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ContentsEditorial.................................................................................................................4Malcom Pein on the latest developments in the game

60 Seconds with... Pavel Eljanov...............................................................7The Ukrainian star recommends using your engines less

Manx Marvels and Misfortunes .................................................................8Carl Strugnell reports from Douglas, while Eljanov and Bok annotate

An Audience with Anish Giri .....................................................................16Paul Lam explains all about a very special event in Coventry

A New Champion! ..........................................................................................18Riazantsev and Kosteniuk shone at the Russian Championships

Tackling the Elite ............................................................................................22John-Paul Wallace explains what it was like to face Peter Leko

Find the Winning Moves .............................................................................26Can you do as well as the stars at the Chess.com IoM Masters?

Stocking Fillers ...............................................................................................30Unsure what to buy or order for Christmas? Sean Marsh will help!

Studies with Stephenson............................................................................33Brian pays tribute to the tireless work of John Roycroft

Never Mind the Grandmasters................................................................34Carl Portman remembers one of his chess heroes

When Jovanka lit up Bridge Chess Club...............................................36James Essinger recruited his co-author for the Bridge derby

How Good is Your Chess? ..........................................................................40Daniel King thinks Karjakin will be a tough opponent for Carlsen

Running Out of Theory: Part 1 ...............................................................44Matthew Lunn has some advise on coping once ‘out of book’

Forthcoming Events .....................................................................................45

Opening Trends...............................................................................................46

Thomas Hardy, Chess and Romance ......................................................47While in Cornwall Brian Gosling was inspired by the famous writer

Overseas News ...............................................................................................48Fine creativity from MVL, Luke McShane and a young U.S. star

Home News.......................................................................................................52Victories for Tony Corkett, Bill Ingham and Tiger Hillarp Persson

Solutions............................................................................................................54

New Books and Software...........................................................................56Paul Hopwood highly enjoyed Ilya Smirin’s King’s Indian Warfare!

Saunders on Chess ........................................................................................58John looks at how following the big matches has changed over time

Photo credits: Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis (p.50), Dorset CountyMuseum (p.47), Calle Erlandsson (p.24), G-Star Raw (p.6), Grand Chess Tour (pp.48,51), Guernsey Press (pp.52-53), John Henderson (p.6), Daniel King (pp.40, 42), Eteri Kublashvili (pp.18-20), Ray Morris-Hill (pp.5, 9, 49), Adam Raoof (p.33), Fiona Steil-Antoni (pp.7-8, 10, 13-14). Astrid Wallace (p.22), World Chess (pp.4, 5, 58).

ChessFounding Editor: B.H. Wood, OBE. M.Sc †Executive Editor: Malcolm PeinEditors: Richard Palliser, Matt ReadAssociate Editor: John SaundersSubscriptions Manager: Paul Harrington

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December 2016

Self-improvement is the name of the gameas we hurtle towards another new year. Thisyear’s stocking fillers should provide plenty ofinspiration for players of all ages and strengths.

Beating Minor OpeningsVictor Mikhalevski, 584 pages, Quality Chess

RRP £22.50 SUBSCRIBERS £20.25

First of all, it’s time to refresh a perennialNew Year resolution, made by all chessplayers: learn some decent lines to playagainst the minor openings. For most players,preparation time is taken up with what to playagainst 1 e4 and 1 d4, leaving gaps in therepertoire against openings favoured by aplethora of club opponents. Grandmaster Victor Mikhalevski, thereigning champion of Israel, really goes totown to provide the reader withcomprehensive coverage of all of White’soptions to 1 e4 and 1 d4. He deals with‘Irregularities’ in the first chapter, travellingacross the board from 1 h3 to 1 a3, beforemoving on to the slightly more popular moves1 f4, 1 g3 and 1 b3 over the course of thenext three chapters. We then encounter the book’s biggestchapter, dealing with 1 c4 e5 (with 2 g3 c6and 2 Ìc3 Íb4 being the respectiveweapons of choice). Coverage of 1 Ìf3follows and is split into three parts, offeringalternative remedies. Mikhalevski examines 1Ìf3 d5 and then 1 Ìf3 Ìf6 with a furthersplit: 2...b6 and 2...g6 (transpositions toregular Queen’s Indians and Grünfelds areclearly possible here, so the reader mustknow something about those defences tofollow this repertoire). Aficionados of Quality Chess books willknow what to expect: great depth and aplethora of variations, running to the likes of‘B2322’, to pick a random example. This isclearly a serious book for serious players andnot one best suited for a quick fix. The general ethos is for Black to playaggressively, seeking the initiative wherever

possible. There are some extraordinary lineswhich would be interesting to play over theboard, replete with novelties all waiting to betried. For instance, after 1 Ìf3 d5 2 c4 d43 b4 f6 4 e3 e5 5 exd4 e4! 6 Ëe2 Ëe7!7 Ìg1 Ìc6! 8 Ëe3 Ìxb4 9 Ìa3 Ìh6 10 Íb2 Ìf5 11 Ëb3 a5! 12 Ìc2 wereach this position.

J.Granda Zuniga-N.Short5th matchgame, Lima (rapid) 2012

The first observation is that White may notbe feeling too comfortable here if he hoped tokeep things quiet with 1 Ìf3. Short played 12...Íd7 and drew after 110 moves. Thesuggested novelty is 12...Ìd3+! 13 Íxd3 a4!when Black will end up with an impressivebishop-pair, offering a clear positional advantage. Some novelties appear very early in thegame, such as this one in the English Opening.The position arises after 1 c4 e5 2 Ìc3 Íb43 Ëb3 a5 4 Ìd5and now the novelty is 4...Ìf6!.

Black will gain “a dangerous initiative” inreturn for a pawn if White takes the bait with

5 Ìxb4 axb4 6 Ëxb4 Ìc6 7 Ëc3 d5!. I find it remarkable that the author hascovered the minor openings in such depthand unearthed so many promising novelties.Of course, very hard work is required toderive the most benefit from the material onoffer, but such a pushy repertoire – refusingto accept equality as the primary aim – couldgo some way to improving results as Black.Still, one shouldn’t be afraid of hard work andit will be a good feeling to start 2017 with aserious armoury of black weapons.

Your Opponent is OverratedJames Schuyler, 220 pages, Everyman Chess

RRP £17.99 SUBSCRIBERS £16.19

Subtitled ‘A practical guide to inducingerrors’, this interesting book takes a differentapproach to the norm. Instead of striving forgreater accuracy in one’s own game, the readeris encouraged to think in a different way:picture the opponent as a fallible, overratedplayer and aim to “expose his ignorance”. As theauthor puts it: “In virtually every game, even atthe very highest levels, your opponent willmake enough mistakes so that it is possible foryou to win. In those few cases where youropponent does not make enough mistakes foryou to win, it is because you did not present himwith enough opportunities to go wrong.” The first step in this approach is to employ a‘no draw’ strategy, granting further time andscope to induce errors. There are 17 chapters inall, with each one targeting a specific theme orarea of the game, from ‘The Opening’ to ‘Ploys’.The former is happy to advocate gambits; thelatter stresses the importance of bodylanguage and other esoteric factors. The author uses a lot of his own games (thequality of which he admits to being mediocre)to demonstrate his theories, but heavyweightsof the mistake-inducing world, such as HikaruNakamura, make several appearances andEmanuel Lasker gets a chapter all to himself.There is plenty of food for thought to be foundhere and it is always encouraging to see

Sean Marsh takes a look at some new books you might like to receive for Christmas

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Stocking Fillers

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examples of strong players blundering underpressure just like the rest of us. Schuyler writes with a light-heartedtouch. Chapter 14 is all about stripping awaythe enemy king’s pawn protection, but hestarts with the following advice: “One way toinduce errors is to take off all your clothesduring the game. Opponents are likely to findthis distracting. Furthermore, if successful,your story might be turned into a popular andinspiring independent film.” This is followed by more serious exampleson the real subject of stripping, such as thissnippet, found in the chapter devoted to Lasker.

E.Lasker-D.JanowskiLondon 1899

Here Lasker tempted the habitual gamblerJanowski to take a little flutter: 12 Ëc2Ìxf4 13 Íxh7+ Êh8 14 exf4 g6 15Íxg6 fxg6 16 Ëxg6. White has strippedthe black king and has three pawns for thepiece. Engine analysis aside, “The onlyassessment that has any value to the playersshould be the chances of Emanuel Laskerbeating David Janowski from this position.”After many adventures Lasker did, indeed,bring home the full point (1-0, 56). Incidentally, examples such as this canleave readers with the impression thatJanowski was merely a fall guy to the greats,so to put this particular encounter in contextit is useful to remember that even thoughLasker was the clear winner at London 1899,Janowski shared second place with Pillsburyand Maroczy ahead of a galaxy of other stars. This book represents a genuine attempt tobreak new ground and offer the club andtournament player inspiration to play a morecombative and uncompromising type of chess.

Chess Strategy for KidsThomas Engqvist, 128 pages, Gambit Publications

RRP £9.99 SUBSCRIBERS £8.99

This is the follow-up volume to Gambit’sChess Tactics for Kids, switching questions from‘How should I do it?’ to ‘What should I do?’. International Master Engqvist offers 50mini-lessons on the art of chess strategy,starting with ‘Control the Centre’ and workingup to ‘Connecting Opening, Middlegame andEndgame’. 27 exercises are given at the end,to test the reader’s new knowledge. Here is a trinket worth remembering.

It’s Black to play. Can you find the best move? Most students find strategy a hardersubject than tactics and I would think the scopeof this book reaches out beyond juniors. Noviceclub players of all ages will find some veryuseful material here and chess tutors will beable to use the mini-lessons at their schools. Incidentally, even the greatest strategistsoccasionally miss their footing whenexecuting their plans.

A.Karpov-A.BeliavskyTilburg 1986

It is hard to believe a 1980s-style Karpovcould misplay this classic minority attack, butthat is exactly what happened. “25 b5?Ìxg2! 26 Êxg2 h4, with an attack. Onepreparatory move (25 Íf1) was needed.” This is a very nicely produced hardbackand one I can recommend to novices of allages who want to add a little strategicknowledge to their game.

The Usborne Chess BookLucy Bowman, 64 pages, UsborneRRP £9.99 SUBSCRIBERS £8.99

Usborne have a long history of producingcolourful, accessible and informative books. Itis good to see them flexing their chess musclesagain with a book that should appeal to veryyoung children (up to Year 4 at PrimarySchools). Richard James is acknowledged asthe chess consultant and the enticingillustrations are by Candice Whatmore. The book starts with the very basic movesof the pieces and works up to ‘Tricky Puzzles’.The book’s innovative hook comes in the formof two pages of stickers at the end of thebook, which readers can use to stick on to thediagrams to show their answers. I like thisidea very much. It makes the book interactivewithout being online (now there’s a rarity),and I can easily see how the stickers willappeal to children. It also makes me nostalgicfor the old ‘peel and stick’ diagrams I used tocreate for chess bulletins back in the 1980s.The book is hard-backed and spiral-bound,making it very easy to open flat withoutcausing any damage. Here is an example of one of the tougherpuzzles. Stickers (or pens) at the ready; givethis one a try.

“Can you place the following whitestickers on the board so that none cancapture another: two knights, two bishops,two rooks, a queen and a king?” It is a very attractive book offering a colourful introduction to the game foryoung children.

www.chess.co.uk31

For all the latest chess bookreleases check out:

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December 2016

Crowns and Coronets, Mitres and ManesHarvey T. Dearden, 224 pages,

J.R.Smith PublishingRRP £14.99 SUBSCRIBERS £13.49

The road to self-improvement isn’t confinedto the moves of pieces over 64 squares, as ourfinal stocking filler will attest. Sometimes it isgood to step aside from the relentless struggleand rediscover other aspects of the great

game. The blurb tells us this is “a book tostimulate, amuse and intrigue.” The author admits “I am an indifferentplayer myself”, but he goes on to say “butchess would be a poor game if it required ahigh degree of proficiency before it could beenjoyed.” There are 52 essays in this book,with each one typically covering three or fourpages. The diverse topics include: ThomasHardy, the Lewis Chessmen, the occult,woodpushing and beauty. Chess diagrams arefew (this is not an instructional book), and theoccasional picture appears too, but generallyspeaking the essays are allowed to stand upfor themselves. Among the many interesting snippetsthere is a discussion about the nomenclatureof the rook, the possibility that the tusks ofan elephant in an early piece design

eventually evolved into the mitre of thebishop, and an examination of chess in Alice’swonderland. Anne Bronte is another writerwhose chess prose is analysed. This is part ofthe extract quoted by Dearden from TheTenant of Wildfell Hall. “‘Check’, cried he: I sought in agony somemeans of escape. ‘Mate!’ he added, quietly,but with evident delight. He had suspendedthe utterance of that last fatal syllable thebetter to enjoy my dismay.” Having analysed the prose, Dearden is ofthe opinion that “Anne was no chess player.” The essays never outstay their welcomeand, indeed, can act as inspiration for furtherresearch. It is one of the most unusual chessbooks of recent times and a great one fordipping in and out of over the festive season– akin to a box of varied chocolates.

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KASPAROV Grandmaster Silver & Bronze Chess Set

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December 2016

As I write this, the first two games of theCarlsen-Karjakin match have been played, but,as you read it, the match will probably be over.So you’ll know whether my cautious predictionof a Carlsen victory in the November articlehas come true, or whether it has gone the sameway as the pollsters’ and pundits’ disastrousfailure to foresee results in the EU referendumin the summer and the U.S. presidential electionin November. Like those people laughably describedas political scientists, I was just guessing. One thing I would have been tempted tobet heavily on would have been the tamestart to the match. Two solid draws. Notevery world championship match has begunquite so cautiously, but I seem to recall rathermore which have this sort of scenario:unambitious opening, queens exchanged, abit of probing by whichever side has amicroscopic edge, like a dentist checking fornew cavities – and then a repetition. So far I’m reminded of the old TV cop showcliché: “Nothing to see here, ladies and gents,move along now.” I confess I didn’t even botherto watch the two openers in real time, such wasmy conviction that they would be little morethan the aforementioned dental check-up. Theluxury of no longer being a chess magazineeditor meant that I could glean the result fromTwitter and then wait for our very own GM DanKing to deliver his excellent video summary ofthe action on YouTube, viewed from my comfysofa on a big screen in the lounge. Which set me to thinking how the way wefollow world chess matches has changed overthe years. Such is my decrepitude that I canremember how we followed the action in thepre-Fischer era. I was vaguely aware of worldchampionships in the early 1960s via smallnews stories in my parents’ newspapers (theNews Chronicle, before it was subsumed intothe Daily Mail, and thereafter TheManchester Guardian, as it was called in thatera), but the first match I followed avidly wasthe 1969 match between Petrosian andSpassky. Needless to say, there was nothingto see or hear on the TV or radio, but LeonardBarden filed a report in The Guardian on theday after each game, with a full game score. I was completely gung-ho for chess in thespring of 1969 when the second Petrosian-Spassky match was in progress (though Imight have achieved better school grades hadI not been so absorbed in it). There is some hardevidence, however, that my chess talent hadfailed to keep up with my enthusiasm. In Game 17, with Spassky having White,after 1 e4 c5 2Ìf3 e6 3 d4 cxd4 4Ìxd4a6 5 Íd3 Ìc6 6 Ìxc6 bxc6 7 0-0 d5 8 Ìd2 Ìf6 9 b3 Íb4 10 Íb2, I thought

the players had blundered, spotting10...Íxd2 11 Ëxd2 dxe4, winning a piece.

In my excitement at seeing what two worldchampions had missed I shot off a letter toLeonard Barden. I still have his reply, dated3rd June 1969, just five days after the game wasplayed (so he was much more prompt aboutdealing with correspondence than I’ve ever been). Leonard’s courtesy and diplomacy inresponding to my youthful folly is a blueprintfor editors and columnists everywhere: “Dear Mr. Saunders, Thank you for yourletter about the 17th game of the worldchampionship match. The answer is that after11...dxe4, White continues 12 Ëg5 exd3 13 Ëxg7 Îg8 14 Ëxf6, when Polugaevskyin Sovietsky Sport says that White has thebetter ending. It’s true that after 14...Ëxf615 Íxf6 dxc2 16 Îfc1 Black is left withthree pawn groups against White’s two, but Ithink that Black would have reasonabledrawing chances with the opposite-colouredbishops. However the main point is that bothplayers would certainly have visualised theconsequences of 10...Íxd2 and assessedthem as better for White; so there was noblunder. Yours sincerely, Leonard Barden.”

At sixteen I was old enough to realise I hadbeen let down gently by the great man, anddidn’t feel too bad about missing 12 Ëg5.And it’s rather wonderful to think that, nearlyhalf a century later, Leonard is still with us andstill writing about world championship chess. Moving forward to 1972, the chesslandscape had changed. In the run-up toReykjavik, the world had been awash withchess stories, not least the desperatestruggle to get the American challenger toplay at all. Newspaper columnists still kept usabreast of the moves, but we now had a TVshow to view, so we could enjoy news of playon the same day, even if not yet in real time. TV coverage became the norm for chess inthe era of geo-political battles between theUSA and the Soviet Union (Fischer vs Spassky),then Soviet Union versus external ex-Sovietdissident (Karpov vs Korchnoi), then SovietUnion versus internal Soviet dissident (Karpovvs Kasparov), and finally a match with someBritish interest (Kasparov vs Short), butthereafter the love affair between the box andthe chessboard gradually fizzled out, at least inour part of the world. Thankfully a new medium came to therescue and we now take chess webcasting forgranted, but I fear it has made us (or, at least,me) blasé about following the games. There isso much chess broadcasting now that onecan pick and choose, and I prefer a multiplicityof games that I can cherry-pick, rather thanjust the one game of what is often rathercagey play. World championship matches canbe a little reminiscent of FIFA World Cup finalswhere, after a pulsating set of qualifiers, thetwo top sides play out a totally sterile nil-nildraw followed by a penalty shoot-out. But, asyou read this, my fervent hope is that you willbe thinking how wrong I was to write it. Oh,me of little faith..

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Saunders on ChessFollow me on Twitter: @johnchess or email: johns@chess.co.uk

Magnus Carlsen does his best for the press, but the first two games in New York were rather drab.

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