The Chess Mind

With the world championship in Mexico City almost upon us, we’ll spend the next few shows previewing the players. This week, we’ll start with the clear favorites: world champion Vladimir Kramnik and world #1 by rating Viswanathan Anand. The great chess these two have produced over the past 15+ years merits many hours of study, but we’ll keep things brief and take a look at one highlight apiece.

We’ll start, alphabetically, with an Anand win. Many chess fans hate the Petroff (wrongly, in my opinion), so they should delight in our first game, an Anand massacre with the White pieces in round 7 of the 1999 Siemens Giants rapid tournament. At that time the following line was in vogue: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Nxe5 d6 4.Nf3 Nxe4 5.d4 d5 6.Bd3 Nc6 7.O-O Be7 8.c4 Nb4 9.cxd5 (9.Be2 is almost automatic these days) 9…Nxd3 10.Qxd3 Qxd5 11.Re1 Bf5 and now 12.g4!? This rapid event was a testing ground for the variation, and the sequence of games was quite amusing. The round 1 game between Anand and Kramnik continued 12…Bg6 13.Nc3 Nxc3 14.Qxc3 Qd6 and Black drew quickly. Yet something was felt to be amiss in Kramnik’s treatment, and in round 5 Karpov tried 14…Kf8, and after 15.Bf4 c6 16.Re3 h5 17.g5 h4 18.Rae1 Qf5 19.Rxe7 Qxf4 20.h3 Bh5 21.g6!! White was winning with room to spare. Anand managed to lose that game, unbelievably, in a completely won position with a huge time advantage, but it wasn’t the fault of his opening and middlegame play. That brings us to round 7, when Kramnik went for this line again, intending to improve on Karpov’s play. (One guess is that instead of 16…h5, he planned 16…f6.) Unfortunately, Anand improved first, and the result was devastating. The game is a fine example of both attacking play and opening preparation, and as a fringe benefit this is a variation you can use against local Petroff players who have forgotten about (or never knew about) this chapter of the opening’s history.

Now for the Kramnik win. Around the turn of the century, was often on the White side of the Queen’s Gambit Accepted, and he won many attractive attacking games in the isolani positions that arose. Our second game, from the 2001 Dortmund tournament, was one of them, and a very complete game as well. The position after the opening was highly complex, and after an inaccuracy by Black Kramnik sacrificed a pawn for a powerful kingside attack. Anand’s typically resourceful defense allowed him to reach an endgame, but Kramnik’s technique was, as usual, up to the job.

Both games highlight the winners’ strengths, and some of their weaknesses too, I think. So come join me: the games are great, and it’s time to start getting psyched up for the world championships. The show starts Thursday night at 9 p.m. ET – hope to see you then! (Directions for watching the shows can be found here.)

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Many of us think of Bobby Fischer's chess as especially sharp, and that's not surprising given the dynamic opening lines he played - 6.Bc4 vs. the Najdorf, the Poisoned Pawn Variation, the King's Indian Defense, and so on. Yet I would classify him as more of a "positional" player, closer to Capablanca, Smyslov or Karpov than Alekhine, Tal or Kasparov. Fischer won more than his fair share of tactical slugfests, but it was well known in his heyday that he preferred clean-cut, strategic solutions to the problems on the board.

Accordingly - and to take a rest from the insane games we've seen the last few weeks - we'll examine a couple of his games focusing on the problem of the d5 square in the Najdorf Sicilian. In one of the games, his brilliancy prize win over Julio Bolbochan from the 1962 Stockholm Interzonal, he exploits the square brilliantly. With the White pieces, he manages to get a great knight on d5 against a lousy bishop on e7, and is able to combine pawn-winning threats on the queenside with a crushing attack on the kingside.

In the other game, he has Black against Milan Matulovic, from the 1968 tournament in Vinkovci. Once again d5 is beckoning, but Matulovic isn't as successful as Fischer was. Once again Fischer gets a good knight vs. bad bishop, and he's able to use this advantage to grind his opponent into the dust (though without the attacking fireworks of the previous game).

Both are very well-played by Fischer, entertaining, instructive, and comprehensible, too. One of the great things about his chess is that you get the feeling you could have won that game, too. This might be a slight illusion, but I think there's a truth in it. Many of his best games have a very clear logic to them, and that's something we can learn from and adopt in our games as well.

So I do hope you'll join me tonight (Thursday night in the Americas, Friday just about everywhere else) at 9 p.m. ET on ChessBase's playchess.com server; the show is free and watching is easy. If you're not sure how to tune in, you can find step-by-step directions right here. See you then!

The late grandmaster Eduard Gufeld who a colorful, controversial figure in the chess world, but we'll ignore the controversy and focus on his chess. An inveterate popularizer of the royal game, Gufeld's writings often celebrated the spectacular aspects of the game - especially (but not only) when he was the source of the spectacle.

This week, we'll take a look at his most famous game, the 1973 victory over Vladimir Bagirov he dubbed his "Mona Lisa". (Ironically, given Gufeld's penchant for publishing the game wherever possible, it's not in ChessBase's Mega database.) It's a real thriller, a King's Indian Saemisch played in the old style with opposite-side castling. In that interpretation of the Saemisch, White throws the kitchen sink at Black's king in the style of the Yugoslav Attack against the Dragon, while Black tries to hold off the attack while developing his queenside counterplay. That's just what we have in this game, which in the course of just 32 moves sees both players combining attack and defense with great imagination and a willingness to sacrifice material. (First Black sacs a piece, then White; Black sacs the exchange, then White offers a rook, which Black refuses by giving up another piece, etc.)

In short, it's an entertaining and well-played game, one I'm confident you'll all enjoy. So join me this Thursday night at 9 p.m. ET: the show is free and the 150th audience member will receive a prize! If you've never tuned in before, you can find directions for watching the show here.

Last week, we started examining the fantastic battle between Peter Heine Nielsen and Tiger Hillarp Persson from the 1998 Politiken Cup, and it turned out that the game was so rich we only made it halfway through! Have a look at the first 17 moves for yourself:

1.c4 g6 2.d4 Bg7 3.e4 d6 4.Nc3 Nf6 5.Be2 O-O 6.Nf3 e5 7.O-O Nc6 8.d5 Ne7 9.b4 a5 10.Ba3 Nh5 11.c5 axb4 12.Bxb4 Nf4 13.Nb5 c6 14.Nc7 Nexd5 15.Nxa8 Nxb4 16.cxd6 Bf5 17.a3 Nbd5



Crazy enough for you? After all the sacs, White is the exchange ahead but material is hanging all over the place, and Black enjoys a serious initiative. Nevertheless, the remainder of the game, while less flashy than the first part (but not by much, especially when you see the variations I’ve unearthed!), is full of content as well. We’ll start with a brief recap of the first part of the game for the benefit of those who might have missed part 1 (but it won’t be any substitute for checking it out in the archives – there’s just so much to see there) and to limber us up mentally for part 2, and then turn to the second half of this struggle. Hillarp Persson plays some of the wildest chess on the planet, and if this game doesn’t make you a fan of his, you might want to check your pulse. It’s that good.

Remember, the show is free and starts at 9 p.m. ET. See you then!

(As always, directions for watching the show can be found here.)

The game for this week's show was so complex and spectacular that I spent a great deal of time working on it. That was a good thing, as the viewers will attest, but there was so much material that we had to stop after move 17! So for those of you who missed out this week, tune in next week: you'll still get to see the whole game, and there are many more beautiful variations to be experienced. Better still: watch the show in the archives, and then you'll be caught up with the rest of audience. You'll be glad you did!

A few months ago I presented the game Ivan Sokolov-Tiger Hillarp Persson, a spectacular contest won by the latter. If you go back and have a look at it, you might think it would be hard for Hillarp Persson to top such an achievement, but as you’ll see in this week’s show, his win over Peter Heine Nielsen is positively jaw-dropping. Hillarp Persson, a talented if inconsistent grandmaster from Sweden, is one of the most creative and non-traditional players on the planet, as you’ll see in this game.

It started innocuously enough, with a Modern (one of Hillarp Persson’s pet lines) transposing into a Classical King’s Indian. Nielsen (then perhaps a newly minted GM, now regularly in the mid-2600s) essayed the Bayonet Attack, and the craziness rapidly ensued. Starting with our hero’s sacrificial novelty on move 13, everything gets crazy. On move 14, HP’s rook is hanging, so of course he sacs a knight as well. On move 16 he puts a piece en prise, on the next move he puts a second piece where it can be attacked, constructing what must be one of the few self-administered pawn forks in chess history! The game never really returns to full rationality, but amazingly, the sequence of adventures concludes in an endgame with equal material (on move 26) where Black’s activity decides.

Your mind will be blown after seeing this game, but that’s okay: it’s great to be reminded of what attracted us to chess in the first place. The only thing crazier than this game is not tuning in to watch it! I hope therefore to see you this Thursday night at 9 p.m. ET (3 a.m. Friday morning CET). Remember, the first 100 viewers get to watch for free! (Everyone else, too, but you won’t want to miss a minute of the show.)

Directions for watching shows live (or in the archives) are here.