The Chess Mind

In the mid-1920s, Mir Sultan Khan (1905-1966) started to play chess as we know it. In 1929 his patron and master (these were the days of British colonial rule in India) brought him to London, and he won the British championship a few months later. From 1930-1933, he was an active participant in the international tournament scene, and he didn’t just participate; he was one of the best players in the world. According to Hooper and Whyld’s The Oxford Companion to Chess, Sultan Khan was one of the world’s 10 best players at the time; according to Jose Capablanca, he was a genius.

Today we’ll look at a game by this genius, a win in the Hastings 1930/31 tournament against none other than Capablanca himself! In an impressive technical display that evokes more recent legends like Tigran Petrosian and Anatoly Karpov, Sultan Khan manages to keep Capa’s pieces either inactive or meaninglessly active from the opening all the way through the end of the game. That’s the sort of thing one expects in a master vs. amateur game, but to do so against one of the all-time greats is remarkable, especially given his own relative inexperience.

So join us as we take a look a game that’s historically interesting, a model of excellent positional play, and one of the very first games in what is now called the Petrosian Variation of the Queen’s Indian Defense – an important line well-worth an overview. See you tonight!

(Note: for those interested in accessing the show but not sure how to do so, click here; for those interested in a list of previous shows, this is the link for you.)

In the Chess Today issue for Thursday, April 21, 2005 (CT-1626), IM Anthony Saidy wrote the following:

"As for the Saidy-Fischer-Karpov-Bellon game [DM: see here], it was ludicrous that Fischer won Informant's brilliancy prize for an utterly unsound pawn sac, and even more so that Karpov didn't refute it, and instead followed (knowingly?) my inferior play for many moves. In my future memoirs the ultimate truth about these games will come out."

I have a number of questions and comments about this:

First, if Saidy doesn't know if Karpov knowingly followed his play, then he can't yet provide the ultimate truth about the games - there's at least one interesting, important fact that will remain unanswered!

Second, the Saidy-Fischer game didn't win the Informant's brilliancy prize for that issue, but came in second place (according to Wade & O'Connell's The Complete Games of Bobby Fischer).

Third, I don't think Fischer won the (second?) brilliancy prize because of the pawn sac, but possible despite it. And even if the pawn sac is "utterly unsound," it doesn't seem to me that it thereby undermines the value of the rest of the game. (Compare game 16 of the 1985 Karpov-Kasparov match. Kasparov's 8...d5 was widely taken to have been demolished in a subsequent Karpov-Van der Wiel game, but the Kasparov game is still considered a contemporary classic.)

Fourth, if the move seemed good enough to Fischer to merit playing, and if first Saidy and then even Karpov were unable to refute it - or even come close - over the board, then even if it's unsound, it's hard to believe it could be quite as bad as Saidy suggests.

Finally, when I was preparing those games for my ChessBase show, the standard "refutations" didn't really seem as clear as they're supposed to be. (Again, see this link and the notes to moves 7 and 8 of the Saidy-Fischer game for some preliminary support of my claim.)

Let's switch topics for a moment, to basketball. Who remembers Michael Cooper? He was a starter on the great "Showtime" Laker teams of the 80s, well known as one of the best defensive players - perhaps the best - of his era.

But what is he best known for? What single image comes to mind when you think of his great career? Unfortunately, it's probably his getting "posterized" by Dr. J's famous windmill dunk in 1983. The clip of that dunk was shown repeatedly at the time and is still shown during slam dunk and Dr. J video packages.

We might call the chess equivalent getting "Kieseritzkied." (It doesn't exactly trip from the tongue, but most experienced chess fans will get the reference.) Great entertainment for the sports or chess fan - but probably not for those in the Cooper or Kieseritzky role.

As Bill Clinton might say, I feel their pain! When I was a teenager, none of my wins over titled players got published, but several of my losses did (one even made it into a German chess publication and the Russian "64"). The first time I had a loss published, it was neat to see my name in print; after the losses accumulated and the wins went unpublished, however, my excitement turned to frustration and occasional annoyance.

So to return to our main subject, I suspect that Saidy, a fine player with many successes in his chess career, would have found the game a praiseworthy one if someone else had been playing White. Of course, I might be wrong about that; it's just a suspicion. It does seem to me a plausible explanation of what looks like an unwarrantedly negative assessment of the game, but (a) I'm willing to be corrected, and (b) look forward to Saidy's memoirs - I expect they'll prove very interesting!