalov earn, as they live in countries where such information is not easily accessible. But Carlsen lives in Norway, where everything is out in the open.

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Last week’s poll “What’s the matter with Magnus?” ended in a narrow win for “Lack of Motivation” but “Nothing – it’s variance” seemed in the lead for most of the week. Clearly, opinions vary on this question.

This week, big time chess returns to the UK, with the London Classic kicking off on Friday. So an obvious question: Who will win the 2015 London Classic?

Maybe Magnus will show his true power? There are ten stars to chose from, and no weak links in this all-play-all. Note the names are listed with their pairing number: 1-5 will get five Whites, while 6-10 will get only four, just in case that affects your deliberations.

1. Veselin Topalov
2. Alexander Grischuk
3. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave
4. Fabiano Caruana
5. Viswanathan Anand
6. Michael Adams
7. Levon Aronian
8. Magnus Carlsen
9. Hikaru Nakamura
10. Anish Giri

There are plenty of other interesting competitions in London in addition to the Classic, in particular the lavishly-funded British Knockout Chess Championship. My pick of the first-round clashes would be Scottish Number 1 Jonathan Rowson against Quality Chess author Gawain Jones.

Nigel Short unfortunately had to withdraw from the Knockout; his replacement, GM Nick Pert, mentioned that even if he was knocked out in the first round, the £2500 he would win would still be his biggest ever chess prize.

The Knockout games start at 10.30 am on Tuesday.

There is a conversation I have once a week, sometimes once a fortnight. It is with a player or the parent of a talented youngster, who would like to have private tuition, either short term or continuously. At the moment this is not something I am ready to do for the payment people are willing to pay. There are just too many projects I need to bring to completion.

But this article is not supposed to be about whining, but a longer reply to the last person who asked me to help her daughter make decisions better and faster. It is, in short, a guide to using my books.

The first point I want to make is the most fundamental one, and thus also the one that is most far reaching and most difficult to implement.

In order to improve your chess abilities, you will have to think in a different way.

There are other ways to improve in chess: physical form (not greatly effective, but it does a lot for your health!), openings (they go out of date and you forget them, still a good position is easier to play), memorising theoretical endings (worthwhile doing, but this needs updating too), calculating faster (similar to sprint training for physical athletes, something you lose if you don’t maintain it) and others.

All of these are worth doing and if you are ambitious, you are probably doing some of them and aware that you should be doing the others as well!

But if you can improve the way you think chess, you will really get ahead.

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We sent Vassilios Kotronias Grandmaster Repertoire 6A – Beating the Anti-Sicilians away to the printer a while ago. Despite the impending doom, commonly referred to as Christmas, the book will be out soon – 9th December to be exact (and a week before on Forward Chess as usual).

Andrew and Nikos are working around the clock, Andrew during the day and Nikos during the night. They are almost done with Playing 1.e4 e5 – A Classical Repertoire, which will be yet another repertoire book for Black based on the Breyer. It seems this is rather popular at the moment! We are hoping this will be the best of the lot, but the competition is stiff.

We are also quite close to finishing Yuri Razuvaev’s book in the classic series, Key Concepts of Gambit Play. It will not go to the printer that quickly though, as John will proofread it and he has to finish his own book first!

This is what we are doing right at the moment. A bit down the line, we will have Mikhalevski: Grandmaster Repertoire 19 – Beating Minor Openings, which will be the final numbered book in the GM Repertoire series, if we exclude A’s, B’s and so on. We will also get around to editing the final book in Tal’s Best Games series, The Invincible. We are working on other projects of course, such as Kotronias on the King’s Indian 4, with the series finishing with volume 5. And no, I will not go through the content of any of these books at this moment.

For a more detailed publishing schedule, maybe the future will provide!?

Two weeks ago the poll predicted a Russian victory in the European Team Championship in Reykjavík. You were right about that, so your overwhelming vote for “The rest is a matter of technique” as the most annoying chess-writing cliché is probably right too.

The comments also produced plenty of interesting “Others”. Too many to note all of them individually, but a couple in particular caught my eye.

Starting with “Better is…” is annoying and unnatural. I must have used this phrase a thousand times without noticing the problem, but I see your point.

“Strategical” is not a word, claims Wulfgar – I would say that if people use it, then it’s a word, but it seems to mean the same as “strategic” while pointlessly using two extra letters.

For this week’s poll I will return to Iceland. World Champion Magnus Carlsen had, by his own stratospheric standards, a poor tournament – a TPR of ‘only’ 2670. This was the third-best TPR in the Norwegian team, after Jon Ludwig Hammer and Aryan Tari. Firstly, congratulations to my 4ncl teammate Aryan who, at age 16, became Norway’s 12th Grandmaster.

But what’s the matter with Magnus? Options include “Lack of motivation” – he is already the World Champion, and has had the highest-ever rating.

Or maybe he prefers playing for himself, rather than a team. If you don’t believe there’s such a thing as a ‘great team player’, then consider Gabriel Sargissian, who delivered a 2800 performance for Armenia, as is traditional.

Or maybe there’s nothing wrong with Magnus, and it’s just natural variation – he’s not a machine.

I will include “Other” to cover everything from ‘distractions in his personal life’ to the fact that his star sign is Sagittarius.

The Top Chess Engine Championship is ongoing. The final is not surprisingly Stockfish against Komodo. As I write, round 58 is under way. Komodo is leading with four wins against one.

It can be viewed here: http://tcec.chessdom.com/live.php

In an earlier round (22), something that is hard to explain happened. Stockfish had a winning position and misplayed it! Gone is the illusion that “you have to be a computer to win this”, or at least it has been augmented a bit.

On top of this there was something to feed conspiracy theories. Here is what a source close to the match said:

“After 53.b6 the online broadcast stopped. The reason it stopped was a technical glitch. There are
two computers running the TCEC event: a 24-core machine runs the engines, and the tournament program cutechess-cli, a webserver. The game playing machine had a problem uploading the pgn file to the webserver (that’s my assessment of what happened). The live broadcast went offline in a position which seemed like an easy win for SF (sf was showing +7 and komodo was also showing a high score). Then the game was drawn; offline…and out of view.”

Indeed Stockfish did mess up a winning position, which led to some Stockfish fans to conclude that there was foul play involved. I enjoy the sound of “computer cheating in computer tournament” or “human cheats in computer tournament” or whatever the Daily Mail will be able to make out of it, looking for another scandal in chess to write about. (Recently an English player changed to Wales – for the second time in his life – and somehow this was seen as a major scandal in chess, while no one had actually noticed, or had cared once they did notice… Best of luck to Nigel of course, but that it should be a scandal is hard to understand.)

To me the most interesting to me is the question, “Why did Stockfish mess up?”, not “Did the Knights Templar hide the descendent of Christ?” or whatever…

Here is the position.

TCEC Season 8 – Superfinal http://tcec.chessdom.com (22), 11.11.2015

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 b6 4.g3 Ba6 5.Nbd2 c5 6.e4 cxd4 7.e5 Ng4 8.h3 Nh6 9.Bg2 Nc6 10.0–0 Be7 11.Qa4 Bb7 12.Nxd4 Nxd4 13.Bxb7 Rb8 14.Be4 Qc7 15.Qd1 Nhf5 16.Re1 Qxe5 17.Nb3 Rd8 18.Bf4 Qf6 19.Qd3 Bc5 20.Rad1 Nxb3 21.axb3 Nd4 22.Kg2 Nc6 23.h4 a5 24.Qe2 Qe7 25.Qh5 g6 26.Qf3 Nd4 27.Qc3 Qf6 28.Bd5 Bb4 29.Qd3 0–0 30.Be5 Qf5 31.Qxd4 Bxe1 32.Rxe1 d6 33.Bf6 e5 34.Qxb6 Qxf6 35.Qxa5 Kh8 36.b4 g5 37.Rh1 gxh4 38.Rxh4 Qg6 39.Qa3 f5 40.Qf3 Qg7 41.b5 Rb8 42.b4 Rf6 43.Rh5 Qg6 44.Qe2 f4 45.Be4 Qg7 46.Qf3 Rh6 47.Rxh6 Qxh6 48.Qe2 fxg3 49.fxg3 Qg5 50.c5 Rg8 51.Qe1 dxc5 52.bxc5 Rd8 53.b6 Rd2+ 54.Kg1 Qd8 55.Qe3 Rb2 56.Bf3 Rb1+ 57.Kg2 Rb2+ 58.Kh3 Qf6 59.b7 Qe6+ 60.g4 h5 61.c6 hxg4+ 62.Bxg4 Qd6 63.Bf5 Qf6

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