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Thursday, January 30, 2020

The Queen Trapped Herself

     Most players are familiar with the 8th Chess Olympiad which took place between August 21 and September 19, 1939, in Buenos Aires and coincided with the outbreak of World War II. 
     When the war broke out many of the participants decided to stay in Argentina or moved elsewhere in South America rather than face an uncertain future by returning to a Europe. 
     The players, most of whom were Jewish, remaining in South America were: Miguel Najdorf, Paulino Frydman, Gideon Stahlberg, Erich Eliskases, Paul Michel, Ludwig Engels, Albert Becker, Heinrich Reinhardt, Jiri Pelikán, Karel Skalicka, Markas Luckis, Movsas Feigins, Ilmar Raud, Moshe Czerniak, Meir Rauch, Victor Winz, Aristide Gromer, Franciszek Sulik, Adolf Seitz, Chris De Ronde, John Francis O'Donovan, Zelman Kleinstein, Sonja Graf and Paulette Schwartzmann.
     This list includs all five members of the German team (Eliskases, Michel, Engels, Becker, Reinhardt). 
     It’s largely unknown, but coinciding with the Olympiad was the 7th Women's World Championship. The event was won by Vera Menchik who was undefeated and finished two points ahead of the then stateless Sonja Graf. Other top finishers with plus scores were: Berna Carrasco (Chile), Elfriede Rinder (Germany), Mona Karff (United States), Milda Lauberte (Latvia), Maria Teresa Mora (Cuba), Catharina Roodzant (Netherlands), Blazena Janeckovaa (Bohemia-Moravia) and Paulette Schwartzmann (France). 

     It’s also not widely known that immediately after Olympiad another tournament was held in Buenos Aires from from the 2nd to the 19th of October 1939 at the Círculo de Ajedrez, one of the two main chess clubs in the city.
     Nardorf and Keres tied for first with 8.5 points followed by Stahlberg and Czerniak, both with 7.0 points. Frydman and Guimard shared 5th and 6th with 6.5. The remaining players were Grau (5.5), Luckis (5.0), Gerschman and Francisco Benko (3.5), Graf (2.5) and Palau (2.0). 
     The following game was one of Capablanca’s last great games and it’s full of fight and has a striking finish. Czerniak came out swinging and developed a strong attack, but Capa consistently found the best moves and at the end Czerniak trapped his own Queen. 

      Concerning this game Capablanca wrote: Yesterday evening I had the white pieces again in Cuba's match against Palestine, a team we had beaten 3-1 in the preliminary section although I had only drawn. 
     As is my custom, shortly after play began I went to see how my compatriots were faring, and I observed that things were going badly, since my teammates had played inferior openings and were all under pressure. Meanwhile, I had obtained a satisfactory opening in a fairly well known though little played variation of the Caro-Kann. 
     I suppose that a large number of aficionados who are accustomed to see me almost always play a positional game in which everything is solidly constructed were surprised to see me playing a purely attacking game. I must point out that games must be conducted in accordance with the kind of opening that is played.
     In the defense adopted yesterday evening by Black, it is necessary for White, if he wishes to obtain any advantage, to attack vigorously before Black can consolidate his defenses and exert pressure on White's isolated queen's pawn. In the light of the above, the public will understand why I launched an assault in such resolute fashion. 
     I had the good fortune of being able to make a long, difficult combination as a result of which I obtained a clear advantage, which I was quickly able to exploit. Black's position collapsed before the end of the playing session. The game was of the kind that most appeals to the public and it is a source of satisfaction for me that this game was the first of its kind played in this tournament. 

      Capa’s opponent was Moshe Czerniak (February 3, 1910 – August 31, 1984) who isn’t very well known, but Chessmetrics assigns him a rating that put him in the world’s top 100 players from 1939 through the 1950s. 
Czerniak

     Czerniak was born in Poland, but in 1934 he emigrated to Palestine, then British Mandate. He played for Palestine at first reserve board in the Olympiad at Warsaw 1935 and at first board at Buenos Aires 1939. In September 1939, when World War II broke out, Czerniak decided to stay in Argentina. 
     After the aforementioned post-Olympiad tournament he tied for 7–9th in Argentine championship of 1940. He played with considerable success in many of the major South American tournaments and in 1950 he finally settled in Israel. From that time he continued to be active in European tournaments, again with considerable success. 
     He represented Israel in 1952, 1954, 1956, 1958, 1960, 1962, 1966, 1968, and 1974. He retired from active competition in 1978. 
     Czerniak wrote several chess books in three languages and in 1956 founded the first Israeli chess magazine, 64 Squares. For more than thirty years he was the chess editor of the Israeli daily Haaretz. He was also the chess teacher of IM and GM of chess composition, Yochanan Afek.

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Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Chess Warts


   Warts have plagued humans for thousands of years and have even been discovered on 3,000-year-old mummies. The medical books will tell you that although warts generally aren’t dangerous, they are ugly, potentially embarrassing and contagious. They can also be painful. The same could be said of a lot chess moves. 
     I remember when I got my first real engine and created a database called “My Games.” The first games I had the engine analyze were all those great postal games that I had put so much effort into and some of my best OTB games. It didn’t take long for the ugly truth to come out...they were all covered with warts, big, ugly, embarrassing and painful warts. And, that was just the “best” games. 
     Eventually I got used to the fact that my games were going to be filled with more warts than a toad, but sometimes they were still interesting. Such was the following recent online game. 
     I decided not to play silly openings and gambits which I have been doing a lot lately just for amusement. Instead, I played the Vienna Game. The original idea behind the Vienna was to play a delayed King's Gambit, but in modern play white often plays more quietly (for example, fianchettoing his B with g3 and Bg2. 
     My intention was to play the Vienna the old fashioned way, but black wouldn’t cooperate and played 3...Qh4?? Why do so many online players insist on the early excursion of the Q to h5 or h4? Do they really think their opponent is going to fall for getting mated or blundering away a R? 
     The Danvers Opening, also known as the Kentucky Opening, Queen's Attack, Wayward Queen Attack, Patzer Opening or Parham Attack is characterized by the moves1. e4 e5 2. Qh5 and I have heard a lot of players swear by it because Hikaru Nakamura has played it with great success in Blitz. But, Nakamura is also an FIDE 2800+ rated Blitz player with a 2700+ classical rating which means he can beat most players no matter what he plays. 
     The opening is just awful and in this game my opponent played a variation of it, got a bad game and was mated in an amusing fashion.

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Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Tal-Botvinnik 1960

     What a year 1960 was! John F Kennedy was elected president and the U.S. entered the Vietnam War with the announcement that 3,500 soldiers were going to be sent there...just as advisers, of course. The Soviets shot down a U2 spy plane that President Eisenhower had assured everybody wasn’t flying over Russia. Fidel Castro nationalized American Oil, sugar and other US interests in Cuba. 
     Aluminum cans were introduced and Xerox introduced the first photocopier...no more mimeographs, a stencil duplicator that worked by forcing ink through a stencil onto paper. 
     On brighter notes, Chubby Chequer started a new dance craze called The Twist. There were only three television channels and aside from politicians coming to the realization that TV was great for campaigning, spreading lies in en mass and slinging mud, we were watching Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Have Gun – Will Travel, The Andy Griffith Show, The Real McCoys, Rawhide, Candid Camera, The Untouchables, The Price Is Right, and The Jack Benny Show. 
     What was going on in the chess world? In the St. Louis at the U.S. Open, Detroit Master Paul Poschel came within a whisker of winning only he couldn’t convert a favorable last-round position against Robert Byrne and had to settle for a draw. As a result Byrne took first by a half point ahead of Pal Benko and Poschel. 
     In the summer of 1960, for the first and only time, the US won a world team championship, the World Student Team Championship at Leningrad, ahead of the USSR. The US team consisted of Raymond Weinstein, Eliot Hearst, William Lombardy, Charles Kalme, Edmar Mednis and Anthony Saidy. 
     Equally exciting was the mid-Summer match between Fischer and Reshevsky. Then with the score tied after 11 games Booby Fischer established a pattern that he was to continue the rest of his life...he walked out. 

     Fischer won his fourth straight U.S. Championship, also a Zonal, ahead of William Lombardy and Raymond Weinstein. The players’ ratings were Fischer (2641), Reshevsky (2632), Lombardy (2555), R. Byrne (2535), Benko (2501), Bisguier (2501), Weinstein (2448), Seidman (2417), Saidy (2412), Sherwin (2411), Berliner (2406) and Kalme (2374). 
     Fischer, Lombardy and Weinstein qualified for the 1962 Stockholm Interzonal, but Weinstein had college exams and Lombardy had just become a priest so Bisguier and Benko went in their place. 
     The 1960 World Championship between Mikhail Botvinnik and Mikhail Tal that was played in Moscow from March 15 to May 7, 1960 was an exciting affair. Botvinnik, the reigning champion, was the favorite, but Tal won the match decisively by a margin of 4 points. 
     Tal was criticized because only on month after the Candidates tournament he played in a relatively unimportant international tournament in Riga that was won by Spassky and Mikenas. And, it turned out that in Riga instead of the impressive swashbuckling attacks for which Tal had become famous, he was on the defensive in most of his games at at no time was he in any position to challenge the leaders. Actually, this tournament was part of Tal’s preparation for the match. 
     In their preparation Tal and his second, Alexander Koblencs, determined that if Botvinnik obtained the initiative in the opening, he was deadly, but in tactical situations be was less sure of himself. Also, it was clear that Botvinnik often accepted a slight advantage in the ending where his great skill in that area would result in success. 
     But, their most important discovery was that during a game, Botvinnik gave most of his consideration to strategy and was rarely distracted by tactical variations. While this had its advantages, it also had a big disadvantage in that sometimes Botvinnik tended to underestimate tactical possibilities. 
    The game featured here saw Tal a full point ahead, but he was not satisfied with his play because in the last four games Botvinnik had been able to direct the game into his favorite channels and seize the initiative. As a result, Tal and Koblencs decided that changes had to be made and a big part of that decision was what opening should Tal play? 
    The Modern Benoni and Nimzo-Indian had not produced satisfactory results, so it was decided that another double-edged defense should be tried and the classical King’s Indian was decided upon. The reason for that decision was that Botvinnik usually selected an old fashioned continuation that involved fianchettoing his light-squared f1 Bishop which Tal didn’t think gave white any advantage. 
     FYI Antonio Radic ( aka AGADMATOR) is a Croatian Candidate Master, whose main work is his Youtube channel. He has the largest YouTube chess channel as of January 2020, with over 546,000 subscribers.
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Monday, January 27, 2020

Krakow/Warsaw 1941


   Hans Frank (May 23, 1900 – October 16, 1946) was a German politician and lawyer who served as head of the General Government in Poland during the Second World War; he was known as “the Butcher of Poland.” 
     Frank, a pretty decent player himself and owner of an extensive chess library, used his position to promote the game. On November 3, 1940 he organized a chess congress in Krakow and six months later set up a chess school under Bogoljubow and Alekhine. 
     As soon as Joseph Goebbels (1897 – 1945), Germany’s Reich Minister, heard of Frank’s chess activities he disapproved because Frank was pursuing a policy “which is anything but that sanctioned by the Reich.” Frank had ordered the setting up of a chess seminar in Krakow under Polish management which Goebbels deemed unimportant. He added that “Frank sometimes gives the impression of being half mad. Some of the incidents that have been reported to me concerning his work are simply dreadful.” 
Frank and Goebbels

     After the war Frank was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials, was sentenced to death and in October 1946 he was guest at an Allied “necktie party.” As for Goebbels, after Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945, Goebbels became Chancellor of Germany for one day before he and his wife committed suicide after poisoning their six children. 
     In 1939 Alekhine and many other players were surprised by the outbreak of World War II during the Chess Olympiad 1939 in Buenos Aires. A lot of players stayed in South America, but Alekhine returned to his wife Grace Wishaar and joined the French Army in its fight against Nazi Germany. 
     After the French surrendered he first went to the zone occupied by the Vichy French but later collaborated with the occupying German forces. After the war he justified his collaboration by claiming that otherwise he and his wife would have been sent to a concentration camp. 
     In 1941, Alekhine published his anti-Semitic material about Jewish and Aryan chess.  According to his friend, the Portuguese player Francisco Lupi, Alekhine was approached by the Nazis who asked him to write some propaganda material which appeared in a German newspaper in March, 1941. Lupi asked his readers what would they have done in a situation where “death and despair was everywhere and life had very little value"?  Would his readers have said “No.” and watched their wife “take a headshot before you also get blown away, or you can write some gibberish and live to fight another day.” 
     It’s not well known, but during the Munich tournament in 1942 which was held for the Axis-controlled championship of Europe, Alekhine wrote in a French newspaper that the tournament stressed "the leading role played by new Europe and marks the end of the , to say the least, inopportune interference of America in the European chess question.” 
     One of the tournaments organized by Frank was Krakow/Warsaw in October of 1941. 

 1-2) Alexander Alekhine and Paul Schmidt 8.5 
3) Efim Bogoljubow 7.5 
4) Klaus Junge 7.0 
5) Josef Lokvenc 5.5 
6) Teodor Regedzinski 5.0 
7-9) Eduard Hahn, Georg Kieninger and Max Bluemich 4.5 
10) Paul Mross 3.5 
11-12) Carl Carls and Heinz Nowarra 3.5  

      Paul Schmidt (August, 1916 – August, 1984) was an Estonian player, writer and chemist who is virtually unknown today, but appears to have been far stronger than one might suspect. 
    Chessmetrics assigns him a rating high of 2696 in 1943 and that put him at number 9 in the world. He last appears on Chessmetrics list in 1952 with a rating of 2522 ranking him number 137th in the world. 
     Among his many successes, in 1935, Schmidt won, ahead of Paul Keres, at Tallinn and in 1936, he drew a match against Keres (+3 –3 =1). In 1936, he won the Estonian Championship. In 1937, he won Estonia's first-ever international tournament at Parnu, ahead of two world title contenders, Salo Flohr and Keres. 
     Schmidt emigrated from Estonia to Germany in the autumn of 1939 and in 1940, he took 2nd, behind Georg Kieninger, in the German Championship. In August 1941, he tied for 1st with Klaus Junge in the German Championship and won the play-off match +3 –0 =1. Both during and after the war Schmidt’s success continued and in 1950 he was awarded the IM title. 
     In 1951, he earned a PhD in chemistry from Heidelberg University, and moved to Canada, then to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he took a job as a professor. Later he and his wife Eva moved Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories and made co  electro-chemistry and anodic oxidation of silicon, was expert in neutron activation analysis, and published many papers, till his retirement in 1982. He continued playing occasional games and regularly visited Reuben Fine in New York. 
    His opponent in this game is the virtually unknown German Master Heinz Nowarra (1897–1945). Nowarra played in many Berlin Championships in the late 1930s and during World War II, he played in several tournaments in General Government (occupied central Poland), usually finishing around the middle of the tournament. Nowarra took also part in correspondence tournaments. In December 1944, his game against Klaus Junge had to be interrupted when Junge left for the front. Ludek Pachman wrote that Nowarra. Like Junge, probably died in the final days of World War II, but nobody really knows.

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Saturday, January 25, 2020

Dabblers, Obsessives, Hackers and Masters

 
I am a hacker
   There is a library around the corner from our house and occasionally I pay it a visit. For years they’ve been advertising a chess club that meets on Wednesday afternoon at 4pm, but nobody goes. I think it was one of the librarian’s ideas several years ago and they never took down the signs or took it off the website. I showed up for the first meeting and there was only one pre-teen girl there and nobody from the library staff.

     They only have two or three chess books, but I go to browse and occasionally check out a biography or history book. One book that got browsed the other day was not really something I would be interested in actually reading, but it did catch my attention. It was Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment by George Leonard.
     The book says the author draws on Zen philosophy and his expertise in the martial art of aikido to show how the process of mastery can help us attain a higher level of excellence and a deeper sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in our daily lives. 
     I am definitely not interested in Zen and am somewhat confused. When I looked it up one source said it’s not a philosophy or a religion. Instead Zen tries to free the mind from the slavery of words and the constriction of logic. Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom. Zen is meditation. Not something that interests me in the least. 
     But what was interesting was the author discussed something all chess players experience...hitting a plateau where we get stuck and fail to make any further progress. 
     Leonard believes we are conditioned to experience success without experiencing a lot of effort, delays and setbacks and when that doesn’t happen the excitement wears off and with it the interest. Then we look for a quick-fix.
     Leonard also discussed a problem that the nation faces. Namely, for a long time now our prosperity is built on a huge deficit and trillions of dollars worth of debt, both as a nation and as individuals. Failure to deal with the deficit goes along with easy credit and the continuing encouragement of individual consumption at the expense of saving and longer term goals. He suggests that our time might be running out. But that’s another subject. 
     In the book Leonard described the attitudes we have towards attempting to master any new skill or challenge and he seems to have hit the nail on the head when it comes to chess players. 

 The Dabbler 
They approach a new sport, hobby, job opportunity or relationship with enthusiasm, but lose interest once initial progress slows or a setback is encountered. They start a lot of new things, but once they hit a wall or plateau they move on.  
The Obsessive 
They are strongly goal-oriented and results-focused and pursues mastery with intensity and dogged persistence, making rapid initial progress. When setbacks are encountered, they redouble their effort and push forward without mercy. But because this cannot be sustained, ultimately they burnout. 
The Hacker 
They have a laid back approach to learning new things and are content to stay on the plateau indefinitely as they remain satisfied in their comfort zone. They avoid getting frustrated and dabble at improvement, but are unwilling to invest in any real effort and hard work. As a result they never progress. 

      Leonard believed mastery is not about reaching perfection, but comes from maintaining a particular mindset as you move along the path of improvement in building your skills or overcoming challenges in any endeavor. 
     Learning any new skill involves brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher than before. You have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills and to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau and keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere. This can be frustrating, but if you are serious, you have to accept plateaus and learn to love training or practice for its own sake. 
     Leonard described the keys to mastery: Instruction, Practice, Surrender and Intentionality. By surrendering he meant you have to accept plateaus and set backs and intentionality is a complicated philosophy in itself, but here I would simply describe it as a sense of purpose. 
     Me? I am a Hacker. 

 Chess Progress article on Chessbase
Ten reasons why adults fail to improve at chess article at The Chess World. This is actually an ad for a chess course, but the reasons are valid.
Five way adults learn differently than children. Article from Learnkit.
How Adults Learn is an article from Child and Youth Care.
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Thursday, January 23, 2020

Pillsbury Razzle Dazzled

     An opening generally known as the Irish Gambit, Chicago Gambit or Razzle Dazzle is, as has been pointed out in a few forums, a terrible opening. Why sac a piece for a Pawn for only 2 tempos of development? The center will be countered rather easily. Never play it! That’s what they say. 
     One poster stated he thought it would be useful in blitz games as a surprise, but he would never play it in a long game. Another person wanted to know why people search for gimmicks to win games instead of relying on good old-fashioned hard work and playing decent lines, adding that the opening is a joke and white will lose if black plays properly. Another boasted that if you play it against him you’ll lose. 
     The opening begins 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nxe5. An apocryphal tale is told of the anonymous inventor of the gambit. On his deathbed, when asked what subtle idea lay behind the gambit, his last words were reportedly: "I hadn't seen the king's pawn was defended." 
     In Chicago in 1899, Dr. D. T. Phillips, a leading Chicago player of the day, played it against Pillsbury during the latter’s simultaneous display against 27 chess players and 10 checkers players. His chess score was +20 -2 =5 and his score at checkers was +7 -1 =2. 
     Dr. Phillips had white because Pillsbury conceded white on some of the boards. When Dr. Phillips played 3.Nxe5 it left both spectators and Pillsbury astounded. As was reported in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the gambit was “not altogether new nor sound and which has been variously dubbed the Irish, Chicago and Razzle Dazzle Gambit.” I am calling it the Irish Gambit because, as can be seen from the article, that name pre-dates the Chicago game. 

   The Razzle Dazzle was applied in the dispatches describing the game in which it was also stated that it was a new gambit involving the sacrifice of a Queen for a Pawn (sic!). Nobody believed the report and all it did was “emphasize the guileless innocence of the reporter who furnished this remarkable piece of news, for the possibility of the successful sacrifice of a Queen at so early a stage is too absurd for belief.” 
     The opening caught the great Pillsbury by surprise and before he knew it his King was under attack by all of white’s pieces. All of Pillsbury’s pieces were balled up around his King and technically there wasn’t any way for white to breakthrough and administer the coup de grace, plus there was still the matter of black’s material advantage. Still, Pillsbury’s position was pretty cramped and as Tarrasch wrote, a cramped position contains the seeds of defeat. 
     The Eagle article observed, the sacrifice “carries with it excellent opportunities for attack which, however, avail only against weaker players as a rule.” I have played this opening a few times in online ten minute games and have had decent success and not all of the players have appeared to be “weak.” The fact is, black has to be careful he doesn’t get overwhelmed!

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Wednesday, January 22, 2020

This Just In...

     While Stockfish development versions are released fairly often, Version 11 is now out. Version 11 is claimed to be 50 points stronger than the last version and 150 points stronger than the version which lost a match to AlphaZero two years ago. 
     Developers estimate that on four cores Stockfish 11 could give 1 to 1000 time odds to the world champion at classical time controls and they would be equally matched. Download…
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Radojcic Whips Warren


   The North Central Open began in 1954 as an unofficial regional championship of the USCF and was one of the strongest opens in the nation. It was won several time by Wiiliam Martz and after his death it was known for many years as the William Martz Memorial. In 1957 the event was won by Bobby Fischer. 
     The 1964 Open was played at the luxurious Plankinton House Hotel in Milwaukee and was a seven‐round Swiss in which 108 players, including one GM and 15 Masters, participated. 
     Miro Radojcic won the event on tiebreaks with a score of 6-1. His score was equaled by Robert Byrne of Indianapolis and by the Chicago Masters Albert Sandrin and Edward Formanek. Three other Chicago Masters tied at 5.5-1.5: Paul Tautvaisas, Vasa Kostic and Richard Verber. Edmar Mednis of New York topped a group scoring 5‐2 while former two time winner Curt Brasket of Minneapolis finished just below the prize winners. 
     Miroslav Radojcic (August 24, 1920 - January 14, 2000, 79 years old) was a Yugoslav National Master and USCF Master, but was probably more famous as one of Yugoslavia's most renowned political journalists for the paper Politika. During the 1960s he worked out of the United Nations in New York as Politika's foreign correspondent to the US, and later in the 1970s he was assigned the same post for London. He also contributed a long-running column for Chess Life called Observation Point. 
Radojcic

     Back in 1967, terrible tempered Bobby Fischer walked out of the Interzonal in Sousse, Tunisia then re-entered only to walk out again. He fought with the officials, complained about the lights, objected to the noise, threatened to smash a news photographer's camera and, so far as his chess was concerned, he beat almost everybody; he was +7 -0 =3 when he left for good. 
     On the eve of his departure Fischer told an interviewer, “I’m leaving these patzers to fight against each other for the right to play against another patzer."  Details…  
     In his Observation Point column of February, 1968, Radojcic more or less took Fischer’s side. He wrote that as Fischer’s friend, he sensed Fischer was haunted by feelings that amounted almost to a persecution mania and at the same time that his behavior was at times childish and illogical, insulting and undignified.” 
     Radojcic looked at Fischer’s behavior like a “wise theatrical director might”...stars are all a bit “silly” and the “the bigger the star, the greater the right to be silly.” 
     In Radojcic’s opinion the TD and tournament committee should have shown a little more leniency and used a little more diplomacy. He thought the actions of the officials only strengthened Fischer’s impression that everybody was being malicious wanted him to leave. 
     Radojcic pointed out that there were some other complaints about the tournament and the TD acted in a petty manner when he refused to move Fischer’s table to a location where the light was more to Fischer’s liking. They were playing in a vast room where there was a lot of empty space and in his game against Miguel Cuellar of Columbia both of them actually picked up their table and carried it to a different location. 
     The year 1964 was a good one for Radojcic...besides winning the North Central Open he finished in 2nd place in the US Open in Boston with Robert Byrne and James T. Sherwin behind Pal Benko and he won the Florida Open.
     Radoicic style was described as smooth and uncluttered with imaginative strategy fortified by eclectic tactics that lead to positions where the fluidity of the pieces brought about about surprising denouements. 
     His opponent in the following game was James E. Warren of Lombard, Illinois, who passed away on December 12, 2014, at the age of 81. Warren worked for Western Electric (later AT&T Technologies) until a 1989 heart attack forced him to take an early retirement. 
     Warren was known for his contribution to Illinois chess as a player, organizer, patron and volunteer is. His wife Helen was a co-founder of the Illinois Chess Association. 
     As a USCF Expert, Warren was a prominent player in the Chicago Industrial Chess League back in the days when having a 2000+ rating was a big deal; masters were rare birds and GMs were mythical people living in far away places...you hardly ever saw one. Warren played Bobby Fischer twice on his 1964 simultaneous tour; they drew on March 22 and again on May 20, 1964.
     After Professor Arpad Elo created his rating system, Warren was instrumental in its 1960 implementation by the USCF where he served as Rating Statistician, wrote a computer program for calculating ratings, and he suggested to Professor Elo that the Harkness System's classifications of Master, Expert, Class A, Class B, Class C should be included. It wasn’t until 1970, the Elo system was adopted by FIDE.

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Tuesday, January 21, 2020

The Adventures of Pal Benko


   I was never a fan of Pal Benko’s games because I thought they were boring and neither have I ever been into chess problems so didn’t appreciate either his problems or endgame compositions. But, Benko the man lead a fascinating life in his 91 years! 
     If you can find it at a reasonable price Pal Benko: My Life, Games, and Compositions is fascinating reading...I can’t imagine anybody paying the ridiculous $109.50 I saw it advertised for on Amazon though!
     Pal Benko (July 15, 1928 – August 26, 2019) was born at Amiens in northern France to Hungarian parents who returned to Budapest shortly after his birth and that’s where he grew up. In 1938, at the age of nine Benko learned chess from his father, who owned a machine parts factory. His first chess book was a collection of Capablanca's chess games, written by Ferenc Chalupetzk and Laszlo Toth. 
     In 1940, Benko started taking chess seriously and in 1941 he became interested in chess problems and began composing them. Owing to a lot of chess activity in Hungary, Benko’s progress was rapid. In 1943, he was leading in his first local tournament when it was canceled because most of the players began getting drafted into the Hungarian Army. 
     December 1943 saw Benko's father arrested by the Hungarian government and sentenced to hard labor for refusing to join the Hungarian Army. Hungary was on the side of the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan. 
     While waging war against the Soviet Union, Hungary engaged in armistice negotiations with the United States and the United Kingdom and when Hitler discovered this betrayal, in March 1944, German forces occupied Hungary and Prime Minister Miklos Kallay was deposed and soon mass deportations of Jews to German death camps in occupied Poland began. Benko’s father was released from prison in March because he Nazis mistakenly thought he was locked up for being pro-Nazi. 
     In July 1944, Pal Benko was drafted in the Hungarian army and was ordered to the front. He deserted but was later caught by the Russians, but managed to escape and make it back to Budapest only to find his apartment bombed out and his father and brother gone. 
     In December 1944, the Soviet army besieged Budapest in a 50-day-long siege in which over 50,000 people were killed. The Soviets considered Benko’s father and older brother POWs and in January 1945, shipped them to Russia as slave laborers. 
     In June 1945, Benko played, and won, his first major chess tournament in Budapest and with it the title of Hungarian Master. The following month his mother died at the age of 41 leaving him alone to care his little sister. In late 1945, he moved to Szeged, Hungary and his father was let out of the Soviet prison and soon defected to the United States. 
     In 1947, Benko majored in economics at the University of Economic. After the war he competed in a number of international tournaments and in March of 1952, while playing in a team match in Goerlitz, East Germany when he and his friend, Geza Fuster (1910-1990), were thinking of defecting to the West. 
     To do that they had to reach the American embassy in West Berlin. They went East Berlin where Fuster, who later settled in Canada, managed to run across the border. Benko was caught, arrested and taken to prison where he was accused of being an American spy. The Hungarian Secret Police thought that his correspondence game chess notation found in his letters and postcards was some kind of secret code. 
     In prison, he was sleep-deprived and tortured before being sent to a concentration camp without a trial. The year 1953 saw Benko starving in the concentration camp but after Stalin died authorities considered releasing him. The Hungarian president Imre Nagy gave amnesty to most prisoners in Hungary and Benko was released in October 1953. 
     A few years later in late October of 1956, the Hungarian Revolt began as a student protest which attracted thousands as they marched through Budapest to the Hungarian Parliament building, broadcasting on the streets using a van with loudspeakers. A student delegation entered the radio building to try to broadcast their demands, but got arrested. When protesters demanded the delegation be released they were fired upon by the State Security Police, known as the AVH (Allamvedelmi Hatosag, literally State Protection Authority). One student was killed and as the news spread, disorder and violence erupted throughout the city. 
     The revolt spread quickly and the government collapsed as thousands organized into militias to fight the AVH and Soviet troops. It was crazy...some local leaders and AVH members were lynched and former political prisoners were freed and armed. Radical workers seized control and demanded political change. 
     Imre Nagy’s new government disbanded the AVH and declared its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and establish free elections. By the end of October, fighting had almost stopped, and normality began to return. 
     Then in November the Soviets struck. A large Soviet force invaded Budapest and other regions of the country resulting in the deaths of over 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops and 200,000 Hungarians fled as refugees. Mass arrests and denunciations continued and by January 1957, the new Soviet-installed government had suppressed all opposition. Pal Benko was part of the uprising, but he was never discovered. 
     In 1957, in Reykjavik, Benko was playing on board 1 for the Hungarian Olympic team and on July 26th he walked into the American embassy in Reykjavik and asked for asylum. The American embassy officials arranged a press conference for Benko to explain why he did not want to return to Hungary. 
     He was granted asylum, but had to wait on a preferential visa which he obtained on October 11, 1957 whereupon he flew to New York only to find out that Hungarian refugees were not allowed in the US as the refugee limit had reached. Fortunately, having been born in France, he was allowed in on a French passport. 
     Benko, who couldn’t speak a word of English and having only a few dollars in his pocket, ended up with his father in Cleveland, Ohio. He wanted to find employment as a club professional for one of several chess clubs that were in Cleveland at the time, but unlike in Europe, such a position didn’t exist and nobody would hire him. According to one person I talked to who knew Benko in those days, he left Cleveland in a huff and moved to New York City where he remained. 
     Visit Chessbase for what is described as one of the most elegant chess problems the article’s author has ever seen. It was composed by Benko when he was 15 and even Bobby Fischer couldn’t solve it in half an hour...see the PROBLEM.
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Monday, January 20, 2020

Budapest Gambit Fajarowicz Variation


   At one time I had a fondness for the Budapest Gambit (1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e5) which GM Boris Avrukh called “almost respectable” and doubts there is a refutation. GM Robert Byrne wrote pretty much the same thing.
     Eventually I gave it up though because although I usually regained the P without much trouble, after that I was out of ideas and white always seemed much better. 
     Under the influence of GM Arthur Bisguier who occasionally played the Budapest, the Fajarowicz Variation (1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e5 3. dxe5 Ne4 instead of 3...Ng5) was to be avoided. Bisguier based his opinion on a game he lost to Reshevsky in the 1954-55 Rosenwald tournament. 
     Bisguier wrote that Reshevsky’s 4.a3 refuted the Fajarowicz and so he gave it up. The term “refute” seems a bit strong. Although his game was pretty anemic from early on, the fatal blunder was 16...g4. 
     In any case, the Budapest wasn’t a good choice against Reshevsky as Arnold Denker discovered when he played it against him at Syracuse (New York) back in 1934 and got mated in 20 moves! 
     Rather than concentrating on regaining the sacrificed Pawn, in the Fajarowicz Variation black puts the emphasis active piece play, fighting for key squares and tactical tricks. But, most theoreticians are in agreement that with simple moves black's tactical possibilities and initiative can be neutralized. 
     Back in 1996, Tim Harding wrote a book, The Fighting Fajarowicz, in which he examined the variation, but at the end it has to be admitted that in practice the Fajarowicz just doesn’t work as well as you would hope. That said, unless white cooperates by not playing the main lines (4. Nf3 or 4. a3) black can often carryout his plans. Even if white plays the best 4th moves, he still has to be careful. Unless you’re playing Grandmasters the Fajarowicz is worth a try.

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