Trifunovic Trounces Aaron

     Dr. Peter Trifunovic (31 August 1910, Dubrovnik – 8 December 1980, Belgrade) was an International Grandmaster and five-time Yugoslav Champion. 
     For many years Yugoslavia was the world's second strongest chess nation and so it is a measure of his strength that at the first and second Yugoslav Championships held 1935 in Belgrade and 1936 in Novi Sad, he finished third behind Vasja Pirc and Boris Kostić, then second behind Pirc, respectively.  Later he won the Yugoslav championship five times: 1945, 1946, 1947 (shared with Svetozar Gligorić), 1952, and 1961. 
     Trifunovic played in seven Olympiads between 1935 and 1962, the most memorable being Dubrovnik 1950 where his 10-3 score earned him the board 3 gold medal. 
     He obtained a Law degree in 1933, followed by a Doctorate. He received the IM title in 1950 and the GM title in 1953. 
     Originally, in the 1930s, he had a reputation as a fierce attacker, but like Flohr, he eventually began relying on positional play and defensive technique. As a result he became a drawing master. In his drawn match with Miguel Najdorf at Opatija 1949 the score was +1 −1 =10 and at Leipzig in 1965 he drew all 15 of his games. 
     Internationally he had a number of excellent results starting in 1945 and stretching to 1965 when he finished second behind Botvinnik, but ahead of Flohr, Larsen and Donner at Noordwijk. One amusing tournament on his US tour was at the 1962 Oklahoma City Open. He was expected to win, but draws with Senior Master Kenneth Smith and the Dallas Expert Robert Potter resulted in his ending up in a ten way tie for first! 
     The variation of Four Ps attack in Alekhine's Defense, 1.e4 Nf6 2.e5 Nd5 3.d4 d6 4.c4 Nb6 5.f4 Bf5, is the Trifunovic Variation. 
     Trifunovic contributed articles about happenings in Europe for Chess Review for many years and in 1962 he made a tour of the US. The Memphis Chess Club has an interesting article on Trifunovic's 1962 visit to the city HERE. 
     The following game demonstrates the ease with which a GM can often defeat even an IM. In this game Trifunovice uses positional assets (control of an open file, N outposts, weak square complex, good B vs. bad B) to gain complete dominance of the position and ends the game with a surprising tactic.
 

Weaver Adams Plays the Frankenstein-Dracula Variation

     Eric Schiller wrote a book on this variation in what has been called "the worst chess book ever written," but because I don't own the book I can't verify the truth of the claim. From reading the reviews it sounds like most people's complaints are about the publisher's poor printing, but one reviewer wrote, "...its value is primarily for entertainment, not so much analysis (there are only 30 or so very scant pages of opening analysis, followed by a poorly organized database dump of lightly annotated games. But for amusement purposes you won't be disappointed." You can take a look inside Schiller's book on Amazon HERE. 
     The Frankenstein–Dracula Variation ( 1.e4 e5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Bc4 Nxe4 4.Qh5 Nd6 5.Bb3 Nc6 6.Nb5) usually arises from the Vienna Game, but can also be reached from the Bishop's Opening. The opening involves a lot of complications and it's not seen much in top-level play although Ivanchuk once used it against Anand back in 1992 and drew. And, I even found a game where Alex Shabalov played it though it was in an open tournament against a "mere" 2400 player.
    The blurb for Schiller's book calls it "a monstrous thicket of complications which still have not been fully explored. The opening leads to fascinating positions which will bring enjoyment both in tournament and correspondence play. Although some theorists have treated the variation as dead and buried, experiments have managed to bring the monster variation back to life for Black, and it can now be considered fully playable."  Looking over this game with Stockfish and Komodo makes me believe that description is about right.
     In the following old game between Weaver Adams and Harry Lyman we seen Adams playing the Vienna, an opening which became closely associated with him. In his first book, White to Play and Win, published in 1939, Adams claimed that 1.e4 was White's strongest move and that if both sides played the best moves white ought to win. After 1...e5 Adams claimed the magic bullet was the Bishop's Opening.
     When the Bishop's Opening didn't produce the desired results, he switched to the Vienna Game, claiming a win with what is today known as the Frankenstein–Dracula Variation. When that failed he switched to the Adams Gambit where he played 6.d4 instead of 6.Nb5.  
     The Massachusetts Chess Association has a very nice tribute to his opponent, Harry Lymam, HERE.
 

Botvinnik vs. Fischer - Their Only Meeting

     The Varna (Bulgaria) Olympiad Final in 1962 featured the newly imposed FIDE regulation where players were forbidden to agree to a draw before 30th move. This had been a response to the plague of the fast growing number of quick draws. It didn't work; if the players wanted a draw they just played neutral moves in order to lengthen the game or played a threefold repetition. 
     The Soviet team consisted of Mikhail Botvinnik, Tigran Petrosian, Boris Spassky, Paul Keres, Efim Geller and Mikhail Tahl. Tahl ended up in the hospital with kidney problems and so was forced to drop out. 
     On the US team, Reshevsky didn't want to be in Fischer's shadow, and because he couldn't play first board, refused his place on the team which was comprised of Bobby Fischer, Pal Benko, Larry Evans, Edmar Mednis, Robert Byrne and Donald Byrne. 
     As expected, the Soviets won the finals by a huge margin followed by Yugoslavia (Gligoric, Trifunovic, Matanovic, Ivkov, Parma and Minic), Argentina (Najdorf, Julio Bolbochan, Panno, Sanguineti, Panno and Foguelman) with the United States finishing a disappointing fourth. 
     The final round was a bitter disappointment for the US. Going in, they seemed a safe bet to medal, but Argentina had been on a roll: they had wiped out Austria 4-0, then beat Romania 3-1. Then in the final round, they crushed Holland by 3-1. 
     In the last round the US was playing Yugoslavia and a 3-1 win would gave them the silver medal while a 2-2 score meant a bronze medal. But, after two quick draws, a loss by Robert Byrne meant the US was losing 1-2 and that meant Fischer had to beat Gligoric to salvage a third place finish. He couldn't do it and lost and as a result Argentina finished a well deserved third instead. 
     Fischer and Botvinnik have pretty much slipped into obscurity as the chess world moves on and the chess understanding of today's top players has surpassed theirs, but at Varna in 1962, one of the most looked forward to games was the World Champion Botvinnik against the hopeful Fischer. At first it was rumored that Botvinnik would be given a rest day, but fortunately for the chess world he ended up playing. This game was the only one ever played between the two. 
     Both players collaborated on the postmortem and in Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games the notes were mostly Botvinnik's. In most cases neither player offered any moves to verify their differing opinions, so I decided to take a look at it with Stockfish 8 and Komodo 10. On the whole, the engines agreed with Fischer's opinions more than Botvinnik's. 
     Fischer gained an advantageous position in the middlegame, but gradually let his advantage slip. The ending after move 51 was interesting because both players reached different conclusions; In My 60 Memorable Games Fischer claimed that he had a win if he had chosen to play 51...Kd4 instead of the move he actually played. Some years later Botvinnik handed the problem over to one of his students, the 13-year-old Gary Kasparov, who claimed that he had found a draw as did Lev Zaitsev in independent analysis. Analysis with Stockfish seems to support the claim that the position was only a draw. 
     Back then overnight adjournments were common and the Soviet team did a good job finding the draw. The game was adjourned at move 45 the Soviet team went to work. Botvinnik was in a difficult position, and probably objectively lost. Tahl recalled how he, Boleslavsky and Spassky worked on it for hours. Botvinnik, Geller, Keres and Furman analyzed all night in another room. When Tahl went to the room of Donald and Robert Byrne to offer a draw in his adjourned game with Donald, he found the Byrne brothers working on the Botvinnik-Fischer game as well. David Levy wrote that it was Geller, who in the early hours of the morning, found the implausible drawing idea beginning with 47.Rxh7! where White allows his opponent two connected passed pawns. 
     You can watch the conclusion of the game when it was agreed drawn on Youtube HERE.
 

Merry Christmas!

Square Off

     I just discovered this contraption yesterday and find it intriguing. It's a Rube Goldberg-like device that allows you to play chess against people all over the world just like online. That's assuming they also have purchased the device. 
     Just hook up the box to your smartphone and when you play, you make your move by actually moving a real chess piece. When your opponent moves, a two-axis robotic arm with a magnetic head beneath the board moves the magnetic pieces. You can also practice against it at different user selected levels. 
     The attraction is that you can sit in the comfort of your living room and challenge a player anywhere in the world and then play on a real chess set...even if it is kind of small; at least that's they way they look in the photos. 
     The cost varies. The plain old Kingdom Set will sell for $375, but if you order today it can be yours for $249...plus shipping, of course. The Grand Kingdom Set will sell for $450 but order now and it's only $299...plus shipping, of course. There are also huge discounts if you order in quantity; you'll have to pay shipping. 
     An outfit from Mumbai, India called Infivention Technologies ran a campaign on Kickstarter to fund the project and claims to have gotten more than enough funding and if you pre-order, your chess contraption should ship in June of 2017. Think I will wait, but if you want to pre-order you can do it on Kickstarter HERE.

Flummoxed by Charles G. M. Watson

     While browsing one of Prudy's books the other day I came across his description of the play of this rather obscure (to most of the chess world) Australian champion and was curious to find out more about him. 
     According to Purdy, Watson was one of those players whose tactics were far superior to their strategy. Watson studied chess books, but he never bothered with general principles and preferred to revel in sheer calculation.  Purdy speculated that he probably whipped through a dozen variations almost every move and saw far more, and far more quickly, than most of his opponents. Purdy added that he still had a plus score over Watson in their individual encounters, mostly because Purdy, as he put it, "...had some faith in principles, and discarded quickly many of the lines Watson took the trouble to calculate out for many moves ahead." 
     Purdy concluded that because Watson despised general principles he suffered for it. According to Purdy, the moral is that even though seeing tactics is absolutely essential, studying strategy is beneficial and is of practical value in that it will often save a lot of time on the clock. Purdy suggested that he looked at fewer lines than Watson, but discovered sounder ones sooner than he did. 
     Charles Gilbert Marriott Watson (October 22, 1878 – March 5, 1961) was an Australian national chess champion. Born in Buninyong, he started playing chess with his father at the age of 10 and, also, at the local club. He later joined the Melbourne Chess Club, winning the Melbourne Chess Club championship for the first time in 1898, then in 1902, 1904, 1905, 1914, 1921, 1931 and 1936. He won the Australian Championship in 1922 and a second time in 1931.
     Watson only played one international tournament, and was soon overshadowed by younger players like Purdy, Koshnitsky, Steiner and so he is unknown outside of Australia and even there, his career wallows in obscurity. Watson retired from chess many times, but always reappeared and was known for his uncanny ability to win lost games. 
     He competed in the championship of the province of Victoria 12 times, won it on his first attempt in 1898 and last won it in 1936. 
     When he won the won the Australian championship in 1922 the British Chess Federation had reserved a place for the winner of the Australian title in the International Masters tournament to be held later that year. The 1922 London International Congress, won by Capablanca ahead of Alekhine and Vidmar, was Watson's only international tournament. He finished 15th out of 16, scoring +4 -1 =10. However, he did mange to defeat many time British Champion H.E Atkins and Richard Reti in a 92-move ending. 
     Watson also had a brief soccer career and played 11 games for the Melbourne Demons in the inaugural season of the Victorian Football League Australian Football competition in 1897. Later in life became a big fan of bridge. 
     The following game has been described as worthy of Tahl. I have to admit that when I saw 10...h4 it left me plumb flummoxed! In the Dragon isn't white supposed to storm the K-side while black seeks counterplay on the Q-side? In this game we see black attacking on the K-side while white is reduced to passive defense. Tinkering around with Stockfish 8 and Komodo 10.1 didn't yield any refutation to Watson's idea though!
 

An Amazing Game, Mutesi vs. Miladi

 

Ms Mutesi and Ms Mildai

    A while back when Queen of Katwe was showing at the local theater I didn't see it because after having watched Pawn Sacrifice, my wife didn't want to see another movie about chess and I didn't want to go alone. But, I finally got around to checking out Phiona Mutesi and the results were quite disappointing. 
     I don't mean to take anything away from Ms Mutesi's accomplishments who grew up in a difficult background and discovered chess as a way out of her situation.  Nor do I fault Disney for making a feel good movie about her, and the massive awareness campaign will, hopefully, solve many of her and her family's problems. But...
     Chessically, the whole thing is a farce! She is hardly a prodigy and being awarded the Woman Candidate Master title by FIDE was an affront to thousands of female players who are far better. 
     In 2012, FIDE awarded Mutesi the lowest-ranked title following her performance in the 40th Chess Olympiad in Istanbul. The title requires that recipients reach, at least once, a rating of 2000. At the time, she was rated 1686, won only one game, against a Korean rated 1542. She also drew three games and lost three. This hardly seems good enough to be worthy of a title. 
     I heard the argument that one reason for her low rating might be the fact that players in her country don't get a lot of chances to play against FIDE rated opponents and when they do, they are usually paired either against much stronger or equally low rated opponents so it's hard to raise their ratings. Hence, ratings are inconclusive as indicators of their actual strength. If that's valid reasoning, why doesn't FIDE give every player who is in a similar situation a title? 
     According to a number of GMs, who are qualified to judge, her performance was no better than an average club player. One GM said, “Let me not mince words: by a purely objective standard, Phiona is not a strong chess player; she is equivalent to a weak-to-average club player (class C or B in the U.S.).” Her current FIDE rating is 1628. 
     If FIDE wants to just hand out titles for publicity purposes, I suggest they establish the title of FIDE BM.
     In looking over some of her games my attention was attracted to this recent fantastic slugfest against the Tunsian Woman Candidate Master, Amen Miladi (born in 2004) who sports a rating of 1432. Both of these young ladies deserve credit for this amazingly complicated game.
 

IM Miroslav Shvarts - Almost a Fake Grandmaster!

     As a result of his victory in the 2004 Kali Cup, a double round robin event that was held in Mindzentkalia, Hungary in 2004, German International Master Miroslav Shvarts notified the German chess federation that he was applying for the GM title because the win secured his third norm.
     Specific details about how this tournament was organized and exactly how the participants were involved are sketchy, but the ratings official of the German Federation, Christian Krause, became suspicious of the GM norm and notified the Hungarian Chess Federation which conducted an investigation. It turned out that the tournament was a complete fraud and no games were actually played. The FIDE Ethics Commission investigated and reached the same conclusion. 
     One year suspensions were handed out to: IM Vadim Eschenko, IM Timofey Galinsky, GM Mato Damjanovic and GM Attila Czebe.  An exception was made for one "competitor", GM Predrag Nikolac, who maintained that he never participated in the tournament and was seen in Germany during the time tournament was supposed to have been played. 
     Shvarts was hit with the hardest sanction, a two and a half year suspension, because he was the primary beneficiary, receiving his third and final GM norm and because his statements about his involvement in this tournament were misleading. For instance in a letter to FIDE he stated he had received his final norm at the tournament and had a certificate signed by the arbiter, Gyorgy Fazekas, and by Zoltan Ambrus of the Hungarian Chess Federation. According to the FIDE site Shvarts' current rating is 2344.
     Then, at a special hearing by the Ethics Commission, Shvarts stated that he had come to realize the Kali tournament was fraudulent, but did not realize it at the time of the event.  The Commission found his testimony unconvincing. At the time he was serving as president of the Saxon Association. 
     IM Lajos Istvandi, organizer of the event was also forbidden to organize, arbitrate or to participate in all chess events for two years. In addition, Interntioal Arbiter Fazekas, who contributed to creating the report at the request of Istvandi was forbidden to arbitrate any chess event for one and a half years. 
     The following game by Shvarts, like the game in the previous post, shows there's a vast difference even between an IM and an ordinary master. Shvarts outplays his master opponent because the master made just one small error when he played 17...b5.
 

Alexandru Crisan, Fake Grandmaster

     FIDE title regulations say that titles are for life but, but it is possible to lose one's title. "Use of a FIDE title or rating to subvert the ethical principles of the title or rating system may subject a person to revocation of his title upon recommendation by the QC and the Ethics Commission and final action by the General Assembly." That's what happened to Alexandru Crisan of Romania when he manipulated the system to gain the GM title.
     On the July 1997 rating list he was rated 2530, but on the January 1, 1998 list he was ranked number 33 in the world with a rating of 2635 without having played any games of note in the previous 10 years against the top 10 players in Romania and without participating in the top group of the National Championship, representing Romania in any Chess Olympiad or producing any result from any official or well-established tournament in Romania or other place in the world. Crisan apparently falsified tournament reports to gain the GM title. 
     As a result a committee investigating the matter recommended his rating be erased and his title revoked. While the Romanian Chess Federation initially favored action against Crisan, eventually he became the RCF president and changed the policy! FIDE intervened to find a resolution.
     It was decided that Crisan would verify his rating by playing in 3 tournaments selected by FIDE and in the Vidmar Memorial in 2001, held in Slovenia, his result was disastrous 0.5 out of 9. But then he bounced back by winning two tournaments in Yugoslavia. At Tekija and Kladovo, he won both events by drawing most games in a handful of moves and defeating a few opponents who were all competent players, but they had fallen on hard times when Yugoslavia melted down in the 1990s. Bribery was suspected.
     In 2011 Crisan was arrested and imprisoned on fraud charges relating to his management of the company Urex Rovinari. As the former owner of Urex Rovinari, he was sentenced to four years in prison for having claimed 80,000 euros in exchange for an intervention involving the construction of a landfill. Chesswise things remained unresolved until August 2015 when he was stripped of his titles and his rating adjusted down to 2132. 
     He's not the only person who arranged titles for himself by "playing" in non-existing tournaments. Ian Rogers alleged that Andrei Makarov (at the time a FIDE vice-president and Russian chess federation president had arranged an IM title for himself. 
     In 2005 FIDE refused to ratify norms from the Alushta (Ukraine) tournaments, claiming that the games did not meet ethical expectations despite the fact that a number of players involved protested. See the ChessBase article HERE. A different Ukrainian tournament in 2005 was found to be completely fake. Read about it HERE and a followup report HERE.
     Oddly, when the Crisan affair was under investigation by FIDE they solicited the opinion of GM Zurab Azmaiparashvili, who at the time was one of the highest rated players in the world. After reviewing Crisan's games, he stated, "For me if I am asked how Mr. Crisan reached his rating of 2600, it is clear to me that it was done in an illegal way." It was odd because Azmaiparashvili, already a strong player, was alleged to have rigged the results of the Strumica tournament of 1995 to allow himself to obtain his title.  Sveshnikov referred to the incident as an open secret. 
    In 2004 at the closing ceremony of the 36th Chess Olympiad in Calvia, Azmaiparashvili was arrested by local police and held in custody for several days. The attitude of the event's organizers towards Azmaiparashvili had been soured when, upon his arrival in Spain, he had attempted to secure two hotel rooms for himself, claiming he was entitled to one in his capacity as a FIDE vice-president and another because he was a player in the event. 
     At the closing ceremony when he approached the stage, apparently in an attempt to inform FIDE officials that the organizers had neglected to award a prize named in honor of former Women's World Champion Nona Gaprindashvili, he got into a conflict with security officials and in the ensuing scuffle both he and a security guard were injured. A press release from the organizers placed the blame on Azmaiparashvili saying that after he had tried to gain admittance to the stage on several occasions he "without any previous provocation, assaulted the agent with a head butt to his mouth". FIDE blamed over-zealous policing, saying, "Despite his clear VIP identification, he was severely beaten up by several security guards". Azmaiparashvili was due to appear in court on July 22, 2005, but the charges were dropped. 
     He had also been criticized in 2004 over arrangements for the 2004 Women's World Championship when Georgian players Lela Javakhishvili and Ana Matnadze accused him of behaving "in a hostile and intimidating manner, using inappropriate and vulgar language and bringing to tears our mothers". 
     In spite of his skullduggery Crisan was a near-master and what makes the following game interesting is that it shows how easily a 2700 GM can roll right over an Expert even though the Expert doesn't make any serious blunders. Crisan's position just slowly deteriorated after a couple of second rate moves until there was nothing left.