The Chess Mind

We continue to commemorate the career of Bobby Fischer, the late world chess champion, with a look at a win from the middle period of his career. By 1966 he was clearly near the top, but there was a strong case to be made for players like Tigran Petrosian, Boris Spassky, and (by decade’s end) Bent Larsen, too. What was clear is that he was an extremely powerful player on the rise, and that power was seen in a mighty way in the Second Piatigorsky Cup in Santa Monica, California. The event was a double round-robin starring many of the best players of the day, and after the first cycle Fischer’s score was a dismal 3½-5½, leaving him 9th out of 10 players.

At this point, Fischer demonstrated his greatness as a player and turned everything around. In the next 7 rounds, Fischer scored 6½ points to pull into a tie for first with Spassky. They drew each other in the next round, but then Spassky won his last round game while Fischer could only draw against Petrosian. Thus Spassky won first place in the tournament, but Fischer’s fantastic comeback left no doubts about the threat he posed to Soviet hegemony. It took him six more years before he could break through against Spassky and win the title, but performances like this one showed that his time was coming.

As you probably guessed, we’ll take a look at one of Fischer’s games from this tournament. In round 11, he faced the “little Botvinnik”, Hungarian grandmaster and many-time Candidate Lajos Portisch. Portisch, like Fischer, was always very well-prepared in his openings, but wasn’t as good at improvisation. That cost him, as the non-standard position that arose from Fischer’s Nimzo-Indian led to a situation where Portisch followed the “rules” and got into trouble. Generally speaking, two rooks are stronger than a queen, and that’s the material balance Portisch eagerly pursued straight out of the opening. What counts, however, is how well one can coordinate one’s forces, and Fischer’s assessment proved superior, and he went on to win a strategic masterpiece.

If a player of Portisch’s exceptional caliber can seriously misassess such a position, we can too! It’s therefore in our interest to take a careful look at this game. Material imbalances like this one come up from time to time, and it’s rare that we study them in advance. So this is a wonderful opportunity to learn something new, while simultaneously taking an appreciative look at one of Fischer’s many beautiful contributions to our game. I hope, therefore, that you’ll join me tonight – Wednesday night – at 9 p.m. ET – see you then!

(Directions for watching the show live (for free) can be found here.)

With the passing of the 11th World Chess Champion, the legendary Robert James Fischer, it's appropriate to spend some time commemorating his great career and contributions to the game. We'll start this week with the game that launched him on the world stage, his win as a 13-year-old over the very strong master Donald Byrne, from the 1956 Rosenwald tournament.

Though it was a prestigious event, Fischer's participation was not "on the merits", as it were (his rating in 1956 was a not exactly whopping 1726!), but because he had won the U.S. Junior Championship earlier in the year. So although he was clearly on the rise, I'm sure he was still looked upon as an outside in the de facto U.S. Championship. He didn't win the event, but he finished with a very respectable -2 performance. And then there's the game with Donald Byrne...

To say that the game was brilliant is to understate things, though Hans Kmoch's label "Game of the Century" may go a bit too far. He's right in spirit, though: this was a stunning debut by the youngster. Not only was it a great game, but it was a promise of much more to come, a promise that was fulfilled - at least in chess - over the years to come. So I think this is an appropriate way to begin our tribute to Fischer's career, and I hope you'll join me tonight (Wednesday) night at 9 p.m. ET on the playchess.com server as we examine this game.

(The shows are free, and you can find more information about watching here.)

I suspect few contemporary players have heard of Fridrik Olafsson, and that's a pity. Born in 1935, he was the strongest player in Iceland for many years. He's a grandmaster, a former Candidate with wins over Tartakower(!), Larsen (countless times), Fischer (twice), Petrosian (twice), Keres, Tal (twice), Karpov (when he was world champion), Korchnoi and contemporaries like Timman and Seirawan. He was also FIDE President (after Euwe, before Campomanes), and at one time he worked as an attorney!

That's an impressive resume, but rather than choose a game from one of the obvious candidates listed above, I've picked something really out of the ordinary. Last August, Olafsson played a game against Dutch prodigy Vincent Rothuis* in a tournament in Arnhem, and it was amazing. Already after 5 or 6 moves, the position was just about unbelievable, and the game remained strange pretty much throughout. It's not a perfect game, but considering how irregular things were, on balance Olafsson's effort can be considered a success. (And all the more so when you consider that he spotted his opponent 55 years, and yet he was the better tactician and improviser on this occasion.)

While the players at Wijk aan Zee are using their free day to find novelties on move 30 to engineer more efficient draws, we'll see a game that's pure creativity from White's third move (a novelty in an already uncommon position) on. Olafsson may not be the player he once was, but he can still play some great chess, and I think you'll enjoy what you'll see, if you join us tonight - Wednesday night - at 9 p.m. ET. The shows are free, and directions for watching can be found here. See you tonight!

* Dutch speakers are invited - nay, beseeched - to inform me of the correct pronunciation of "Rothuis".

Most of us are very familiar with the usual suspects in today's super-tournaments; players like Anand, Kramnik, Topalov, Leko, Svidler, Morozevich, Ivanchuk and so on are household names - at least when the household includes the sorts of people who read this blog! But there are a host of other great players, players whose ratings reside just a notch or two below that of the Linares crowd. Given half a chance, they are capable of the highest results as well.

For instance, there was Khalifman's victory in the 1999 FIDE world championship and Kasimdzhanov's triumph in the 2004 edition of the same competition. Examples can be multiplied, but even the foregoing is enough to confirm something Moldovan grandmaster Viorel Bologan has written in his recent best games collection: "There are many more than ten people who know how to play chess"!

As you may already suspect from the title of the post, Bologan considers himself one of the more-than-ten, and he can make an excellent case for the claim. There have been many notable successes in his career, but the greatest achievements to date came in 2003. At the start of the year he won the incredibly strong Aeroflot Open, which qualified him to play in the Dortmund super-tournament later that year. Although his rivals included Anand, Kramnik, Leko and Radjabov, he won the 10-round event by a full point!

Appropriately, then, we'll have a look at his win over Anand from this event. The opening was a Classical Caro-Kann, but this didn't produce a dull game, but only one where the hand-to-hand fighting took a little while to develop. But it wasn't that long, and soon interesting things were happening all over the board. Anand is not just a great, great player, he's probably the best defender in the chess world. Yet in our game, Bologan somehow managed to keep him under complete control, winning in impressive fashion.

The fun is in the details, of course, and this is a game that repays careful study. I hope, therefore, that you'll join me tonight - Wednesday night - at 9 p.m. ET (that's Thursday morning at 3 a.m. CET) as we investigate this fine game from the recent past. The shows are free, as always, and if you're not sure how to watch the directions are here. See you there!

For those who can't make the live ChessBase shows, but do watch them in the archives, I've just uploaded the Lerner-Dreev show from two weeks ago. Enjoy!

One of the most successful players at the end of 2007 was American GM Hikaru Nakamura, who managed to win the round-robin event in Barcelona, the knock-out Corsica Masters, and the North American Open in Las Vegas. These three victories are helping him draw near the magic 2700 marker, and as you'd expect from a very strong player on a great run, he's producing some terrific chess.

So we'll have a look at a game from the first event, the tournament in Barcelona, one which Nakamura himself has dubbed the best game he has ever played. This was his game against Polish GM Michal Krasenkow. In a sort of Catalan/Queen's Indian hybrid, Nakamura managed to seize the initiative with the black pieces, and this turned into a small advantage. The situation would have remained tolerable for Krasenkow, had he patiently accepted the situation, but he found a very promising-looking tactical idea that seemed to place his opponent in a critical situation.

You will have surmised, of course, that the emphasis is on seemed; Nakamura had seen farther. We'll have a look for ourselves, and even if we're not able to find the problem ourselves, we can certainly appreciate Nakamura's brilliant idea, one which deserves a wide audience and to be revisited and remembered for some time. I hope therefore that you'll join me tonight - Wednesday night - at 9 p.m. ET as we ring in the New Year with this great game!

Remember: the shows are free, and you can find directions for viewing the show (whether live or, later on, in the archives) in this post.