Boy Becomes Youngest-Ever US Chess Grandmaster

13-year-old Samuel Sevian wants to eventually be world champion

By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff

Posted Nov 28, 2014 4:00 PM CST

(Newser) – Sam Sevian likes watching hockey and basketball and hates doing chores, the Boston Globe reported in March, making the 13-year-old sound like pretty much every other American teen boy. But most American teen boys don’t have the title of chess grandmaster under their belt, an honor Sam earned last week at a St. Louis tournament, making him the youngest US grandmaster ever, AFP reports. Sam, who trains with chess guru Garry Kasparov, won all four games he played, elevating him over the 2,500-point mark needed for the title; the previous youngest-ever US grandmaster was Ray Robson, who nabbed that designation in October 2009 just shy of his 15th birthday, notes the US Chess Federation. “He really outplayed his opponents in three games. But the fourth, it was really back and forth,” Sam’s father, Armen, tells AFP, adding that his son is the sixth-youngest grandmaster in the world.

The California teen is used to winning: When he was just 8, he became the youngest person ever in the US to become an official “chess expert,” and in 2009, he became the country’s youngest “national master.” He’s been playing since he was 5, and he and his dad are the only ones in the family who play, the San Jose Mercury News reported in 2010. “Every attempt to teach [Sam’s younger sister] to play chess fails,” Armen told the paper. He sometimes wonders if his son’s passion will pay off. “I actually told Sam, ‘Maybe we should do something else,'” Armen told the Globe. “But that doesn’t go well with Sam.” The teen’s next goal: to get to 2,600 points so he can compete in more-elite tournaments and someday become world champion. “First, I would need to improve my game,” he tells AFP. “My confidence level is high. This [win] definitely helps.”

Inside the Big-Money World of College Chess

By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff

Posted May 3, 2014 3:15 PM CDT

(Newser) – Football and basketball aren’t the only college competitions playing with serious cash. Chess may not have the national spotlight athletics does, but these days, the money behind it is nothing to sniff at. In 2011, a four-time women’s world chess champion asked Texas Tech for $1 million in funding for her chess program, Webster University’s student newspaper reported last month. Susan Polgar didn’t get the deal—but Webster, the St. Louis school where she now works (and to which she took her entire team), says it spends $635,000 per year on chess, not including scholarships for players.

And this is at a school that doesn’t give athletic scholarships, the Washington Post notes. The University of Texas-Dallas, another big player, last year spent some $691,000, including scholarships, it says. These figures don’t faze the professor behind the chess program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, a frequent winner of chess’s own Final Four. “It is the level of funding you need these days to have a really top-notch chess program,” he says. Indeed, since Polgar came on, Webster recently won its second title in two years, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. But a college affordability expert wonders: “Are we just starting another version of what’s happened in the football or basketball arena? I think we are, even though the stakes are smaller.”

Eye patches

From the first page of an article by Fred Reinfeld, ‘At What Age is a Chess Master at his Best?’, on pages 249-253 of CHESS, 14 March 1936:

‘Teichmann, who had only one eye, was famous both for his laziness and for the rather large percentage of blunders in his games. My impression of Teichmann’s play underwent a radical change when, through a mishap in the Syracuse, 1934 tournament, I was forced to play my last game with a patch over one eye. I have spent many a pleasant time at the chess board, but never have I endured four such agonizing hours as in that game where I had the use of only one eye. Since then I have had a tremendous admiration for Teichmann, and my vivid realization of his dreadful handicap has enabled me to understand his readiness to take a premature draw. The chronicle of human achievement does not include any more heroic deed than Teichmann’s first prize in one of the strongest tournaments in chess history (Carlsbad, 1911), with his fine victories in this protracted contest over Alekhine, Nimzowitsch, Schlechter, Rubinstein, Tartakower, Kostić, Spielmann – to mention only the most outstanding rivals.’

An illustration by W.H. Cozens on page 316 of the November 1961 BCM:

Another player who had occasion to wear an eye patch was Emanuel Lasker, during his autumn 1909 contest against Dawid Janowsky; see the photograph in our article Lasker v Janowsky, Paris, 1909.

Lasker had undergone an operation on his right eyelid, as reported on page 407 of La Stratégie, November 1909:

‘Le Dr. E. Lasker, bien que handicapé par les suites d’une opération subie à la paupière de l’oeil droit, a brillamment maintenu sa renommée en gagnant sept parties contre une perdue et deux nulles.’

IT’S YOUR MOVE, CHARLEMAGNE

THE EIGHT By Katherine Neville.

In this first month of the first year of a kinder, gentler America we have a novel that is a longer, knottier version of ”The Maltese Falcon.” It’s the story of a quest for Charlemagne’s chess set, known as the Montglane Service, and the decoding of its ancient curse by a computer jockette named Catherine Velis. To put yourself in the proper frame of mind for this review, I suggest you contemplate Robert Benchley’s essay ”What I Learned in College,” in which he said that he knew Charlemagne did something in A.D. 800 but for the life of him he could never remember what it was.

The contemporary story opens in New York in 1972 with Catherine being assigned by her company to set up a communications system for OPEC – a job that her namesake creator, the author and former computer expert Katherine Neville, actually did. Before leaving for Algiers she attends an international chess match at which the British grand master is murdered. This and a visit to a fortune teller provoke the question, ”Have you ever heard of the Montglane Service?” Everyone in the book asks this question of everyone else and the reaction is always the same: people turn ”quite gray,” stagger backward and speak through gritted teeth.

The historical story within the story opens in France in 1790 with the nuns of Montglane Abbey digging up the buried chess set to save it from revolutionaries. The pieces are distributed to various nuns, including the novice Mireille, who takes hers to Paris where her guardian, the painter Jacques-Louis David, buries them in his garden. Meanwhile, the Abbess of Montglane takes the concealed chessboard and goes to Russia to visit her girlhood friend, Catherine the Great, and young Mireille embarks on a People-magazine association with all the great figures of the French Revolution – Talleyrand, Robespierre, Marat, Napoleon – all of whom have heard of the Montglane Service and long to crack the code that will reveal the secret of world power.

From eavesdropping on legendary historical figures in these fly-on-the-wall scenes, the reader is regularly yanked back to the present to follow the fortunes of Catherine in Algiers where a spy story is unfolding, complete with secret police, kidnappings and the reappearance of the sexy Russian chess master, Solarin, whom she met in New York. The idea in all this backing-and-forthing is to create a mystical merge file, so to speak, between Catherine and her 18th-century counterpart Mireille, who also ended up in Algeria, where she roamed through the Sahara eating whatever her peregrine falcon caught whilst in pursuit of the hot chess pieces and the great mystery therein. Some of the historical sections are fun, especially the vivid portrait of the evil Marat dripping pus from his hideous sores, but when Mireille murders him in his bathtub and lets her look-alike friend Charlotte Corday go to the guillotine in her place, my suspicion is confirmed that this is a far, far sillier book than anything I have read in a long time.

It should be sold with an attached pencil on a string, like the original crossword puzzle books, so that the reader can work out all the codes, anagrams and encrypted messages that keep cropping up. The title comes from – among other things – the fourth day of the fourth month, the birthday that Catherine supposedly shares with Charlemagne, and the fact that Catherine and Mireille both have figure-8 marks on their palms. The author also tosses in some square roots (8 is the square root of 64, the number of chess pieces in a set), and launches into an analysis of the relationship between music and math. ”It was Pythagoras who discovered that the base of the Western music scale was the octave because a plucked string divided in half would give the same sound exactly eight tones higher than one twice as long,” she lectures, and anyone who can’t hear the supercilious bleat of the computer nerd in that is as deaf as a post.

When not sounding like a cross between a DOS manual and a State Department briefing book, Ms. Neville’s writing founders on the shoals of the overplotted thriller with passages like: ”What was this formula Hermanold wanted? Who was the woman with the pigeons, and how had she known where Solarin could find me to return my briefcase? What business did Solarin have in New York? If Saul was last seen on a stone slab, how had he wound up in the East River? And finally, what had all this to do with me?”

Given all the historical personages the author whistles in, one more won’t hurt. Nicolas Boileau, the 17th-century French literary critic, gave writers a piece of advice that Ms. Neville could use: ”Make not your tale of accidents too full / too much variety will make it dull / Achilles’ rage alone, when wrought with skill /Abundantly does a whole ‘Iliad’ fill.”

Drawing

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/15/books/it-s-your-move-charlemagne.html

Vladimir Putin’s Chess-Master Nemesis; Garry Kasparov, the Man Who Would Be King

By STEVEN LEE MYERS 

Photo

Garry Kasparov signing autographs in Lusaka, Zambia, where he was campaigning in July.

Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, put his head down, hunched his shoulders and walked hurriedly down the carpeted corridor of the Sands Cotai Central, a labyrinthine new complex on reclaimed land in Macau. Downstairs were two of the world’s most lucrative casinos and retailers like Saint Laurent Paris and Fabio Caviglia. There were restaurants, spas and an array of theme-park attractions from DreamWorks, including a daily parade through the lobby with characters from “Shrek,” “Madagascar” and “Kung Fu Panda.” Here on the fourth floor, though, hundreds of boys and girls from across Asia had just wrapped up their matches in a chess tournament. Spilling into the corridor, many of them gaped at Kasparov barreling by, as if Shrek himself had wandered up to the wrong floor. That was why he was rushing, he explained, when I managed to catch up to him as he turned toward a bank of elevators. “If you stop,” he said, “you’ll be there for 30 minutes.” He did not sound angry, just matter of fact. “Everyone circles around. They want pictures.”

Kasparov, who at 51 wears his increasingly gray hair cropped short, had just left a luncheon in a smaller room nearby. In attendance were V.I.P.’s representing numerous national chess federations. On Aug. 11, they and others will gather in Tromso, Norway, to elect the president of the sport’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale des Échecs, or FIDE (pronounced FEE-day). Kasparov, who surprised the chess world when he announced his candidacy last fall, is an intense man, impatient and not inclined to waste his time with anything extraneous, but his allies are encouraging him to ease up in this regard, now that he is trying to win over those who view him as a polarizing figure. Kasparov circled the luncheon room like a politician on the rubber-chicken circuit, skipping his own lunch and stopping at the round tables to greet individual delegates. Once everyone else had left, he sat down and tallied the votes he thought he could count on — Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan — and those he could not. “Russia, India, China,” he went on. “You can see how it is.”

Chess at the international level is populated with men and women of genius and outsize egos. As a result, this year’s quadrennial exercise to elect the leader of FIDE has become as bitter as only a fight inside an arcane international organization can be. There are 181 countries or territories that have their own chess federations, and 176 of them are eligible to vote in Tromso when it hosts the biennial Chess Olympiad (an event mired in controversy because of a dispute with FIDE over the qualification of, among others, Russia’s women’s team). The campaign for those votes has provoked accusations of deceit and bribery. It has also revived decades-old personal feuds and controversies over everything from how the federation is governed to the murder of a journalist in 1998 and the wisdom of playing chess with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011. “The elections, I think, are the dirtiest we’ll ever see,” Ignatius Leong, an influential figure in Asian chess, told me in Macau.

The campaign has become something much larger too — in large part because of Kasparov’s candidacy. Kasparov is a voluble and articulate critic of the country he considered home until he chose self-exile last year, and his campaign has turned into a new battleground for two old rivals, one who once dominated chess and another, Vladimir Putin, who now dominates Russia. Putin’s government has thrown its diplomatic resources against Kasparov and in support of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, FIDE’s incumbent president. In the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March and the downing last month of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the fight over FIDE’s leadership has become a proxy for a broader debate over freedom and democracy, over the future of chess and over the place of Putin’s Russia in the international order.

Kasparov’s retreat through the hotel corridor had an unforeseen tactical flaw: He had to wait for an elevator. A boy from Vietnam had followed him and, pen in hand, shyly asked in broken English if Kasparov would sign his red team jersey. Kasparov demurred, saying the boy’s pen was not the kind that would work on the cloth. Mine did, so I handed it to him. He huffed but finally scribbled his name below the jersey’s team logo. The elevator doors opened just as a few more players had gathered, precisely as he warned would happen. The one lucky kid bounded away ecstatically.

“Garry Kasparov is a threat to the unity of chess,” Kirsan Ilyumzhinov told me in June when I met him in his office, located amid drab Soviet apartment blocks in southeastern Moscow. His office is sparse compared with those of most Russian officials, who tend to favor expensive furniture and ostentatious displays of gifts, awards and political fealty in the form of photographs featuring Vladimir Putin. Instead, Ilyumzhinov has photographs of Kalmykia, the remote, sparsely populated Russian republic where he served as president from 1993 until 2010, and of the Dalai Lama — Kalmykia being the only Buddhist region in Europe. Ilyumzhinov, who is a year older than Kasparov, is handsome, soft-spoken and inordinately polite to a visitor. He seems, in person, not nearly as eccentric as the reputation that precedes him, one based largely on his repeated accounts of what happened to him one night in September 1997.

Photo

Kasparov with the board of the Zambian Chess Federation and several zone representatives. Credit Charlie Shoemaker/Getty, for The New York Times

It was a Wednesday, and he sensed a spectral presence on the balcony of his apartment in Moscow (almost all regional leaders in Russia keep a home in the capital). When he went to investigate, aliens in yellow bodysuits transported him to an enormous spaceship and then to another planet. They did not talk much, but he emphasized that he needed to get back soon, because he had a flight to Kalmykia the next day. They assured him not to worry; there was plenty of time. In Ilyumzhinov’s various retellings, his tale remains remarkably consistent, and he has stood by it, despite skeptical and amused questioning from journalists. Over the years, he has expounded on his views of extraterrestrial life, comparing them to the belief in Jesus Christ or Buddha. He also has opined that chess itself comes from a higher plane, either God or outer space: It certainly is not of this world.

Like Kasparov, Ilyumzhinov was a chess prodigy, becoming Kalmykia’s champion when he was 14, but he never reached similar heights in international competition. After high school, he worked in a factory until he was conscripted by the Red Army. Following his time in the military, he returned to a factory job before gaining acceptance to the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the university that prepped the Soviet Union’s diplomats and provided him with business-world contacts. When the country fell apart, Ilyumzhinov ended up the owner of a network of businesses and a very rich man, though as is the case with many of Russia’s oligarchs, the exact source and size of his wealth is opaque. Ilyumzhinov was elected Kalmykia’s president in the heady years of Russia’s new democracy, running on the argument that, as a rich man, he would not succumb to corruption. In fact, as many regional leaders in Russia in the 1990s did, he treated his homeland as his personal fief, neutering the local legislature and controlling the media. In 1998, one of his aides was convicted in the murder of an opposition journalist and political activist, Larisa Yudina. Earlier this year Sergei Mitrokhin, the chairman of the Yabloko Party, the biggest liberal party in the 1990s, cited the murder as a reason to oppose Ilyumzhinov’s re-election to FIDE, describing his Kalmykia presidency as “a disgusting merger of authoritarian rule, corruption and crime.”

Ilyumzhinov has presided over FIDE since 1995. After an internal revolt following a congress in Moscow — at one point during the assembly, the former world champion Anatoly Karpov was supposedly threatened with having his legs broken — Ilyumzhinov emerged as a compromise choice to take over the presidency. He was backed by Karpov then and has been re-elected ever since, despite what his many critics say is an erratic, even scandalous tenure that has undermined the sport’s international prestige. Ilyumzhinov blurred the lines between the presidencies of Kalmykia and FIDE, traveling the world to promote chess and the republic simultaneously. He befriended Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, for example, and one of his first acts as FIDE’s president was to schedule the 1996 world championship in Baghdad at a time when Iraq faced punishing international sanctions. The United States warned one contestant, Gata Kamsky, then a resident, that playing a match there might lead to civil and criminal charges against him. Under enormous pressure, Ilyumzhinov moved the match to Kalmykia’s small capital, Elista. Envisioning a new era of international attention for Kalmykia, Ilyumzhinov then built a Chess City on Elista’s outskirts, including a glass-domed palace intended as a venue for matches and tournaments that he had almost solitary power to organize.

Ilyumzhinov’s forays into international affairs as FIDE’s president — and his contacts with some of the world’s most reviled leaders in times of crisis — have raised the question of whether he serves as an envoy for the Kremlin. In June 2011, he arrived unexpectedly in Libya’s capital, Tripoli, and met Qaddafi nearly three months into the NATO air war there. (In 2004, he placed FIDE’s championship in Tripoli, where he introduced a controversial new knockout format; only five of the world’s top 20 players attended.) The two men sat down for a game of chess, broadcast on state television as evidence that Qaddafi was still in charge. Ilyumzhinov offered him a draw. He told me that Qaddafi asked him to deliver messages to Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and other leaders of NATO nations, offering to hold a constitutional referendum as a compromise to end the war. It was Qaddafi’s last public appearance before he was captured by rebels and killed in October 2011.

“Everybody who supports chess is my friend,” Ilyumzhinov said, showing me photographs to make his point: the Dalai Lama and the pope, as well as Syria’s embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, whom he visited in May 2012, in the midst of the country’s civil war. According to Ilyumzhinov, he and Assad opened a chess school together that was later bombed by the Syrian rebels. “Chess is beyond politics,” he said, not very convincingly. That, he added, “is why Kasparov is so dangerous. This is why it’s necessary to fight him. This is what the chess world was afraid of: Kasparov started mixing chess with politics.”

In the world of chess — and it is bigger than you might think, with an estimated 600 million regular players, according to a survey commissioned by FIDE — Kasparov is a living legend, whose fame eclipses that of the reigning champion, Magnus Carlsen. I heard him repeatedly referred to in this way by players, delegates and even Ilyumzhinov. Kasparov became the sport’s youngest world champion in 1985, when he was 22 (a mark that has since been lowered), a woolly-haired challenger up against the Soviet Union’s chess establishment and its reigning champion for the previous decade, Anatoly Karpov. Among those watching the tense finale on Soviet television on Nov. 9, 1985, was Vladimir Putin, a young major in the K.G.B., stationed in a small intelligence outpost in the East German city of Dresden. According to a memoir written by one of Putin’s colleagues, the entire cadre of Soviet agents and military men stationed there rooted for Karpov, thinking even then that Kasparov was “an extremely impudent upstart,” which was exactly how the propaganda machine of the Soviet Union described him. The author thought Putin showed “dangerous sympathy” for Kasparov. Times have changed, clearly.

Chess has always occupied a disproportionate place in the Russian psyche — as much as any other game or sport, it forms part of the national identity. The Bolsheviks, who overthrew the last czar in 1917, initially disparaged the game as bourgeois, but some were ardent players, Lenin among them. According to “The Immortal Game,” by David Shenk, the Soviets saw the political and ideological value of the sport, “turning the popular but ragtag nature of public chess play into one of the self-identifying marks of emerging Soviet culture.” The Soviets created a system of academies that resulted in their domination of international chess for the second half of the 20th century. Only Bobby Fischer’s upset victory over Boris Spassky in 1972 — a televised Cold War drama — interrupted the Soviet Union’s reign until the state itself collapsed, and the sport, like nearly everything else in Russia, lurched through a decade of crises.

Kasparov was a product of the Soviet sports machine and, almost from the beginning, a rebel against it. He began playing seriously at 7 at the Young Pioneers Palace in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. By the time he was 13, he was already traveling abroad, representing the Soviet Union internationally. In his memoirs — and he is a prolific author of autobiographies and books on chess — Kasparov describes his rise through the chess ranks as a series of struggles against a sclerotic Soviet chess bureaucracy and against FIDE, which, he wrote in “Unlimited Challenge,” published in the United States in 1990, had “legalized tyranny in the world of chess.” He was convinced that the Soviet chess federation conspired with FIDE to block his ultimately successful challenge against Karpov, whom he described as “just the man for a system which elevated to the skies everything that helped to affirm its own ideological fetishes, even in sport.”

Admired in Russia not just as an intellectual but also as an athlete, whose sturdy build has diminished only slightly over time, Kasparov had the kind of fame that allowed him to immerse himself in the roiling politics of the time. He strongly, and publicly, backed Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to open the Soviet Union in the 1980s — and then later criticized him for backsliding. After the abortive coup in August 1991 hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kasparov threw his support behind Boris Yeltsin and Russia’s new generation of democrats. By 1996, though, he had broken with Yeltsin and, at least early on, supported one of his challengers in that year’s election.

Three years earlier, he did something similar in chess, splitting from FIDE at a time when he was its greatest champion. Kasparov organized a championship match in London against the British grandmaster Nigel Short under the auspices of a new organization called the Professional Chess Association, which raised the $2.5 million prize fund through sponsorships. Kasparov won, but FIDE promptly expelled him, and the chess world endured an unseemly rift until Ilyumzhinov brokered a reunification match in 2006. Many have never forgiven Kasparov for going his own way. “I told him that there will be people out there who will say you destroyed FIDE,” Ignatius Leong told me. When he joined Kasparov’s campaign, he advised him that he must not “run away” from the allegations against him. “Just admit that those were mistakes. And then people will forget it. If you try to defend, you will run into more problems.”

Photo

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov in his office in Moscow. Credit James Hill for The New York Times

Kasparov seemed to have Leong’s advice in mind the night he arrived in Macau. When he spoke to an invitation-only group at a buffet dinner at the Sands Cotai Central, he sounded contrite, humbled, honored to present himself as a candidate. He told a story of once being questioned by a skeptical chess official about his scant travels to Africa — a battleground in the current election. Back then, he told the attendees, he had been only to Morocco, but “now I can say I’ve been to 22 African countries.” He also verged toward acknowledging his role in the chess world’s split. “Many things have been discussed in the past. I made mistakes. Everybody made mistakes. At the end of the day, it’s about the future. And everybody knows now that chess needs reform.”

Kasparov sponsored the chess tournament in Macau through the Kasparov Chess Foundation, which he created in the United States in 2002 to promote chess as an educational tool. He has since established branches in Africa, Asia and, most recently, Mexico. After the tournament ended, Kasparov spent six hours at an awards ceremony held in the convention center on Macau’s thoroughly unauthentic Fisherman’s Wharf. (As Jose Silveirinha, a ponytailed Portuguese poet who is president of Macau’s chess federation, told me: “Macau is an illusion, like what happens in the desert when you are dying of thirst. What do you call it? Hallucinations.”) Kasparov sat at the head table, rising to make brief remarks before he handed out medal after medal to the winners, dozens of them.

During breaks in the ceremonies, he retreated with his aides to a side room for the real purpose of his visit: to meet privately with the various chess delegates who will vote in Norway. More than two dozen of them were in Macau, and not all had declared for Kasparov; some remained in Ilyumzhinov’s camp. Kasparov and his aides kept a tally of prospective votes, like whips in the United States Congress, noting each public pledge of support — the public nature of those endorsements being essential to create the impression that Ilyumzhinov’s victory is not presumptive. Kasparov and his aides say Ilyumzhinov and the Russian government have exerted extraordinary pressure on federations, especially those that have come out in Kasparov’s favor. One delegate who did in Macau, Mahmood Hanif of Afghanistan, was promptly removed from the FIDE website because of that support, as he and Kasparov’s camp claim.

Kasparov is a stubborn idealist in a country deeply cynical about politics. After he retired from chess in 2005, he brought the same intensity and aggression with which he played to the quixotic goal of ousting Putin from power. He organized protests and barnstormed around Russia to try to ignite political activism in a populace that, during the economic boom of those years, remained resolutely comfortable, apathetic or both. Kasparov had once seen hope in Putin’s unexpected rise, referring to him in print as a “young pragmatic leader” who would “strengthen democracy inside Russia” and “level the curves” of Yeltsin’s erratic policy, but soon enough he dismissed his earlier enthusiasm as “wishful thinking.” In late 2007, he announced that he would run for president himself, challenging Putin’s handpicked successor, but as happens to most Kremlin opponents, his campaign was easily suffocated at its inception, just as he and his supporters expected it would be. He could not even meet the legal requirement to hold a nominating convention with 500 participants, because no venue in Moscow would rent him a space large enough. Just ahead of Russia’s parliamentary elections that winter, Kasparov was arrested during a protest and sentenced to five days in jail. Behind bars, he said, he received an unexpected gesture from his former archrival, Anatoly Karpov, who applied to visit him in jail — a sign that the Kremlin’s increasingly repressive tactics were worrying the country’s elite. “He was not allowed, by the way, but the very fact is he tried,” Kasparov explained to me. “It was very human of him.”

Photo

Garry Kasparov at a chess tournament last month in Lusaka, Zambia. Credit Charlie Shoemaker/Getty, for The New York Times

The improvement in their relations — after five world-championship matches and blistering verbal assaults against each other — ultimately led Kasparov back into chess politics. In 2010, during FIDE’s last presidential election, Karpov challenged Ilyumzhinov, saying he had done lasting damage to chess. Kasparov threw his support behind Karpov, who briefly won the backing of a majority of the Russian Chess Federation, but then security officers raided the federation’s headquarters in Moscow and temporarily expelled its members. The ostensible reason was that an audit had turned up “financial irregularities,” a tactic Putin’s critics have experienced with some frequency. The federation promptly reversed its endorsement. When FIDE’s delegates gathered four months later in Khanty-Mansiysk, an oil town deep in Siberia, Ilyumzhinov was re-elected again.

“The very fact that Karpov failed to actually get support in Russia should tell you about the strength of Ilyumzhinov’s support in certain quarters,” Kasparov told me. “Because Anatoly Karpov is a” — he searched for the term — “a local national hero. And Ilyumzhinov by every account should not be able to beat him in the power game. But he did.”

Kasparov, unlike Karpov, is widely viewed as a foreigner in his home country — in part because he is half-Jewish, half-Armenian, born in Azerbaijan, in part because of his outspoken rebellions against the “chess mafia” and the Kremlin, in part because of the company he keeps abroad, including prominent conservatives in the United States. When Kasparov blurted out something in English as he was being arrested in 2007, Putin ridiculed him in an interview with Time magazine, which had just named Putin Person of the Year. “Why did Mr. Kasparov, when arrested, speak out in English rather than Russian? Just think about it. The whole thrust of this thing was directed toward other countries rather than the Russian people, and when a politician works the crowd of other nations rather than the Russian nation, it tells you something. If you aspire to be a leader of your own country, you must speak your own language, for God’s sake.”

In February, Kasparov acquired a passport from Croatia — after an application for one in Latvia became politically contentious — because he feared that his expiring Russian passport would not be renewed in the midst of the campaign, thus curtailing his travel.

Ilyumzhinov brought up the matter of Kasparov’s passport with me. In today’s Russia, association with a decadent West is tantamount to treason (even if many officials and businessmen have property abroad and send their children to elite boarding schools outside the country). “I am a patriot of Russia,” Ilyumzhinov told me, adding that he had offered financial support to Kasparov and his business ventures in the past. “I love my country. Kasparov, who grew up in this country, received an education here, became a champion here, who was receiving money here, from my own hands — he is praised for struggling against Russia and its people. Isn’t it crazy?”

Kasparov’s career has always made him something of an itinerant. He traveled widely for chess, of course, and then later to promote his books and give lectures. He and his third wife, Daria, have lived mostly on the Upper West Side of Manhattan since they married in 2005. (Their daughter, Aida, his third child, now 8, attends Dalton.) Still, he told me that he considered Russia his home, an essential part of him. When there, he lived with his mother, Klara, at an apartment in the center of Moscow. In February 2013, however, his mother received a telephone call from the Investigative Committee, known in Russia as sledcom, which was created in 2011 as the principal federal investigatory organ, responsible directly to the president. Since then, the committee has functioned as the Kremlin’s legal instrument for suppressing anyone viewed as a threat to Putin’s rule. In today’s Russia, a telephone call from sledcom has, for many, the same resonance that the “knock on the door” by K.G.B. officers in the dark of night once did. It could only end badly. Kasparov was abroad at the time of the call, but his mother was told that he was wanted as a witness in a new investigation of two other opposition activists. “I asked Navalny,” Kasparov told me, referring to the anticorruption blogger Aleksey Navalny, now under house arrest, “and he said, ‘You can enter the building as a witness, and you can leave it as a suspect.’ I didn’t see any reason for me to come back.”

The essence of Kasparov’s campaign platform is that FIDE has become like Russia: an opaque, top-down, deeply corrupted organization that stifles the enormous popular and commercial potential of the sport. He said that Ilyumzhinov’s leadership — the coziness to the Kremlin, the meetings with dictators, the murkiness of FIDE’s decisions and finances — has spooked sponsors and failed to seize the opportunity presented by the Internet and social media to attract more players and spectators. He had made that case in meetings with delegates from Europe to Africa, Latin America to Asia. And yet even to Kasparov’s supporters, the campaigning can feel less like a reasoned argument than a shameless bidding war. Peter Long, a Malaysian who holds the chess rank of FIDE master and is one of Kasparov’s campaign supporters in Asia, complained to me that the eagerness of some delegates to get financial support for their federations overrode their concern for the health of the sport. Long finds the craven appeals appalling. “It disgusts me,” he said.

More troubling still, Kasparov now stands accused of using the same tactics as Ilyumzhinov to buy delegates’ support. Ignatius Leong, who is from Singapore, joined Kasparov’s campaign last year in what Ilyumzhinov has called a personal betrayal. Leong had served as the secretary general of FIDE, effectively making him one of Ilyumzhinov’s deputies, though the two men have long had stormy relations. A lawyer who advises Kasparov’s campaign, Morten Sand, drafted a contract to put Leong’s support in writing. In that draft, which was leaked to The New York Times, the campaign offered to pay Leong $500,000 and to pay $250,000 a year for four years to the Asean Chess Academy, an organization Leong helped create to teach the game, specifying that Leong would be responsible for delivering 11 votes from his region and also make “the effort to deliver 15 votes (not counting China).”

Sand, who also used to work for FIDE under Ilyumzhinov, told me in Macau that the leaked contract must have been extracted unlawfully from Leong’s FIDE email account and that the agreement was never intended to pay for the votes. As The Times subsequently reported, Kasparov’s campaign published a final draft three days later that deleted the personal payment to Leong and stated that all the money would be paid to organizations, not to individuals. Leong, who is a veteran organizer and referee at tournaments, dismissed the suggestion that the votes could be bought, saying the controversy over his agreement was a smear campaign by Ilyumzhinov’s camp. In an open letter to the chess federations, Leong charged that Ilyumzhinov’s intermediaries had offered him as much as $2 million for his support. “Garry warned me,” he went on, referring to his decision to support Kasparov. “He said once this is declared, I will be a main target. I said, ‘O.K., so be it.’ ” In a legalistic report to FIDE’s executive board in May, Ilyumzhinov accused both men of breaching FIDE’s code of ethics and possibly American and Singaporean laws and recommended ousting Leong from his post.

“Do you want to question our integrity?” Kasparov asked, though not antagonistically, when I brought up the contract. By now we were in his hotel suite after his escape from the autograph seekers. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think it’s a fair call, because we are helping federations, and we do it openly, and we are not hiding our intentions.” Still, he sounded like a player who had not foreseen the hidden flaw in an aggressive move and was scrambling to regain the advantage. “I don’t see any violations of the law in this case,” he said. “FIDE has been complaining loud about it, but when it is complaining about bribes and corruption, it’s like Putin complaining about unrestricted use of force against peaceful citizens.”

Putin himself has not openly declared support for Ilyumzhinov, but his position is not in doubt. In June, he met Ilyumzhinov at the opening of an annual tournament involving Russian schools. As is his wont, Putin used the event, which was held in Sochi, the site of the Winter Olympics in February, to trumpet the revival of another Soviet tradition that would return Russia to its proper place among world powers. “We see that chess is developing ever more actively in Russia,” Putin said, with Ilyumzhinov at his side. “This is deservedly so. First of all, Russia has a very rich chess-playing tradition. Second, chess is a sport that develops the individual, the most intellectual sport, and we were always at the top of international ratings in this sport.” Putin then advised Ilyumzhinov as he made the ceremonial first move of the first match: e2-e4, the most common chess opening. “Your mission is completed,” Ilyumzhinov told him, after which the two men retreated to a private meeting.

Ilyumzhinov told me that he and Putin discussed only the expansion of chess in schools, not the FIDE campaign. The following week, however, Ilyumzhinov made a surprise announcement that the next world championship, a rematch between Magnus Carlsen and Viswanathan Anand of India, would be held in November in Sochi. The decision to hold it there — Russia has been desperate to recoup some of the $51 billion spent to redevelop the region for the Olympics — has only added to the impression of Ilyumzhinov’s critics that FIDE is simply another servant of Putin’s global ambitions, especially given the international furor over Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Russia’s foreign ministry has also showed unusual interest in the campaign, and its ambassadors have met with or written to officials in several countries to influence the outcome. Prospero Pichay Jr., the head of the Philippines federation and the country’s delegate to the election, said his country’s vice president contacted him after a meeting with the Russian ambassador. “I said: ‘Mr. Vice President, I’m sorry. I’m taken.’ ” Pichay, who goes by Butch, was one of the few I met who did not see the election as a larger geopolitical struggle. “It’s a personal grudge between Putin and Garry,” he said. “Putin is a vindictive guy, and he doesn’t want Garry in FIDE. It has nothing to do with Putin and the West. It’s personal.”

During the ceremony in Macau, as a pop band called Casa de Portugal performed, I noticed Kasparov sitting alone at the head table. He was deep in thought, his hands crossed over his nose. He seemed startled when someone came by with a box of his books for him to sign. When the ceremony finally ended, I accompanied him in his van back to the Sands Cotai Central. He was exhausted, nodding off as we rode through the sweltering night.

When Kasparov retired from chess in 2005, he told me at the time that he was done with the sport — except for the occasional anonymous game online. But since then, even before his unexpected return to the sport as a FIDE candidate, he has continued to promote and write books about chess, to work with children and rising stars like Carlsen and even to compete in the occasional exhibition. “Somehow chess always played a role in my life,” he told me.”I cannot separate myself from Garry Kasparov as the champion.” And somehow Kasparov’s chess has always been inseparable from his politics.

Kasparov’s FIDE campaign — its outcome still uncertain on the eve of the vote — seems like the latest game in a grudge match he has been playing for decades now, against what he has viewed as Soviet and then Russian repression. Putin’s approval rating, meantime, is hovering above 80 percent. “Even in political speeches,” Kasparov told me, “people always ask you chess questions. You can’t escape from that. The question I always received at almost any performance, any lecture, any appearance: Does chess help you in your political activities?” Kasparov then parsed the question, taking it apart like a difficult position, correcting each flawed premise and formulating a countermove. “I say, first of all, it was not political but more like human rights,” he said. “But the answer to your question is no, since in chess we have fixed rules and unpredictable results. And in Russia, it is exactly the opposite.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/magazine/garry-kasparov.html

Dominance

by Donny Gray • March 29, 2014 • Endgame Fundamentals

One of my favorite chess books is Domination in 2,545 Endgame Studies, by Ghenrikh Kasparyan. It is solely about how to dominate your opponent’s pieces. Domination is a way to say that even though a piece has a wide choice of squares, it cannot avoid being captured. As you get the hang of this concept you can use it also in the middle game. Many times you will even be able to just partially dominate a piece in such a way that it has no useful squares even though you cannot win it.

In the 2014 Candidates Tournament in the 1^st round former world champion Anand used domination to win his game against the 2^nd highest rated player in the world, Levon Aronian.  But before we take a look at that game let’s see some basic examples.
In our first example we can see that white’s bishop is dominating the black knight.  No matter where the knight goes, it can be taken by the bishop. We say that the knight is dominated. Now all white needs to do is bring something over to take the knight, as it cannot run away.

Knights can dominate as well. In fact, all pieces can dominate. There are countless examples.

 

As we can see in our 2^nd example, the material is dead even. However, many things are in favor for white. White has the better pawn structure, the king is centralized, and, most importantly, the white knight dominates the black bishop. All white needs to do now is bring the king over to take the helpless bishop.

Now let’s take a look at domination in a real Grandmaster game. As you can see, our players have some pretty impressive FIDE ratings. Anand is the former world champion while Aronian is currently the 2^nd highest rated player in the world.

White: GM Viswanathan Anand (2770)
Black: GM Levon Aronian (2830)

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.OO Be7 6.Re1 b5 7.Bb3 OO 8.h3 Bb7 9.d3 d5 10.ed Nd5 11.Nbd2 Qd7 12.Ne5 Ne5 13.Re5 Nf6 14.Re1 Rae8 15.Nf3 Bd6 16.Be3 Re7 17.d4 Rfe8 18.c3 h6 19.Ne5 Be5 20.de Re5 21.Qd7 Nd7  22.Red1 Nf6 23.c4 c6 24.Rac1 R5e7 25.a4 bc 26.Bc4 Nd5 27.Bc5 Re4 28.f3 R4e5 29.Kf2 Bc8 30.Bf1 R5e6 31.Rd3 Nf4 32.Rb3 Rd8 33.Be3 Nd5 34.Bd2 Nf6 35.Ba5 Rde8 36.Rb6 Re5 37.Bc3 Nd5 38.Be5 Nb6 39.Bd4 Na4 40.Rc6 Rd8 41.Rc4

 

As you can see, after 41.Rc4 black’s knight is trapped because it is being dominated by the white bishop on d4!

41…. Bd7 42.b3 Bb5 43.Rb4 Nb2. Sneaky if white takes the knight now on b2, black regains the piece with Rd2+. But, Anand did not win the world champion title for falling for these types of traps.

44.Bb5 ab 45.Ke3! Here white could allow the knight to escape if he had played Ke2.  All black had to do then was play Nc4!

45….  Re8+ 46.Kd2 Rd8 47.Kc3 Resigns

He resigned because if 47…..Nd1+ then 48.Kc2 and the knight is lost because once again the knight is dominated by the bishop on d4!

About the Author: Donny Gray

Donny received his U.S. Master title in November 1988. He is a two-time Arkansas Champion (1975 and 1978) and was the Georgia Co-Champion in 1995. He was the U.S. Army Champion (in 1988 and 1989), N.A.T.O. Championship (Top U.S.A. Player) Aalborg, Denmark in 1988, the 2000 South Carolina Co-Champion, and he represented Georgia in the 2005 Champion of Champions tournament . Additional titles and championships include: Title of “Master” in U. S. Correspondence Chess, Rank of “Master” in Internet Chess Club blitz play, Rank of “Master” in U.S.C.F. Online blitz play, 2007 Georgia Senior Champion, 1st Place Lee Hyder Memorial (2009, 2010), 1st place SC Blitz Champion (2011), and 1st place Snow Storm Open (2011, 2012, 2014). He currently resides in St. Simons Island. He owns Don’s Computers and teaches chess locally. He owns and operates http://www.ChessThinker.com.

http://georgiachessnews.com/2014/03/29/dominance/

 

 

Sochi G11: In dramatic finale, Carlsen retains title

11/23/2014 – The game was all the fans could hope with dramatic play throughout. Vishy Anand played the Berlin to groans but after a critical 23…b5! the situation looked very promising. Whether due to nerves or fatigue, he followed this up with a dubious plan that gave up the exchange with no obvious counterplay. This was the death knell as Magnus Carlsen capitalized. Express report.

 

11/23/2014 – The game was all the fans could hope with dramatic play throughout. Vishy Anand played the Berlin to groans but after a critical 23…b5! the situation looked very promising. Whether due to nerves or fatigue, he followed this up with a dubious plan that gave up the exchange with no obvious counterplay. This was the death knell as Magnus Carlsen capitalized. Express report.

FIDE World Chess Championship Carlsen-Anand 2014

Round Eleven

The game started with a predictable opening: a YABB (yet another boring Berlin). However things took a turn for the better for Anand, and very soon after, for the worse! A brilliant pawn push with 23…b5!! didn’t quite put Carlsen against the ropes, but it signaled that Black had his own attacking chances!

A packed room with GM Negi Parimarjan, Chris Ward and Rustam Kasimdzhanov doing
commentary while Garry Kasparov shows up to see the action live on http://www.playchess.com

Svidler and Nepomniachtchi commenting on the game when suddenly…

Magnus’ reaction to b5!!

The problem was that Anand grossly overestimated his position. The follow-up exchange sacrifice on b4 was, to put it simply, overly optimistic and Carlsen gladly gobbled the offering. Black’s position was unable to support the passed pawn, and all Carlsen needed to do was reduce material to put Anand in grave danger.

White’s play after being up the exchange was precise and accurate, not afraid of calculating variations and finding ‘only’ moves to retain a decisive advantage. At the end, the Challenger’s position could not hold together any more and Carlsen emerged as the defending World Champion!

Carlsen, Magnus2863–Anand, Viswanathan2792World Chess Championship 20141123.11.2014Robot 8

1.e4 e5 2.f3 c6 3.b5 f6 4.0-0 xe4 5.d4 d6 6.xc6 dxc6 7.dxe5 f5 8.xd8+ xd8 9.h3 d7 10.c3 h6 11.b3 c8 12.b2 c5 12…b6 13.ad1 e7 14.fe1 c5 was eventually a draw in Anand-Nakamura, 2010. 13.ad1 b6 14.fe1 Played after a ten minute think. It’s possible that Carlsen was not entirely familiar with this position specifically and already started to figure out how to place his pieces. 14.d5 a5 15.d2 e7 16.e3 Kokarev-Leko in the Russian team championship earlier this year. The game was drawn without much happening. 14…e6 15.d5 g5!? An interesting approach. This move severely weakens f6, but Anand claims that he can live with a knight there. On the other hand, on g5 Black protects f4, essentially cutting off reinforcements to the e5 pawn in the future. Also the pawn majority has been successfully halted. 16.c4 b7 17.h2 a5 18.a4 e7 19.g4 g6 So far Anand has played a very nice Berlin. His position is good, but of course White’s central domination and extra space allow him to be at least equal. 20.g3 e7 21.d2 hd8 22.e4 f8 23.ef6 b5‼ A bomb shell! This incredibly unexpected move comes with beautiful timing. The pawn cannot be taken or White already risks standing worse. 24.c3 The strongest idea for White is to ignore the pawn, but now Black’s position is quite strong. 24.axb5 a4 25.bxa4 xa4 allows Black to attack the weak c4 pawn and gives him control (for now) of the open a-file. Black is already better and it is not clear how White will hold his position together. For example: 26.c1 f4! 27.xf4?! gxf4+ 28.xf4 d2! 24.cxb5 c6! 25.bxc6+ xc6 and now it is White’s b3 pawn that is a big issue. The knight on d5 is destabilized which means it must retreat, exposing the weakness on b3. 26.e3 xb3-+ 24…bxa4 25.bxa4 c6 26.f3 db8?! Played after a 22 minute think. This idea of playing Rdb8 is not bad per se, but its follow-up is not nearly as good. 27.e4 b4 Black sacrifices the exchange, obtaining the pair of bishops, a passed pawn, and fixing his structure on the queenside. Overall he has good chances of obtaining compensation, but not for the full exchange unfortunately. 27…b3 28.b1 ab8 29.xb3 xb3 30.c1 is playable for both sides, though White does have some annoying pressure against a5. 28.xb4 cxb4 28…axb4! If Black wanted to sacrifice the exchange, he absolutely had to back it up with activity. The only way of doing so was activating his rook on a8. 29.h5 The main issue for Black is that his position is still very solid, but it does not have an active way of making progress. If White keeps trading, and trading, and trading, eventually the extra exchange will just be an extra exchange. b7 30.f4 gxf4 30…d7! Was an interesting resource, but White would have an ace up his sleeve. 31.f5 xa4 32.fxg6 fxg6 33.hf6 c2+ 34.d4 xd1 35.xd1 c6 36.d7! And ignoring the pawn attack no d5 grants White a huge initiative and two monster passed pawns. 31.hxf4 xf4?! This only helps White. 31…c6 32.xg6 fxg6 33.f4 xc4 34.xg6 c5 was rather bad, but better than the game continuation. 32.xf4 xc4 33.d7! The activity of the rook is starting to make itself felt. Black cannot dislodge this intruder. a6 33…c6 34.d4! a2 35.c1+ b7 36.d7 only makes things worse. For example: c8 37.d5 b3 38.c3! b2 39.xa2 bxc1 40.xc1 and Black’s position is simply falling apart, starting by the f7 pawn. 34.d5 c6 35.xf7 c5 The material difference is too big. Anand is clawing for activity, but White’s next stroke ends it. 36.xc7+! xc7 37.xc7 c6 37…b3 38.d5 b2 39.e6 and the powerful pawn on b2 is not going anywhere. 37…xc7 38.c1 instantly loses. b3 39.xc4 b2 40.xc5+ and Rb5 next, right on time. 38.b5! xb5 39.axb5+ xb5 40.e6 b3 41.d3 e7 42.h4 a4 43.g5 hxg5 44.hxg5 a3 45.c3 The last accurate move, and now Black cannot hold his pawns together anymore. 45.g6 a2 46.g7?? b2=

Anand started to realize his position was not good after sacrificing the exchange

Stockfish sees mate, as does Komodo, which has a quaint way of showing it (+250)

Game, match and title: a subdued Anand in the press conference.
When asked if he considered retiring after this loss, his answer was a firm “no”.

Chief press officer Anastasiyia Karlovich,
who did an incredible job throughout the event

“I feel happy and relieved” the defending World Champion: Magnus Carlsen!

We will be bringing you a full coverage of the press conference and the player’s reactions to the match in a future report.

Score

Game:	Rtg	01	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12	Score
M. Carlsen	2863	½	1	0	½	½	1	½	½	½	½	1		6.5
V. Anand	2792	½	0	1	½	½	0	½	½	½	½	0		4.5

Summary of round eleven for Indian readers by Niklesh Jain

कार्लसन जीते !! फिर बने विश्व शतरंज विजेता !!

मुझे आज समझ नहीं आ रहा की किस तरह इस मैच के बारे में आपको बताऊँ । सबसे पहले तो युवा मेगनस कार्लसन को पुनः विश्व विजेता बनने के लिए बहुत बहुत बधाई । वो शायद पहले ऐसे विश्व विजेता जो अपने खेल से सामने वाले को परास्त नहीं करते बल्कि अपने असाधारण अचूक खेल से सामने वाले को कोई मौका ही नहीं देते उन्हे परास्त करने का और फिर सामने वाला खुद ही गल्तियाँ करना शुरू करता है और कार्लसन मशीनों की तरह उसकी गलती को उसे दंड दे देते है । आनंद आज शानदार खेले और फिर अचानक समय के दवाब में गलत चालें चलते चले गए । शायद इस महान खिलाड़ी पर उम्र का प्रभाव अब दिखने लगा है । पाँच बार के विश्व चैम्पियन यकीनन अभी भी दुनिया के सबसे बेहतरीन खिलाड़ियों में से एक है पर विश्व चैम्पियन के हकदार अब मेगनस उनसे भी ज्यादा है ये अब उन्हे मानना ही होगा । क्यूंकी आनंद हर बार इस प्रतियोगिता में दवाब के क्षणो में बिखरते नजर आए है । पर हाँ आनंद की पिछले बार की हार से लेकर इस विश्व चैंपियनशिप के अंतिम मैच तक उन्होने एक बात हमेशा के लिए साबित कर दी की इंसान को कभी हार नहीं माननी चाहिए वो वाकई एक शेर की तरह लड़े । उन्हे अपने इस शानदार प्रयास के लिए और उनके इस जज्बे के लिए सलाम । खेल एक बार फिर बर्लिन ओपनिंग में खेला गया और आनंद ने आज अपनी तैयारी और शानदार चालो के मिश्रण से खेल को एक ऐसे स्थान पर ला दिया था जंहा से वो बहुत मजबूत नजर आ रहे थे और उनका हारना तो लगभग असंभव ही लग रहा था पर अचानक 23 चाल पर कार्लसन की एक थोड़ी कमजोर चाल के जबाब में आनंद ने जैसे ही b5 जैसी शानदार चाल चली अचानक खेल में एक चमक आ गयी पूरी दुनिया के बड़े दिग्गज खेल के विशेषज्ञ इसे अपने अपने हिसाब से आकलन करने लगे आनंद ने कुछ बहुत बेहतरीन चालों के मिश्रण से कुछ देर के लिए लोगो को उनकी जीत के बारे में भी सोचने का मौका भी दिया। ट्वीटर पर तो जैसे बड़े ग्रांड मास्टरों के ट्वीट की बाढ़ सी आ गयी थी और होती भी क्यूँ न बात विश्व विजेता के तय होने की जो थी । पर इसके बाद अचानक आनंद जब Be7 चल कर कार्लसन को और दवाब में ल सकते थे उन्होने अचानक बहुत सोच कर अपने हाथी को कार्लसन के ऊंट के बदले कुर्बान करने का ऐसा निर्णय लिया जो शायद किसी और के लिए तो शायद काम कर भी देता पर कार्लसन के खिलाफ ये उनकी सबसे बड़ी और आखिरी गलती साबित हुई ।मै शायद आज आनंद की जीत के बारे में लिखकर गर्व महसूस करता पर यकीन मानिए आनंद भी अपनी बादशाहत को इस नए युवा अभेद योद्धा के हाथो सौंपकर आज नहीं तो कल संतुष्ट जरूर होंगे ।आनंद को भी उनके आने वाले समय ओर कार्यो के लिए शुभकामनाए भारत को आप पर गर्व है और हमेशा रहेगा ।कार्लसन को जीत की पुनः बहुत बहुत बधाई दोनों खिलाड़ी जमकर खेले और शतरंज दुनियाँ भर में और प्रसिद्ध हुई इससे ज्यादा एक शतरंज प्रेमी को क्या चाहिए ।

उम्मीद है आपको हिन्दी के लेख पसंद आए होंगे ….

आपका निकलेश जैन

Book Review: Bent Larsen’s Best Games – Fighting Chess with the Great Dane

By Davide Nastasio

I love history and I love chess history even more. However, in order to make sense for me, chess history combines all the different characters from among different decades and centuries. Some players are legends because they are beyond human standards, like Fischer, and some are minor characters in this cosmic drama we call human life.

Bent Larsen is a world class player who lived in an era where professional chess players were few, mainly starving or sacrificing their lives for the love of Caissa. While there was financial reward for the players in the Soviet Union and even fame and love from the masses for those in Russia, for those in the west life was definitely more difficult. This is one of the first main ideas outlined in the book. Larsen had the chance to have a good life and become an engineer, instead he choose to become a chess player in a time when such a profession didn’t give the financial reward GMs, of that level, typically obtain today.

Just to better understand the world in which Larsen and Fischer lived, we need to say that young players in the former Soviet Union were “completely nurtured,” which means they would have trainers, coaches, training tournaments, seconds (since, in that time, games were adjourned and a player needed a second to analyze through the night) and so on. Fischer and Larsen didn’t have any of this type of training and were living on meager tournament prizes, simul displays, and the articles they wrote.

Although the title indicates that the book contains Larsen’s “best games,” Larsen himself never thought these were his “best” games. In fact, the games he commented on came out under different sources and they were mainly called “selected games” or “difficult decisions” because Larsen believed it was too relative to use the term “best games” because for every player “best games” means something different.

In the book there are 124 games commented on by Larsen, with four provided in the introduction, which was written by three different authors as an article previously published by New in Chess. My understanding is that the first 51 games are commented with a similar prose to one book Larsen published in the 1970’s, while the games therein after are from different sources, magazine articles, or annotated quite later.

One of the aspects I appreciate is that there are mostly text comments with variations only when needed. I like this format because I dislike long variations. But this book has many other positive aspects. Of the thirty-nine (39) chapters, most deal with the important, high level tournaments Larsen participated in throughout his life. Crosstables from the tournaments are included, which not only list all players in the tournament, but also provide the context in which to see how Larsen performed in that particular tournament. Most chapters also include several pictures of Larsen in different stages of his life.

I’ve long wanted to have a collection of Larsen’s games in algebraic notation. Unfortunately, the previous books that I found on the market were all descriptive. This book is good for players rated 1200 to 2400, since it covers many different openings, and, of course, a whole range of middle game ideas and tactics.

Larsen is clearly a cosmopolitan character. He lived everywhere—toward the middle of his life he moved to Argentina, a wonderful country for him because this is where he met his second wife. Larsen’s writing style is pleasant and he has nice anecdotes and also some nice judgment. For example, Larsen describes how Bronstein lost against him, which signaled the moment when Bronstein was no longer able to compete at the top level for becoming one of the world champion contenders. The book delves deeper into showing how chess is truly a hard sport and how psychology plays a big part of the game, especially at the top level.

I’d like to present a few games from the book that I particularly enjoyed. For Larsen’s superb annotations, please refer to the book. In general, from just these few games, it is possible to see that Larsen was able to play many different openings and there are many strategic themes, for example, how to exploit the space advantage to win a game, or attack on the kingside, or how to totally paralyze the opponent.

Note: On page 35 of the book, the game Olafsson vs Larsen is catalogued as a Grunfeld Indian defense; however, for me, it is a Sicilian Najdorf. Perhaps it was just an error of the editor. (Georgia Chess News Editor’s note: We do make those kind of mistakes!)

Fridrik Olafsson

Bent Larsen

Reykjavik m (8) – 1956

1.e4c52.Nf3d63.d4cxd44.Nxd4Nf65.Nc3a66.Bg5e67.Qf3Be78.O-O-OQc79.Rg1Nc610.g4Ne511.Qe2b512.f4b413.Nb1Ned714.Bh4Bb715.Bg2Nc516.Nd2Rc817.Kb1Na418.N2b3h619.Be1Nc520.Nd2Nfd721.h4g622.g5e523.fxe5dxe524.N4f3Ne625.Rc1Nf426.Qf1Bc627.c4bxc328.Rxc3Bb529.Rxc7Rxc730.Bg3Bxf131.Bxf1hxg532.hxg5Bc533.Nxe5Bxg134.Bxf4Bh235.Bxh2Rxh236.Nef3Rh137.a3Nc538.Ka2Rxf139.Nxf1Nxe440.Ne3Rc5

0–1

Eigil Pedersen

Bent Larsen

Danish Championship – 1954

1.d4Nf62.c4g63.Nc3Bg74.e4d65.g3O-O6.Bg2e57.d5Nh58.Nge2f59.exf5gxf510.O-ONd711.Rb1a512.a3Nb613.b3f414.f3Bf515.Ne4a416.gxf4Qh417.Bb2Nxf418.Nxf4Qxf419.Bc1Qh420.Be3Bh621.Bf2Qh522.Ng3Qg623.Nxf5Rxf524.Qd3Bf425.Bg3axb326.Rxb3Bxg327.hxg3Rg528.f4exf429.Rxf4Qxd330.Rxd3Nd731.Bh3Ne532.Rb3b633.Kf2Kg734.Bf1Ng4+35.Ke1Re8+36.Kd2Ne537.Be2Kh838.Rf6Kg739.Rf1Rg840.g4Kh841.Re3Rxg4

0–1

Jens Enevoldsen

Bent Larsen

Copenhagen m (4) – 1953

1.e4e52.Nf3Nc63.Bb5a64.Ba4Nf65.O-ONxe46.d4b57.Bb3d58.dxe5Be69.Qe2Nc510.Rd1Be711.Nbd2O-O12.c3Qd713.Nd4Nxb314.N2xb3Nd815.Be3c516.Nxe6Nxe617.f4f518.Qf2Qc619.Rd2a520.Rad1a421.Nc1d422.cxd4cxd423.Rxd4Nxd424.Rxd4Rac825.Ne2Rfd826.h3g627.Rxd8+Rxd828.Nd4Qe429.Nxb5Rd330.Ba7Qc431.Nd6Qc1+32.Kh2h533.Ne8Bb434.e6Be1

0–1

Bent Larsen

Axel Nielsen

Nordic Championship (–) – 1953

1.Nf3Nf62.c4c53.d4cxd44.Nxd4Nc65.Nc3d66.g3g67.Bg2Bd78.Nc2Bg79.b3O-O10.Bb2a611.O-ORb812.Rc1b513.Nd5Nxd514.Bxg7Kxg715.cxd5Ne516.h3Qb617.Qd4f618.Qxb6Rxb619.Nd4g520.Rc7Rd821.Kh2h622.Be4Kf823.f4Nf724.Bf3Rbb825.Ne6+Bxe626.dxe6Nh827.f5b428.Bb7a529.e4

1–0

http://georgiachessnews.com/2014/11/01/book-review-bent-larsens-best-games-fighting-chess-with-the-great-dane/

World Chess Championship 2014 Carlsen vs Anand Game 10

Daniel King analyses the games from the World Championship Match 2014 between Carlsen and Anand in Sochi. This is his game 10 report.

Rooked

The supremely old-school game of chess is dealing with a very avant-garde brand of unsportsmanlike conduct

by Dave McKenna

It happened this spring, in the 2012 Virginia Scholastic and Collegiate Chess Tournament. Both Quentin Moore and his opponent, a rising star on the D.C.-area chess scene named Clark Smiley, came into their match undefeated over the weekend-long competition. So the state title and an expenses-paid cross-country trip to the national high school championships would likely go to the game’s winner.

Judging by his pre-tournament rating — 2141, according to the U.S. Chess Federation system, making him the second-highest of the 75 players vying for the high school title — Moore shouldn’t have had any trouble getting past Smiley (1875). But Smiley was on fire, having won nine of the 12 previous rated tournaments in which he’d played and taken second place in the other three. Smiley’s former high school coach, forgetting that the kid’s spree came in state and regional events and not globally significant competitions, now says Smiley had put up “a record only Bobby Fischer could have.”

And in a match played in an earlier round at the Scholastic tournament, held at a Best Western in McLean, Virginia, Smiley had whupped Aravind Ponukumati, a teammate of Moore’s on the perennial state champion chess squad from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Smiley was rated almost 200 points below his opponent, but played “several hundred points above his rating,” Ponukumati says.

“He was playing so aggressive,” Ponukumati said. “I remember thinking, He’s crushing me!“

Against Moore, Smiley continued his dominance. For an opening, he played what pawnheads would describe as the Kevitz variation of the Queen’s Gambit Declined, a sophisticated attack for which Moore had no good answer. Smiley had Moore in check after 16 moves and never let up.

“I was about to resign,” Moore says.

Moore was too focused on just avoiding checkmate to pay much mind to Smiley’s off-board behavior. He ignored Smiley’s frequent tap-tap-tapping away on a handheld Dell computer. Smiley had been given permission to use the device to keep a digital record of each move — but only for that purpose.

“A lot of kids use those now, and I knew those were allowed,” says Moore of the scorekeeping app, called eNotate, which had only recently been sanctioned by the chess powers that be for tournament use. eNotate received the blessing of administrators after its designers convinced the USCF that the software was fail-safe for cheating. Moore, then an 18-year-old senior at TJHSST, generally regarded as one of the brainiest high schools in the country, shunned the gizmos in favor of an old-school record-keeping method: paper and pencil.

But while Moore ignored his opponent’s between-move activities, tournament director Robert Getty didn’t. Getty, who says he was aware of Smiley’s winning streak, monitored the match from across the ballroom. Its one-sidedness held his interest most.

“I’ve watched Quentin Moore play in these tournaments over the years,” Getty said. “He’s always been a strong player. And while I’ve seen him lose before, I’d never seen him take a beating like he was taking here. He was getting destroyed.”

And when he spotted something fishy about the way the player consulted his personal digital assistant, Getty moved in for a closer look. After Moore’s 28th move, Getty halted the match and asked Smiley to show him the PDA. Smiley pulled away and turned off his device, says Getty, but after several uncomfortable seconds he handed it over without saying a word.

Getty fired up the Dell again, and no score sheet appeared. Instead, a screen popped up for a program from the Fritz line of so-called “chess engines.” These are super-smart, user-friendly apps able to analyze the positions of all pieces on the chessboard and consider millions of possible outcomes in a matter of nanoseconds before suggesting the best next move. By pushing all the right buttons on a good chess engine, any Kardashian sister could conceivably checkmate Fischer.

And, as proven here, with Fritz’s assistance, Smiley could destroy Moore.

Smiley admitted to Getty and others that he’d cheated. While making his confession, though, Smiley said the game against Moore was the first and only time he had ever accessed the illegal program.

Smiley was ordered to forfeit that match and all previous games in the event, and was thrown out of the tournament. Despite the player’s unadvanced age, the Virginia Chess Federation used Smiley’s name in their announcements of the suspension, one sign of how seriously they are taking the offense. The federation quickly suspended Smiley for what was termed “using unauthorized software indicating an assessment of his position and analysis of possible variations.” His ethics case was referred to the national sanctioning body, the U.S. Chess Federation. According to USCF president Bill Hall, Smiley is, at 16 years old, the youngest computer cheat ever brought before his group.

He now faces a lifetime ban.

“He’s just a little boy who made a mistake,” says Catherine Smiley, his mother.

Clark Smiley, whose mother declined to make him available for an interview, was removed from his high school team. His neighborhood club, which had become the strongest and most hard-core chess clique in the D.C. area, had a civil war over the scandal; Smiley’s high school coach, distraught over what he said was a shaming of the game he loved, led a separatist movement and formed a new confederation designed only for “honest players.”

But even though the kid’s only confessed misdeed came among small-time players in an otherwise unremarkable tournament, the electronic score-sheet caper could have implications far beyond the hotel ballroom where it occurred. Most important for everybody but Smiley: Along with being the youngest techno-cheat, he is also the first player of any age caught exploiting an approved software application as part of a cheating scheme.

So folks at the USCF are now trying to determine exactly how Smiley cheated, and how often. The answers could affect not only the severity of his punishment, but the future of computers in competitive chess.

“This is all new for us,” says VCF president Andrew Rea. “This is a serious breach. We can’t just let it go.”

Gadgetry of any sort has a rocky history in chess.

In the late 18th century, for example, a Hungarian engineer named Wolfgang von Kempelen toured Europe with a machine called The Turk, which he promoted as a mechanical chess master. Legend holds that Napoleon and Ben Franklin are among the chess aficionados who lost to Kempelen’s brainchild. Decades after those big wins, word got out that The Turk, which Kempelen built to woo Empress Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina of Austria, was a royal scam: For all its pulleys and wheels, Kempelen always made sure an accomplished and totally human chess player was hiding inside the machine, making all the right moves.

The Virginia scandal involved the opposite ruse, in which a machine surreptitiously called the shots for a player. The chess engines this scheme centered on are relatively new: Computers only surpassed humans at the chessboard during young Smiley’s lifetime. Scientists had an easier time designing digital brains that could produce atom bombs or navigate lunar landings than they did fashioning a machine that could play chess worth a darn. Plainly, until relatively recently, chess was too complicated for computers. An analysis of chess’s complicatedness in Wired determined that the number of possible positions in an average 40-move game is 10 to the 128th power, a sum “vastly larger than the number of atoms in the known universe.”

In 1966, MIT brainiacs entered MAC HACK VI, a computer program they’d devised, into the Massachusetts Amateur Chess Championship, making it the first computer program ever to enter a tournament. It drew just one match and lost four.

And it wasn’t until 1981 that any computer program beat a player with a master rating in tournament play. (Full disclosure: My brother, Geoff McKenna, who, despite being a chess master by rating and among the strongest players in the D.C. area, was never a threat to take Garry Kasparov’s crown, got written up in chess and scientific magazines in the early 1980s after defeating Belle, a product of Bell Laboratories and back then the reigning world computer chess champion.)

But by 2007, a chess engine called Rybka was routinely shutting out grandmasters even when spotting the humans a pawn and taking black, thereby letting humans go first, the more statistically desirable position. Computers have gotten noticeably better since then; humans haven’t.

The man-machine war in chess is no longer contested: “Computers are better than us,” says USCF president Ruth Haring.

Some old-school gamers lament humanity’s slippage. “Chess was more fun when computers were patzers,” says Peter Biyiasas, a former grandmaster and Canadian chess champion. Biyiasas says his decision to retire from competitive chess was helped along by the advent of superhuman electronic aids.

But Haring and other caretakers of the game have been pushing to increase technology’s presence. Without computer intervention, they fear kids who spend most of their days accessing one app or another would ignore the sport of kings (and queens and rooks, et al.). And some portions of the computer creep have inarguably been a boon — online chess, for example.

And as training tools, chess engines, including the Fritz software that Smiley depended on, are a godsend to the game.

“I grew up when nothing was computerized and you had to live in New York or San Francisco to get to play against great players,” Haring says. “You just played your neighbor. Now, you can train against a grandmaster-strength program, and all the openings of all the great players are available at your fingertips. There are all these tools that have really opened up the game.”

The dark side, of course, is that technology-aided cheating episodes have popped up all over the place in recent years.

Among the more entertaining techno-scams: In the 2006 World Open in Philadelphia, the most moneyed tournament in the land — this year’s event, which concluded in July, had a kitty of $250,000 — tournament director Mike Atkins got bad feelings about a competitor named Steve Rosenberg, entered in the 2000-and-under division (a category for competent but non-master players). Rosenberg came into the tournament having won 18 matches in a row. Then Rosenberg kept his winning streak going against superior competition in the early rounds of the World Open, all the while wearing several layers of clothing in the heat of the Northeastern summer and playing each game with his hands cupped over his ears. Atkins eventually surmised the oddball get-up was part of a scheme, and that Rosenberg was somehow getting moves fed to him. With Rosenberg undefeated heading into the late rounds of the tournament and one win away from taking home the $18,000 first prize, Atkins confronted him about his suspicions, and during the interrogation a tiny electronic device was discovered in Rosenberg’s ear. The player claimed it was a hearing aid; Atkins hopped on his laptop and from Internet research quickly found that the gadget, called a Phonito, was in fact a radio receiver that could be used to relay information from a third party, and, in this case, was likely a third party accessing Fritz or some other chess engine. (The $270 Phonito was manufactured by Phonak, a Swiss electronics firm that at that time was in the news as the sponsor of Floyd Landis during his Tour de France cheating episode.) Rosenberg declined to answer Atkins’s questions; given what was at stake, the tournament director took the non-answers as a confession and booted him out of the tournament.

“If you’re going to lose $20,000, you’d scream bloody murder,” Atkins told me in 2006. “Instead, he just said, ‘If you’re going to forfeit me, just give me my thing back and I’ll go home.’ And he left.”

Rosenberg has never been heard from again in competitive chess circles. (A caller responding to messages left at the phone number in Canton, Michigan, listed for Steve Rosenberg in old USCF directories said that though his name was Steve Rosenberg, he didn’t play chess.)

And not all the bad acting in chess takes place on our shores: In July, the World Chess Federation bounced three high-level French players for an elaborate cheating scheme from the 2010 Chess Olympiad in Siberia. Joanna Pomian, the head of the Fédération Française des Échecs, the French chess federation, dropped a dime on members of her own national team. She discovered that the French squad, led by 21-year-old grandmaster Sebastien Feller, was being fed strategy in the middle of games by coaches who were consulting computer chess engines. Pomian said she’d acted only after finding incriminating text messages sent between team members, including one from a player to a coach that read, in French, “Hurry up, send moves.”

A couple years ago, I spoke with Larry Kaufman, a designer of the Rybka software, regarded in recent years as the strongest chess engine on the market. I asked if he worried that his brainchild would be abused by bad guys. Never, he said.

“The cheating part isn’t hard,” Kaufman told me. “Getting away with it is. I don’t think chess players are good enough to get away with it.”

Smiley clearly wasn’t good enough to get away with his chessboard crime, though questions remain about how good a cheater he really was. His PDA was not confiscated after he was caught using a chess engine at the Virginia Scholastic. “I showed the PDA to [other tournament officials], who also saw the PDA running with the illegal software,” says Getty, “and after he’d admitted to cheating, I returned the device to the player. I had no right to keep it.”

That meant officials couldn’t perform an autopsy on the Dell to learn how often Smiley had accessed the program illegally during tournament play.

Catherine Smiley says she believes her son’s once-and-only-once version of his cheating timeline. She also says accusations of serial cheating are nothing more than “sour grapes from people he beat fairly.”

Sour grapes or no, it is true that all the evidence contradicting Clark Smiley’s contention that he only cheated against Moore is circumstantial.

It’s also pretty darn convincing.

Smiley’s tournament wins started coming in bunches in the summer of 2011, after he’d attended a camp sponsored by the Ashburn Chess Club. They take the game very seriously there. The Ashburn club only formed in 2009, but this year its teams took first place in both the Open and Amateur Divisions of the D.C. Chess League, one of the strongest confederations in the U.S. For Ashburn’s camps, international master Nikolay Andrianov serves as the lead counselor. The club charges members for sessions with Andrianov, a Russian native who commutes cross-country from his Phoenix home. He can command such a fee because of his 1978 win over Kasparov — meaning he’s one of the few to ever beat the greatest chess player of all time in his prime.

Understandably, Ashburn brass did an awful lot of patting itself on the back and cheerleading during Smiley’s winning streak. A solicitation for Andrianov’s clinics put out last year called Smiley “a model for scholastic players.”

“Clark Smiley did it again!” read a blurb in the club’s online newsletter from August 2011, after Smiley went 5-0 while winning last year’s Atlantic Open. Smiley took home $1,200 in prize money for that win.

“[Smiley] has improved tremendously since the Ashburn Chess Camp,” read the club’s newsletter after the Atlantic Open win. “Congratulations, Clark. You make us proud of your achievements!”

The USCF stats show a turnaround that sure does seem too good to be true. Before July 2011, Smiley’s career record as a tournament player was 180 wins, 151 losses, and 13 draws. But Smiley went 41-3-2 in the 46 official games he’d played heading into the Virginia Scholastic.

“Forty-one and three? That’s a record only Bobby Fischer would have,” says Dino Obregon, the faculty adviser for the chess team at Stone Bridge High School, the Loudoun County, Virginia, school Smiley attends and played chess for before being removed for cheating. “This kid isn’t Bobby Fischer. I beat him.”

The climactic match of the Atlantic Open came when Smiley defeated Bryan Simonaire in the final round. “That would have been my biggest win,” says Simonaire, who wasn’t aware that his opponent had subsequently been caught cheating until he was interviewed for this story. The news triggered some memories of the matchup.

“I remember talking to [Smiley] after our game,” says Simonaire, who away from the chessboard is a Maryland state senator and member of the Special Senate Committee on Ethics Reform. “My impression of this kid wasn’t Whoa! This is a tough chess player!, which is that attitude you often get from kids who can really play, kids who know the game. But he just seemed like a regular kid. I figured he had a good day.”

Asked what else he recalled about their match, Simonaire says, “He had some device in his hands the whole game.”

The USCF website allows a player’s ratings growth to be displayed in graph form. Smiley’s personal chart features a massive vertical hike in his rating beginning last summer. Robert Getty points out that Smiley’s USCF rating in so-called blitz chess, a quickie version of the game, is now 283 points below his standard tournament rating. And while winning nine of his 12 standard tournaments prior to the Virginia Scholastic, Smiley never won a blitz tournament. (Moore’s blitz rating stands only 77 points lower than his tournament rating; Ponukumati’s blitz-tournament differential is just -38.)

“That’s significant because in blitz you don’t keep score,” he says. “There’s no electronic score-sheet app for blitz.”

Getty is one of a large contingent of folks familiar with the Virginia scandal who believe Smiley’s cheating scheme lasted much more than just one game.

Adam Chrisney, a fellow member of the Ashburn Chess Club, is another. Just two weeks before he was officially caught cheating, Smiley won an event called the Virginia Open. Chrisney, also an entrant, says he found Smiley’s tapping away on his PDA in the early rounds of the event bothersome, but didn’t initially think anything ominous was taking place. eNotate’s novelty and reputation as being cheat-proof provided a great cover, says Chrisney.

“I knew that [electronic score sheets] were allowed, so I figured this was a kid using his new toy,” says Chrisney.

But when Chrisney had to face Smiley in the last round of the tournament with the Virginia Open title going to the winner, his opponent’s keyboard work no longer seemed harmless.

“It should take maybe three or four taps, max, to record a move on a score sheet,” Chrisney says. “He was making copious amounts of taps on the keyboard, and I really started wondering what the hell he was doing.”

Smiley whupped Chrisney in that game, but after the match Chrisney reported what he suspected was cyber-cheating to tournament director Mike Atkins — the same guy who blew open the Phonito cheating scam at the 2006 World Open. Atkins questioned Smiley, but didn’t find enough evidence to overturn the result. (Atkins declined a request to discuss the Smiley case for this story.) The win over Chrisney gave Smiley the tournament title and a $400 cash prize. Chrisney says his judgments were vindicated after Smiley was caught at the Scholastic tourney, but says the situation makes him feel bad for the perp.

“He’s a kid, and this isn’t murder,” says Chrisney, who would have won the Virginia Open had he beaten Smiley. “But cheating is bad for chess.”

Ponukumati is also convinced he was up against a computer when he was supposed to be playing just Smiley. Virginia Scholastic tournament rules prohibited players to leave the main room if they weren’t playing. While Moore was facing Smiley in the fifth round, Ponukumati was hanging out with TJHSST teammates in an adjacent room doing a postmortem on his loss to Smiley earlier in the event. Ponukumati says he plugged all the moves from the earlier game into various chess engines and “found a clear pattern of cheating.”

“Every move from moves 13 to 30 matched [the computer],” says Ponukumati.

Moore, with a question, offers perhaps the strongest argument that this wasn’t a one-off incident: “Why would he start cheating in the fifth round of a tournament?”

The failure to seize the Dell also means some mystery remains about Smiley’s cheating methodology. It’s unclear exactly how Smiley accessed the chess engine while ostensibly also running eNotate.

“This is the first time there’s been an incident reported with eNotate,” says Rea, “so there’s still a question about what was done so [Smiley] could enable other software applications on that device.”

The two options are:

1. Highbrow But Sneaky: Somebody hacked the eNotate program stored on Smiley’s PDA to allow the app to run concurrently with a chess engine.
2. Lowbrow But Brazen: Smiley simply turned off eNotate once a game started and ran the cheating program exclusively.

Moore, who will study computer science at the University of Virginia, isn’t ready to discount the possibility that hacking took place. He admits being daunted by the brainpower that would take, however. “I couldn’t do it,” he said.

Sevan Muradian, the designer and primary vendor of the eNotate software, asserts no hacking took place. The USCF rulebook specifically states that to gain tournament certification, vendors of electronic score sheets must prove that anybody using the score sheet “cannot access a chess engine or any stored games, openings, or analysis contained within the electronics of the device.” And, say USCF officials, eNotate passed muster. Muradian remains convinced it’s hack-proof.

“Once you enter recording mode of eNotate, recording the game, you cannot flip to another application. You cannot use any other program — not Fritz or any chess engine,” says Muradian. “We deactivate any wireless connection and disable any hardware buttons. [Smiley] didn’t override that. No way.”

Only “about 500″ copies of eNotate, which sells for from $50 for just the software to about $150 for a loaded PDA, have been distributed so far. Each copy is registered with the North American Chess Association. The NACA website shows Clark Smiley’s father, Mark, registered as no. D866204. Registrants can authorize others to use their software in tournaments, according to Muradian.

Muradian says his own investigation of the Virginia Scholastic cheating episode leaves him convinced the player took the low-tech route to the low road and ran only the Fritz program while cheating. Of course, if it were proven that a high school kid could override eNotate’s firewalls through a hack, the software would likely immediately be banned from tournaments. Asked if his theories on what happened were colored by what was at stake, Muradian says no.

“There was no hack,” he says.

Even so, Muradian says he’s going to design new screens for eNotate that are “more annoying,” so tournament directors can more easily discern whether a player’s PDA is in fact running the sanctioned program. He thinks that’ll be enough to prevent copycat cheats.

The USCF has not said when it will announce a ruling on Smiley’s ethics case.

As for how the scandal will affect others: Moore will henceforth be wary of every PDA-equipped opponent he faces. “I’d played [Smiley] twice when he was using the handheld device, and he beat me both times, and once when he wasn’t, and I won that game,” says Moore. “But I had no reason at the time to suspect he was cheating. I’ll suspect everyone who uses these things from now on.”

Getty intends to keep a closer eye on players of any age who show up at the table using an electronic score sheet.

Haring says she’s troubled by the cheating episode, but has no plans to use it to launch a technological crackdown within USCF.

“Technology we can work with,” she says.

Haring ascribes her positive outlook to an incident involving (who else?) Bobby Fischer. In the early 1980s, Fischer, already well into his exile from the chess world and the real world, came to San Francisco to hide out and stayed with Haring, whom he knew through chess. And while there he came across a stash of paper score sheets from her playing career, all from long before the advent of Monroi and eNotate. “I kept all my old games in a shoe box in a closet,” says Haring, who was an international master as a player before entering a career in chess administration. “And I came home from work one day and saw that Bobby Fischer had found the box and had gone through all my games. I was terrified, but I asked him, ‘So, what do you think?,’ and he said something that helped me with the rest of my life. He said, ‘You’re a pretty good player, but you’re too pessimistic.’ He was right. And when Bobby Fischer speaks, chess players listen. So I use that as a general guiding rule in the rest of my life, too: Don’t accept a bad situation; look for ways to improve your situation. It helped my chess game and my life. It helped me to look for a positive, better outcome; there’s a better move there. So, technology, yes, there are threats, but it’s good for the game.”

The Ashburn Chess Club held another summer chess camp in August, led once more by Andrianov. The 2012 camp ended with an in-house tournament, with the winner receiving a trip to Russia to play against kids in the world’s chess epicenter. That’s a big prize. But, because of the actions of a former camper at last year’s gathering, a new rule was in place. The Ashburn website advised all prospective attendees that they would have to get through camp “without the use of electronic devices.”

“I like pencil and paper,” says Andrianov. “That’s what kids in Russia use, and it’s worked out pretty well for them.”

http://grantland.com/features/the-evolution-cheating-chess/