A Follow-Up Post

My mentor in the sixties and seventies was Larry Evans. He is a Grandmaster and an excellent teacher. I had the honour of watching him play against Bent Larsen in the 1972 tournament I referred to in the previous post. My teacher got taught.

In the after-game analysis Bent explained that he knew that Larry thought (and taught) in terms of concrete concepts. So he deliberately steered the game into complications where Larry's point-count style chess (from Bent's perspective) would not help him. Wow.

Bent Larsen, 1935-2010:

Danish chess legend Bent Larsen died yesterday in Buenos Aires, following a short illness, at the age of 75. He was a leading grandmaster from the mid-to-late 50s through the early 80s, and for a period from the mid-to-late 1960s until his 1971 Candidates match against Bobby Fischer was considered a genuine title contender and even at one point possibly the strongest player outside the Soviet Union.

Read the whole thing.

(Via The Chess Mind Blog.)

Bent Larsen dies at 75

In the glorious days of my youth the greats of chess did battle and we all stood in awe. Bent Larsen was one of those greats. I partly took up the Grand Prix Attack because he was one of the first grandmasters (that I knew of) to practice it.

He played in the Grandmaster tournament on San Antonio in 1972, following Fischer's victory over Spassky. I met him and his wife on a street corner there. They were both so gracious to me and left a positive impression. I am sad at his passing.

Bent Larsen dies at 75:

Bent Larsen photographed in January 2010 by Peter Heine Nielsen.

Hello Everyone,

It is sad news that the great chess player Bent Larsen is no more.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Alexandra Kosteniuk's CHESSBLOG.COM.)

Philosophy and Chess

are sometimes close companions. Dennis M considers death and the arguments for survival beyond death:

Maroczy - Korchnoi ?:

The Hungarian grandmaster Geza Maroczy died in 1951, but on some reports, his chess career didn't end there. He took about 34 years off, and then, with the help of a medium named Robert Rollans, played a game against Viktor Korchnoi that lasted until 1993. (He lost, but hey - he was rusty. You can replay the game here.)

Read the whole thing.

(Via The Chess Mind Blog.)

A Beautiful Day

can inspire the most interesting ideas. I'm tiring of trying to fix a hole in my opening repertoire so I turn to listen to Father Roderick on his latest Secrets of Harry Potter podcast. Father or one of the other panellists mentions that they thought of the Funeral Antiphon "In Paradisum" when reading about the song of the phoenix over Dumbledore's dead body.

This antiphon was sung as the body was removed from the church at the end of the service. Having previously thought about my own funeral, I wanted to know what it sounded like. And here it is.

What are the chances of getting a choir to perform this for my rite of passage?

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

But no pictures today, alas. We landed this morning at Funchal, Madeira. Every letter of every word that I type tends to be done twice or more, since I`m not used to the Portuguese keyboard.

A week ago Sunday we stopped at Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas. We´re not beach people, so we enjoyed the barbeque, attended by the free range chickens. I watched the little black chicks wandering under the tables as the happy people ate, blissfully unaware. More than once a chick stopped and looked thoughtfully at some well shaped toe, exposed through sandals. But there were no incidents, happily.

Seven days at sea go by remarkably fast. Especially for the wife, who is up early (well early by cruising standards, anyway) and tries to close down the Piano Bar every night with a busy schedule in between. I gave that up after a couple of nights. Getting old, I guess.

I did find a chess partner, though. We use the large set by the pool. I recommended FICS to him. If I manage to not drop a piece early I´m usually winning. But we take an hour or more to play, so they´re fairly serious games.

Today we´ll just wander around the Old City and maybe take the cable car ride. There are beautiful orange blossoms in the trees above me as I write. Across the road pink and red geraniums fills an iron grill balcony, the length of the street. The clouds rolling in just highlight the intensity of the colours.

After a day at sea tomorrow, we plan to make a pilgrimage to Fatima on Wednesday. That will be the feast of the Annuniciation, solemn feast of Our Lady. We have had a special devotion to her since she aided us during a crisis fifteen years ago. But that´s a story for another day. The point is, I may not have time to blog from there. If not, I´ll try to do it from the ship (far more expensive).

Time to move on. See you all later.

Darn

I missed the deciding game of the match. Thanks to Dennis Monokroussos we can look at it at our leisure:

Topalov Wins Game 7, Wins Match 4.5-2.5:

The final game of the Topalov-Kamsky Candidates Match wasn't pretty, but it was very exciting.

Read the whole thing.

(Via The Chess Mind.)

Remembering Paul Keres

It was 1975, the Vancouver Open Chess Tournament. One of the biggest names to attend was Paul Keres. It was at Totem Park in UBC. Just writing that brings up emotional memories of the cafeteria we played in. The Fischer boom in chess was about to go bust. There were 209 players that year. The subsequent annual Paul Keres Memorial Tournaments would rarely break 100.

Anyway, he won the tournament and died within a couple of weeks, on his way home to Estonia. It's all in half-remembered pictures stored in a rarely visited part of my memory. A decent, gentle man so far as I could tell. And a marvel as a chess player. Requiescat in Pacem.

This Week's ChessBase Show: Remembering Paul Keres:

Estonian legend Paul Keres was born 93 years ago today, and although he passed away in 1975, his games are likely to be remembered as long as there are chess fans.

Read the whole thing.

(Via The Chess Mind.)

Happy New Year

Many Blessings to you and yours in this New Year. I'm not much for the staying up until midnight thing. I was working yesterday evening and returned to a dark and empty house. The family had scattered to various locations to ring in the New Year. I would have preferred to go straight to bed, but the obligatory midnight phone calls kept me up.

On the other hand, New Year's Resolutions are a big thing with me. I have quite a list, all aimed at personal improvement: spiritual, intellectual and physical. My Chess-related resolutions will have to be reviewed in light of Dennis Monokroussos' advice:

The Chess Mind New Year's Resolutions:

The rest of the world may be different, but here in the U.S. of A. it's very popular to make resolutions for the new year.

Read the whole thing.

(Via The Chess Mind.)

The World Championship

Which one? Chess, of course.

I haven't blogged about chess for quite a while, so I'll borrow Dennis Monokroussos' blog entry as an excuse to make up the deficit. Since I've left University life behind (sigh), I've resumed my decades long quest for chess improvement.

I have been fairly faithful in visiting the Chess Tactics Server every day for 45 minutes or so. Progress has been slow, but undeniable. That is the major area of weakness in my game. Disciplined thinking is another and I hope to study and to practice in games, especially on FICS.

I've joined their Team League and have played a couple of games for my new team: Veins (don't ask). But it's a humbling experience to go over the post-mortem with the help of chess software. Every stupid move is dispassionately highlighted.

And just to add to the pain, I'm wanting to upgrade the computer to something fast and multi-processor. Maybe there'll be a quad-core iMac next year? Unfortunately, the new chips are $1000 a crack, so I'm doubting it.

Anyway, I'm mildly relieved to see that I'm not the only one missing tactical themes:

Kramnik-Anand, game 5 with notes: Earlier today, Anand won his second game to take a big 3.5-1.5 lead in his world championship match against Kramnik. It was another great game in the Meran Semi-Slav, but it came to a screeching halt when Kramnik fell for a very neat trap - but one within his pay grade to figure out and sidestep.



Kramnik is now in biiiiig trouble, and if he loses tomorrow he can just about book a plane for Moscow (or Paris) for this weekend. If only for the sake of excitement, let's hope Kramnik overcomes his chess version of "the yips".



Meanwhile, here's today's game, with my notes. (On a replayable board, with deeper commentary than in the live blog post.)

(Via The Chess Mind.)

Technorati Tags:
Chess, Computers

What's In a Name?

I'm off to class in a little bit. You can, if you wish, ponder the imminent crowning of Viswanathan Anand as World Champion.

What's In a Name?: "The not-so-great debate: Anand: world champion or tournament world champion?"

(Via The Daily Dirt Chess Blog.)

World Championship 2007

A round-robin tournament is underway in Mexico City. It's currently in Round Five. Anand and Kramnik, the current world champion, share the lead with 2.5 points each. I have no favourite in this contest. It just seems odd to me that the championship is being determined by a round-robin rather than the traditional match play. The championship format will revert to match play after this, however.

You can follow the games on FICS.