How Did He Manage to Lose?

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Peter Thiel, Chess Master...among other things

     I remember seeing the name Peter Thiel appearing in Chess Life years ago and remembered him as a promising young player, but then he seemed to have faded from prominence. 
     When his name popped up in the recent Presidential campaign I didn't make the connection until just recently. It turns out that although Thiel budded from a promising junior into a journeyman master, he has been a busy man heavily involved in many other things. 
     Born October 11, 1967 in Germany Peter Andreas Thiel is a German-American entrepreneur, hedge fund manager, venture capitalist, philanthropist, political activist, and author. Also, Thiel seems to have what many would call aberrant religious views. Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was the first outside investor in Facebook, is primarily a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Often referred to as the "Don of the PayPal Mafia", Thiel was ranked No. 4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014, with a net worth of $2.2 billion, and No. 246 on the Forbes 400 in 2016, with a net worth of $2.7 billion.
     Thiel was the son of a chemical engineer who moved his family to Cleveland, Ohio when Thiel was only a year old. His father then worked for various mining companies and for a while they lived in Africa and it is believed that it was during that time that Thiel developed some of his philosophies. One of his elementary schools in Africa required the wearing of uniforms and utilized corporal punishment such as whacking student's hands with a ruler for mistakes. This my have been the cause of his distaste for uniformity and regimentation. The family eventually settled in Foster City, California.
     He studied philosophy at Stanford University, graduating with a B.A. in 1989. He then went on to the Stanford Law School, and received his J.D. in 1992.  After graduation, he worked at various jobs before founding Thiel Capital Management in 1996. He then co-founded PayPal in 1998, and served as chief executive officer until its sale to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. After eBay's acquisition of PayPal, he went on to found several other companies. 
     Thiel is gay, pro-marijuana and politically a libertarian who has supported vocally and financially the Republican John McCain and the Libertarian Ron Paul. In November 2016, he was named to the executive committee of President-elect Donald Trump's transition team and is also being considered to head the Food and Drug Administration under Mr. Trump. He has also contributed millions to various causes he believes in. 
     Sidebar...I saw John McCain give a speech in 2008...what stood out to me was that he had on a very nice suit! I don't know a lot about his politics, but I do admire the fact that he endured a great ordeal as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. I went to the speech just because I wanted to say I saw the Republican presidential nominee for the 2008 United States presidential election. When he began speaking, I left. While walking across a field to reach the parking lot and my car I got stopped by a Secret Service agent who wanted to know where I was going. When he found out I had actually been in the building, he immediately wanted know what door I came out of. After being briefly questioned further, I was allowed to proceed. Back to Thiel...
     Thiel is also a man who believes in the power of technology and is on a mission to change the world through technology.  He also wants to find a cure for death. Regarding death, he says, "You can accept it, you can deny it or you can fight it. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it." 
     Theil has poured millions of dollars into what he calls ‘the immortality project’. He says that he would like to live longer, and would like other people to live longer and as such, he has signed up with a company in the field of cryogenics to be deep-frozen at the time of his death. 
     He started playing chess at the age of 6 and in 1980 was ranked as the 7th-best U.S. player in the under-13 category with a rating of 1791. By the way, these days the top 13 year old in the U.S. is Awonder Liang, rated 2609 and the top 12 year old is Brandon Jacobson rated 2374; times have changed!  His other interests were reading of science fiction, playing Dungeons and Dragons and he was obsessed with Tolkien. In fact, two of his businesses are named after Tolkien references: Mithril and Palantir. 
     His current USCF rating, last published in 2005, stands at 2287 and he holds the titles of Original Life Master, National Master, Life Master with the USCF. His highest rating was 2342 in the early to mid-1990s. He has not played tournament chess in a number of years, but he did make an appearance at the recent World Championship match to make the ceremonial first move at the tiebreaker round.
 

Found this deep in My Games Database

     Today the temperature is stuck on 28 degrees and we are having our first snow...a light lake effect snow. Yesterday was dark, cold and blustery...good days for looking over some old games buried deep in my database. I came across this one played against an old friend from our OTB days which we played, without a time limit, on a server. It has been sitting there unannotated for the last ten years and when I took a look at it I was surprised to find that it was actually pretty well played, plus it has some instructional value. 
     Normally I don't present long games because most players, myself included, are not looking for long endings...we want snappy tactics. But, what makes this game interesting is the unbalanced material in the ending. Those types of positions are always difficult to evaluate and engine evaluations can sometimes be misleading. I have posted numerous times on this situation and here is yet another example of the difficulties involved! 

2010 - Revisiting Minor Pieces for a Rook - Part 1  
2010 - Revisiting Minor Pieces for a Rook - Part 2
2011 - Engine Positional Evaluations and Comparisons 
2011 - R vs B and N
2013 - Two Minor Pieces or Rook and Pawn...which to choose?! 
2014 - An Instructive Tahl - Botvinnik Game
2016 - When Should You Sacrifice on f7?
 

Henry Hookham

    Hookham (October 22, 1824 - November 24, 1898 in Christchurch, 74 years old) was a New Zealand champion in a bygone era.. He was born was born at 15 Old Bond Street in London, England which today houses a Prada store. He learned to play chess around the age of ten. 

     In 1850 he became a partner in the Hookham Library, a publisher and bookseller, and in about 1863 the library was converted into a company and he was appointed to a managerial position. He resigned after two years and in 1865 emigrated along with his wife and children to near Christchurch. He first tried his hand at farming, but after a few years he became a schoolmaster which he continued until his retirement in 1885. 
     He won the championship of the Province of Canterbury in 1870. Nine years later in 1879 the first New Zealand Chess Championship was held in Christchurch and he became New Zealand's first champion, a title which he retained the title for ten years before losing it at the establishment of the Annual Championship Congress, also held in Christchurch, at the end of 1888 and into 1889. He later won the title again at Dunedin in 1890 and was second in 1893 and third in 1895-96. He played in every Congress until the year before he died. 
     The first New Zealand Championship was held at Bellamy’s (a restaurant?) in Christchurch from 19th August to 4th September 1879. In case you're wondering why it was held at such a late year...the European settlement in New Zealand only began around 1840 with most settlers coming from England, Scotland and Ireland so it took a while for a national championship to be organized. Australia held its first championship at Adelaide in 1887 and it was common for players from both Australia and New Zealand to compete in each others championships for many years. 
     Competitors living within fifteen miles of Christchurch had to pay a five guinea entry fee (which I think would be about $70-75 in today's U.S. currency, but I could be wrong.) while for others the entry fee was waived. That may seem odd, but the purpose was to limit the number of local players. 
     The time control was 15 moves per hour and it was a double round-robin which was the first and last time that format was ever used. Another odd fact was that with only eight players (4 games per round) the event had five arbiters. The prize fund was a £80 with £50 for first, £20 for second, and £10 for third prize. The tournament resulted in a tie between Hookham and David Hay. Hookham won the single play-off game after six hours play. 
     A little more than nine years later the second championship tournament was held, also in Christchurch, over the New Year of 1888/89. There were just six players and the new champion was Arthur Morton. Hookham, who finished fourth, was the only player from the 1879 field to play again in the championship. 
     Hookham played in the first ten championships, winning a second title in the third championship in 1890 against a new crop of players. Hookham also represented New Zealand at the Adelaide Congress of 1887. His score of +2 -5 =2 was only good enough to finish tied for 7th-8th, but he did manage to hold the winner, Henry Charlick, to a draw. 
     He served as the president of the Caterbury Chess Club from its foundation until his death. An 1882 edition of the Canterbury Times ran an article describing his tenure in that position as having been on that was "characterized by ability and soundness of judgment, as well as consistent kindness to all young players who have sought for his experienced help and guidance." 
 

Susan Polgar's Suggested Changes to World Championship

     Ms Polgar has long been persona non grata with the United States Chess Federation because of a dispute dating back to 2008. 
     Also, in February 1996, Polgar won the Women's World Championship for the fourth time, but FIDE had difficulty finding a sponsor for her title defense in 1998 and in 1999 arranged it under conditions to which she objected. 
     She requested six months to recuperate and prepare after having her first child.  She also objected to the match was to be held entirely in China, the home country of her challenger Xie Jun. That last condition was against FIDE rules. 
     When she refused to play under those conditions, FIDE illegally stripped her of her title. Polgar sued in the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, for monetary damages and the restoration of her title. In March of 2001 the court ruled in favor of Polgar, ordering FIDE to pay her $25,000 in damages. However, since a new World Champion was crowned, FIDE could not restore her title. She then retired from competitive chess. 
     As a result, as she herself, stated on he blog, "Without being involved with any national federation or FIDE, I am able to raise $1.5 – $2 million per year for many years for SPICE and Susan Polgar Foundation projects. Therefore, it is obvious that chess is marketable if it is being done the right way!" Speaking of the current world championship situation she says, "The current system is boring and does not attract adequate sponsorship." 
    Even the current champ, Magnus Carlsen, has long believed there should be a new system for the world championship except he proposed a knockout system.  I can't agree with that proposal because it's been done before and the result was a disaster. Alexander Khalifman took the title in 1999, Anand in 2000, Ruslan Ponomariov in 2002 and Rustam Kasimdzhanov won the event in 2004.   Three of those guys, while they are strong players, just can't be mentioned in the same breath as Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Tahl, Spassky and Fischer.
     Polgar's suggested changes calls for 24 games: 

8 games with a classical time limit where each win would result in 3 points (1.5 point for a draw) 
8 games with rapid time limit where each win would results in 2 points (1 point for a draw) 
8 games with a blitz time limit where each win would result in 1 point (.5 point for a draw) 

The total points for the match would be 48 and one needs 24.5 points to win and in the event of a tie, an Armageddon game will be employed immediately after the blitz format to decide the winner. 

     This last was match was probably the most boring I have ever seen. Carlsen and Karjakin are probably the first world championship players who have been born out of the computer era. Today's GMs have grown up with most of their training done with computers and as a result, their play is very objective...and boring. Spectacular play has all but been eliminated in favor of engine driven evaluations. As Murray Campbell so aptly put it, “If you’re interested in winning, then you play the right move, even if it’s an ugly move or a computer move.” He also added that the computer leads to preparation that can lead to draws.
     Campbell's observations are right on target and while Polgar's suggestions are distasteful, they seem to be the only way of spicing up the matches and at least making them interesting again. Besides, as Polgar says, she knows how to raise money for chess. I doubt the people running FIDE will be interested though.

The Amazing Zoltan Sarosy

     This Canadian chess Hall of Famer, inducted into the HOF in 2006 at age 99, was born in Budapest on August 23, 1906. 
     There was nowhere to play chess in his hometown and it wasn't until he attended the University of Vienna and joined the Vienna Chess Federation that he began studying and playing in tournaments. He quickly became one of the best players in Vienna and on one occasion even won the city championship. 
     When he moved back to Budapest in 1933 chess tournaments were frequent and he won a number of tournaments, beating the city's best players, including the Hungarian Champion, Geza Fuster. From then on, he went on to win several championships in the 1930s and was awarded the Hungarian master title in 1943. 
     Fluent in Hungarian and German, in 1944 he volunteered as a translator when other Hungarian men his age were drafted and sent to the Eastern Front. At the end of the war, worried that Russians might have him imprisoned for being a military translator, he fled Hungary. He left his wife and daughter behind and later sent for them when he was in Canada, but his wife refused to leave Hungary so they divorced. (He eventually remarried in Canada.) 
     Once he reached Austria, he managed to find a place to stay in Salzburg before moving to a refugee camp. Wondering across Europe, he ended up in Alsace, the German-speaking province taken back by France after the war. 
     In November 1950, he saw a newspaper article about how Canada had changed its immigration laws and realized he was eligible for a visa and two days after Christmas he was in Toronto. There he played in city tournaments and joined the local German chess club and YMCA where he once again met Geza Fuster whom he again defeated. 
     Soon afterward he took a break from chess in 1957 to open a business. He had been working at a job laying tiles but didn’t like working for other people so started selling cosmetics then began importing them himself. After several years, he bought a convenience store which he ran until the late 1970s. 
     After resuming OTB pay in 1963 he won the Toronto Championship. In the late 1960s, he decided to focus solely on correspondence chess, playing in international competitions and winning the Canadian Correspondence Champion in 1967. In 1988, he was named International Correspondence Master by the ICCF. 
     In 2000, at the age of 90, Sarosy was concerned that he would not be able to finish any new correspondence games via mail. However, he chanced to see a newspaper with a story about computer courses for seniors so he learned how to use a computer and bought computer books, familiarized himself with the new way of playing chess and at the age of 94 began entering email tournaments. He even managed to tie for 2nd place at a correspondence tournament at the age of 102. 
     In 2006, Sarosy was inducted into the Canadian Chess Hall of Fame. He has been called the oldest chess player in the world.
     Sarosy speaks five languages, one of which, Spanish, he taught himself in the 1980s. Sarosy celebrated his 110th birthday back on August 23rd. Today he lives in a seniors’ home and though he now uses a wheelchair to get around he has a sharp mind and not only remembers his life as a child but what he had for breakfast. 
     The following correspondence game is rather long, but don't let that discourage you from playing through it because it's a messy, fascinating slug fest filled with what Botvinnik called head-whirling complications. In fact, I don't guarantee the accuracy of my notes because I ran into a couple of positions where, thanks to horizon effect, Stockfish 8 had some difficulty reaching a clear conclusion. The position after 16.Bb2 was particularly difficult. Both players deserve credit for playing an interesting game and let's hope we can all play as good as Sarosy did in this game when we are 82 years old!
 

A Spectacular Piece Sacrifice in a World Correspondence Championship Game!!

    Fake stories and headlines designed to titillate are proliferating on the internet, social network sites, newspapers and TV and they can do serious damage to whatever or whomever was the target. 
     The recent American Presidential race was a prime example of the political aspect of fake stories. Hillary Clinton, rightly or wrongly, was accused of series of crimes, there were claims she had health issues, and that she was in cahoots with shadowy global financiers. And, of course, the overwhelming majority of the media’s campaign coverage consisted of negative reporting, also rightly or wrongly, on Donald Trump. I saw a lot of memes on Facebook along with news stories concerning both candidates there and elsewhere that I simply could not verify by any research...makes me think a lot of it was made up. Shoddy analysis and reports that are often colored by bias, innuendo and prejudice seems to be the norm, but that's nothing new. See my posts on Political Mud Wrestling and the story about the time Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California. 
     That post came to mind when I read the new world CC champ, Leonardo Ljubicic (FIDE rated 2087 and ICCF rated 2602), managed to pull off a "speculative piece sacrifice" at move 32 (with help from Stockfish, of course) for a critical victory over German SIM Hans-Hermann Clever. I figured it had to be a "Man Bites Dog" headline and was eager to see how Ljubicic pulled it off.  It turned out that playing through the game was a disappointment because like a lot of news stories we see these days,  the claim was a boat load of crap. The truth is Stockfish 8 saw the sacrifice immediately in a position where it was already giving white a huge advantage.
     Everybody knows that it's impossible to achieve any significant result in today’s CC without engines and databases and good results require powerful computers, diligent opening research and lots and lots of patience. The result is a lot of very high quality, sterile games. In the last world correspondence championship 87 percent of the games in the finals were drawn, with two players drawing all 16 of their games. The point is that when I see claims that 32.Bh7+ was a spectacular sacrifice when Stockfish saw it instantly and white was already winning, it's hardly an accurate description. Far more credit should be given to Ljubicic for finding 28.g6 because, at least on my laptop, it wasn't even in the engine's top five moves.
 

A Stunning Queen Sacrifice by Sergei Prokofiev

     Sergei Prokofiev (April 23, 1891 – March 5, 1953) was a Soviet composer, pianist and conductor. As the creator of masterpieces across numerous musical genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. 
     After the Russian Revolution, Prokofiev left Russia with the official blessing of the Soviets and resided in the United States, then Germany, then Paris, making his living as a composer, pianist and conductor. 
     When he first arrived in the United States, in San Francisco, he was questioned by immigration officials then released; that was on August 1918. Because of delays in production of his operas he soon found himself in financial difficulties and in April 1920, not wanting to return to Russia a failure, he left for Paris.
     In Paris he had moderate success, but in March of 1922 he moved with his mother to the Bavarian Alps where for over a year he concentrated on an opera project. By this time his music had acquired a following in Russia and he received invitations to return there, but he decided to stay in Europe. In 1923, Prokofiev married the Spanish singer Carolina Codina (1897–1989) before moving back to Paris. They had two sons. 
     In 1927, Prokofiev made his first concert tour in the Soviet Union. Over the course of more than two months he spent time in Moscow and Leningrad (Saint Petersburg had been renamed), where he enjoyed success. In the meantime, Prokofiev came under the influence of the teachings of Christian Science. He began to practice its teachings and believed it to be beneficial to his health and so remained faithful practitioner for the rest of his life. His belief in Christian Science also caused him to turn against the style and the subject matter of some of his earlier work.
     The start of 1930 saw him touring the United States, but by the early 1930s, both Europe and America were suffering from the Great Depression which inhibited his opera and ballet productions. Having been homesick for some time, Prokofiev began to build bridges with the Soviet Union acting as a musical ambassador between his homeland and western Europe. In 1936 Prokofiev and his family settled permanently in Moscow after shifting back and forth between there and Paris. 
     After World War Two, in early 1948 following a meeting of Soviet composers, the Politburo denounced Prokofiev for the crimes of "formalism", described as a "renunciation of the basic principles of classical music" in favor of "muddled, nerve-racking" sounds that "turned music into cacophony." As a result, by August 1948, Prokofiev was in severe financial straits and deeply in debt. Also, earlier in February 1948 Prokofiev's second wife, Lina, was arrested for espionage when she tried to send money to her mother in Spain. After nine months of interrogation she was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor. She was eventually released after Stalin's death in 1953 and in 1974 left the Soviet Union.
     Prokofiev died at the age of 61 on March 5, 1953, the same day as Joseph Stalin. He had lived near Red Square and for three days the throngs gathered to mourn Stalin made it impossible to carry Prokofiev's body out for the funeral service at the headquarters of the Soviet Composers' Union. Usually Prokofiev's death is attributed to cerebral hemorrhage, but he had been chronically ill for the prior eight years. Lina Prokofiev outlived her estranged husband by many years, dying in London in early 1989.     
     Prokofiev was also enthusiastic about chess, frequently visiting the chess club in St. Petersburg, but during his last years his doctors forbade him to play. He was friends with both Capablanca and Botvinnik and he once met Lasker who gave him an open invitation to visit with him in Berlin. He was also on good terms with Alekhine. It was after he returned to Russia that Prokofiev and David Oistrakh became friends and played many chess games together. That lead to their match in 1937. Oistrakh, a First Category player (around 2100 Elo), was one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century. 
     Ten games were to be played at the Master of Art Club in Moscow, with Vladimir Alatortsev and Ilya Kan as the referees. The games were to be played two evenings a week with a time control of thirty-six moves in two hours and ten moves every hour after that. Only seven games were played.  
     The winner was to receive a trophy, but there was also a "behind the scenes wager." Both musicians were engaged for a concert tour, though only one was actually needed and the bet was the loser of the match would be the one that had to go on the tour. Oddly, only the score of one game (a draw) of the match, which was won by Oistrakh, is known.
 

Necrology

Mark Taimanov (1926) died at the age of 90 in his hometown St. Petersburg on the 28th and 20-year-old Russian GM Urii Eliseev died after falling from the 12th floor balcony at his apartment. The incident reportedly took place on 26 November, Saturday, at 23.30 when Eliseev was relaxing with his friends and decided to jump from the apartment balcony to the balcony in the next apartment...his attempt failed.

How To Evaluate Threats

     C.J.S. Purdy founded and edited the magazine Australasian Chess Review from 1929 to 1944 when it became Check which morphed into Chessworld from 1946–1967. Anything Purdy wrote is valuable to amateur players...Bobby Fischer called him a great chess instructor and that is a pretty good compliment! 
     In one of his magazine articles on threats, Purdy wrote that assuming it's your move then a threat is a move your opponent could make if it were his turn to move that would be damaging to your game. 
      He pointed out a threat is a MOVE and to think of threats in words such as, "He threatens to win my Queen." or "He is threatening a mating attack." is not only vague, but is plain wrong!  In order to determine if the threat is real or imaginary, you must calculate what would happen if your opponent actually made the move. 
     A good example of what Purdy was talking about can be seen in the famous game Yates vs. Reti, New York, 1924. You can play over the whole game HERE, but I want to look at the position from Reti's perspective after 11.Re1 and apply Purdy's advice. So, in the below position, it's actually black's move, but taking Purdy's advice, we will pretend it's white's move and see if Bxe6 is a real threat.