Luke McShane

The stench of burning rubber hung in the air as I trudged back to my hotel in Hull city centre last Saturday evening. A wheelie bin lay in the street, with a fire flickering out next to it. Everywhere there were tired-looking policemen, obviously relieved the yobs had dispersed. I too was spent, and a little deflated, though there was one brawl that day which I had relished. I’d faced the experienced grandmaster Stuart Conquest in the penultimate round of the British Championships, held in Hull’s City Hall. After five tense hours of play, I came agonisingly close to winning, though Stuart’s stout defensive effort ensured I also had to stay on my toes to avoid losing.

All eyes are on the Games in Paris, where an estimated 10,000 athletes from more than 200 nations will compete. This comes 100 years after the Paris Olympics of 1924, a milestone event when the number of competing nations jumped from 29 to 44. That same year, Fide, the international governing body of chess, (Federation Internationale des Echecs) was founded in the 9th arrondissement’s town hall by Pierre Vincent, the secretary of the French Chess Federation. An unofficial chess Olympiad took place alongside the athletic Olympics, though the first official Fide Olympiad was not until 1927. Those were sympathetic times for international cooperation – the League of Nations was founded at the Paris Peace Conference in 1920. And so, in 2024, Fide comes to mark its own centenary.

I have a pet theory, based not on hard data but on insights from postmortem chitchat. My theory says that novices and experts, when facing evenly matched opponents, make roughly the same number of screw-ups in a game. The difference is that the novice’s oversights will be far more significant. The novice walks into checkmate, where the grandmaster hangs a pawn. One blunders a bishop, where the other concedes a softening of the pawn structure. Strong players rely on their well-honed sense of danger to avoid the most egregious errors. After studying hundreds of thousands of tactical motifs, one just knows when a situation looks sketchy – perhaps there are a couple of undefended pieces, and the king is open to attack.

If you visit the English Chess Federation’s website hoping to become a member, you will be confronted with a comprehension test. You will scroll past walls of text before appraising your membership options. Would you like to be a Supporter, Bronze, Gold, or Platinum member? Perhaps you are eligible for Junior Bronze, Free Junior Bronze, Junior Gold, Free Junior Gold, or Free Student Gold? Like the intricacies of the tax system, there must be reasons for this befuddlement of detail. The free tiers, for example, are intended as an inducement for members in their first year. But the initial impression is baffling: a simple table would go a long way to clarify the differences. As for the benefits of membership, the ECF’s monthly online magazine ChessMoves deserves greater prominence.

Garry Kasparov endorsed the slower time control which was used at the Superbet Chess Classic. That event, which concluded this month in Bucharest, was the latest leg of the Grand Chess Tour, the annual series of events for elite players which comprises a mix of faster and slower formats. In the words of the former world champion: ‘The preservation of classical chess… is very important for helping players to realise their full potential, to put on display what they can do.’ He compared the format to ‘modern opera’, in contrast to rapid and blitz events where the action is faster, but the play is less refined. At its best, classical chess contains ambitious, unusual ideas, such as the pawn sacrifice played by Firouzja in the game below.

There is a sublime satisfaction in a good detective thriller. We will, of course, have accessed the same facts as our sharp-witted sleuth. The fleck of yellow paint on the raincoat meant little to us, as did the creaking door and the page missing from the notebook. But at last the alibi is dismantled, and from the tangle of contradictions emerges an elegant, coherent thread. Genius, they say, is seeing what everyone else sees and thinking what no one else has thought. On the chessboard, we also agree on many of the facts: this rook enjoys an open file, that bishop is pinning the knight. And much tactical reasoning is straightforward: ‘The queen is guarding against the mate, so let’s try to deflect it.

The English Championships concluded last weekend in two dramatic playoff matches. In the open event, Gawain Jones defeated last year’s winner Michael Adams by 1.5-0.5. The first game saw Adams pressing in a complex queen endgame, but he lost after an astonishing oversight which allowed mate in one move. Though Adams pushed hard for a win in the second game, patient defence from Jones secured the draw and the title. In the women’s championship, last year’s winner Katarzyna Toma faced Elmira Mirzoeva, the formerly Russian woman grandmaster who transferred her federation to England earlier this year. In the rapid playoff games, Mirzoeva took the lead with a convincing victory, but the second game saw Toma turn the tables with an unlikely counterattack in a lost position.

‘OK, there is a body with a knife there, and the police come and say nothing happened… You have to find who, why, what, but it happened, don’t pretend that it didn’t happen!’ Vladimir Kramnik deployed that analogy about the world of online chess, which he sees as riddled with cheating. Cheating happens. Once in a while, I get demolished in a casual online game in a manner that leaves no room for doubt that my opponent’s moves were silicon-assisted. Chess.com, the platform that hosts the biggest online events, has a dedicated Fair Play team to monitor cheating, and their checks have led to over a million account closures in 2023 (0.6% of the total number). Nevertheless, Kramnik clearly believes that Chess.

Lawyers in a courtroom, it is said, should not ask questions to which they do not already know the answer. Chess players are well advised to adopt a similar attitude to pawn endgames – steer clear unless you can anticipate the outcome with certainty. In endgames with more wood on the board, overlooking a nuance need not be catastrophic. In pawn endgames, nothing is minor, and any oversight can be decisive. Yet their apparent simplicity has the lure of a siren song. Grandmasters are usually more circumspect, so I was gobsmacked by Alireza Firouzja’s endgame howler in the recent Norway Chess tournament.

‘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.