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!

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