Luke McShane

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.

The top Emirati grandmaster Salem Saleh is an imaginative, dynamic player whose games are a treat to watch. But his win at the recent Sharjah Masters against Vladimir Fedoseev (formerly Russian, but now representing Slovenia) was surely the artistic highlight of his career. The combination which ends the game is dazzling, but both players deserve credit for energetic play in the earlier part of the middlegame. Vladimir Fedoseev-Salem SalehSharjah Masters, May 2024 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 h4 A modern extravagance, mainly used by players who wish to avoid the combative Grünfeld defence which would arise after 3.Nc3 d5. If Black stubbornly insists on a Grünfeld-style approach with 3… Bg7 4.Nc3 d5, then 5.h5 poses serious problems.

England teams brought home an Aladdin’s cave of medals from the European Senior Team Championship, which concluded in Slovenia last week. Their victory in the over-65 section was particularly convincing. The team of John Nunn (reigning world senior champion 65+), Tony Kosten, Peter Large, Chris Baker and Nigel Povah lost just two games out of 36, and picked up four individual board medals, including gold for Chris Baker. Peter Large demolished a Finnish grandmaster in the following game.

The Four Nations Chess League (4NCL) enjoyed a captivating finale over the early May bank holiday. As the final round commenced, three teams remained in close contention to win the title, each with nine wins out of ten matches, and each entering their final match as strong favourite. That meant the league would likely be decided on board points, so every half-point would count. The surprise contenders were the Sharks, who had fielded consistently strong squads but with only a couple of grandmasters. Beating Cheddleton by 5-3 in the final round was another good result, but not the big one they needed. Manx Liberty, who won the event last year, had the strongest lineup on paper, led by the veteran elite grandmaster Alexei Shirov.

Streaks are made to be broken. For many years, the German Bundesliga, the strongest national league in the world, has been dominated by the team from Baden-Baden. Their lineups include the likes of Viswanathan Anand and Richard Rapport as well as England Olympiad players Michael Adams and Nikita Vitiugov. Before this season, they had won 16 of the last 17 league titles, with just one hiccup in 2015/16, when the team from Solingen took the title. This season proved to be a second bump on the road, when they were beaten by the team from Viernheim. This was no David and Goliath moment.

What is it like to play chess? Once in a while, I try to convey the atmosphere of a competitive chess tournament to someone who has never witnessed it. I liken it to sitting an exam, in that it lasts for hours and makes your brain hurt; at least everyone can relate to that. But that fails to explain why you would want to do it. So I also mention the thrill of a mental cage-fight, which resonates with some while horrifying others, and then I sow confusion by adding that the game is deeply beautiful. Here’s hoping that Chess Masters, an eight-episode series to be broadcast on BBC2 next year, will succeed where words often fail, and bring the game’s drama to a new audience.