Luke McShane

White to play. Caruana-Firouzja, Sinquefield Cup, 2024. Caruana exchanged rooks, but soon ran out of checks and resigned before the b2 pawn could promote. Which move would have secured a draw here? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 2 September. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1 Qh8+!

For the irrepressible Hans Niemann, August is no time to chill. The 21-year-old American grandmaster began the month by defeating his compatriot Wesley So by 13-10 in the quarter-final of the Chess.com Speed Chess Championship. He gave a vitriolic interview after the match, railing against the ‘chess establishment’ and those he perceives as trying to ruin his career. Evidently, his relations with Chess.com, Magnus Carlsen and others have hardly thawed since last year’s conclusion of their legal dispute which arose in response to unsubstantiated cheating allegations after Niemann’s win against Carlsen at the Sinquefield Cup in 2022. ‘America’s brightest talent’ (by his own description), has complained of a lack of invitations to top-tier events.

The British Championships, which concluded in Hull earlier this month, saw a notable achievement for 15-year-old Shreyas Royal, whose stellar performance was his third and final qualifying result to earn him the grandmaster title. He becomes the youngest British player to reach that milestone, beating David Howell’s record which had held since 2007 (and before that, my own!). Royal’s win against Howell was one of the best games of the event, although the Alexander Best Game Prize (named for C.H.O’D. Alexander, the Bletchley Park codebreaker and Spectator chess columnist) was awarded to Howell, for the precision in his endgame against Ameet Ghasi.

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.