The Chess Mind

Aleksander Wojtkiewicz passed away a couple of weeks ago, and while he's a pretty well-known figure in U.S. chess, his games haven't received as much exposure as one might expect from a grandmaster of his strength. We'll thus take a very small step towards rectifying this, by presenting his beautiful attacking win over Greek GM (then IM) Spyridon Skembris, from the 1990 Olympiad in Novi Sad.

The game gets high marks on aesthetics, but it's also logical and instructive, too: Wojtkiewicz doesn't go after Black, guns blazing, from the sheer joy of the attack. Instead, he has been accumulating small advantages: a little extra space, slightly more mobility, superior coordination, and so on. One such advantage by itself might not translate into much, but their combined weight spelled Black's doom - but only thanks to Wojtkiewicz's beautiful and well-calculated play!

I hope you'll join me at 9 p.m. ET this Monday night - it's free, after all! - and you can find directions for watching the show here. Or, if you'd like to watch this show, or one of the many other past shows, you can find directions for doing that in the previous link, and a list of the games I've covered in those earlier shows here.

Judit Polgar has just turned 30, so we'll commemorate the occasion with a look at one of her characteristically tactical games. As all of you undoubtedly know, she is (by far) the strongest female player of all time, not to mention one of the strongest players on earth, period, several times breaking into the top 10 on the FIDE rating list. For nearly 20 years now, she has bludgeoned strong opponents into submission with her powerful attacking skills, but instead of one of her typical routs, we'll look at a more meaty game.

In particular, we'll look at a very hard-fought game with one of her sometime-top 10 peers, Boris Gelfand, from their 2003 rapid match in Pacs, Hungary. Gelfand won the match by an unrepresentatively lopsided 6-2 score, but Polgar won this game, the match opener, in a see-saw battle that found both players repeatedly reject drawing lines. The play was rich if not perfect, and will give viewers opportunities to learn from all three phases in the game; in short, it's time for another great Monday night battle!

The show will start, as always, on ChessBase's playchess server at 9 p.m. ET, and you can find directions for watching the show live (for free) here, while a list of games covered in previous shows can be found here. (Directions for watching archived shows can be found in the preceding link.)

In the mid-1980s, Hungarian grandmaster Lajos Portisch was in the world's super-elite, while his countryman Jozsef Pinter was "only" a strong GM. In this game from the 1984 Hungarian Championship, however, the expected roles are reversed: while Portisch certainly didn't play poorly, Pinter's chess was brilliant. In what looked like a position where Portisch would have all the fun, trying to milk a small edge in space and structure, Pinter proved that the dynamic factors had not yet been exhausted. The queens were off, but that didn't mean that it was an endgame or that Portisch's king was thereby immune to all danger. Pinter was able to whip up a dangerous attack, and ironically, the crucial piece in that attack - the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back - was his own king!

So I hope you'll tune in this Monday night at 9 p.m. ET: it's an inspiring effort by Pinter, and his strategy in the late opening/early middlegame, after the queen trade, offers a fine model for Semi-Tarrasch and Gruenfeld players alike, as we shall see. If you play either of these openings (or face them), then this game will very likely be of interest to you.

Those who haven't yet tuned in may want to take a look at the directions for doing so (or for looking at older, archived shows) here, while a list of games covered in past shows can be found here.

One of which might even be real.

Alexander Alekhine is, of course, one of the all-time greats of the game. A feared attacker, a great annotator, and a deep researcher of openings and a very hard worker at the game in general, Alekhine was a key figure in the transition to the game as we know it today. Many of his games were works of art – sometimes literally! I don’t mean by this that he played chess on a canvas, but that on more than one occasion, games he presented as his own were simply made up, in part or even in toto.

In this week’s show, we’ll take a look at one such game, and throw in a fragment of dubious provenance as well. First up is Alekhine-Gregoriev, a casual game allegedly played in 1915. The game’s authenticity has long been doubted, as is nowadays almost universally recognized as a fake. We’ll discuss it, as well as the real game on which it was based, and then we’ll turn to the equally famous Alekhine-Gofmeister fragment, from an odds game played in 1917. As far as I know, the authenticity of this fragment has not been challenged – but it is at least as fantastic as the Gregoriev game!

Whatever the truth about these two games, what is clear is that they are both brilliant and beautiful productions of a great mind, and comprise a marvelous chess feast for us to enjoy this next Monday night at 9 p.m. ET. As always, directions for watching shows (live or archived) are here, and a list of games covered in past shows is here.

See you then!

To my mind, no one wins nicer games than Viswanathan Anand does when he's in good form. His openings are always extremely well-prepared, his tactical imagination is astounding, and his play strikes me as forceful - but in a "correct" rather than speculative fashion. Many of his wins are model games, and that's true of this week's offering as well, his win with the white pieces over French GM Joel Lautier from Biel 1997.

Lautier offered up a surprise with the Scandinavian Defense (aka the Center Counter) but Anand's home preparation - upon which he improved over the board, with an apparently risky but deeply calculated variation - gave him the advantage. Finally, Anand was able to conclude with a beautiful and brilliant attacking idea, putting the icing on the cake.

So join me this Monday night at 9 p.m. for our chess dessert: not only is it a great game, but it gives us the opportunity to discuss the Center Counter, an important opening that has received little-to-no coverage on the show thus far.

Directions for watching the show can be found here, while a list of games covered in previous shows (almost all of which can be found in the archives - see the previous link) can be found here.