Play it again, Amin

‘Back to the Future with Casablanca Chess’ was the tagline for the elite rapid tournament held in Morocco last month. The intriguing premise was that games would begin from positions taken from the opening phase of famous historical games. The four guinea pigs for this experiment – dubbed the Casablanca Chess Variant – were Magnus Carlsen, Viswanathan Anand, Hikaru Nakamura and Bassem Amin; the latter grandmaster from Egypt is rated in the world’s top 50.

Other strong grandmasters selected the positions from historical world championship matches. Most allowed the players considerable creative scope, and all were balanced according to engine evaluations, so players might be happy to play with either colour. Well, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. I would have recoiled from the position dished out to Anand and Amin in the first round, which began with the following moves, as played in the fifth game of the Chigorin-Steinitz World Championship match in 1889.