‘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.
1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bc4 Bc5 4 b4 Bxb4 5 c3 Ba5 6 O-O Qf6 7 d4 Nge7 8 Bg5 Qd6 9 Qb3 O-O 10 Rd1 Bb6 (see diagram 1)
The pawn sacrifice on move 4, known as the Evans Gambit, remains popular today. White gains time and a strong central pawn duo, but Steinitz relied on the lack of weaknesses in his position, counting on the extra pawn for the long term. To my eyes, this is miserably constipated, and the lifeless bishop on c8 requires urgent attention. Modern grandmasters prefer to give back the pawn quickly to catch up in development.
Of course, in the diagram position Steinitz has acceded to return the pawn after all. After 11 dxe5 Qg6 12 Qa3 Re8 13 Nbd2 d6 the position was even, and remained so until Chigorin made an elementary blunder five moves later and lost.
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