Monthly Archives: April 2020

4/23/2020 For decades Boris Gelfand has been one of the best chess players in the world. He is known for his deep analyses, his passion for chess and his admiration for Akiba Rubinstein. In an interview with ChessBase Gelfand talks about the Candidates, why modern players study the classics and why chess makes him happy. | Photo: Russian Chess Federation

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Dear Boris, the Candidates Tournament 2020 in Yekaterinburg was the last live-tournament before the corona lockdown. Unfortunately, it was postponed after the first seven rounds. But how did you like the chess so far? Is there any game that particularly impressed you?

In the first seven rounds we saw quite a few interesting games. Ian Nepomniachtchi's ending against Anish Giri in round 1 and Nepo's win against Wang Hao were the most memorable games for me.

You have a lot of experience with the Candidates. In 1991 you qualified for the first time for the Candidate Matches, in 2013 you played in the Candidates Tournament in London. What makes Candidates Tournaments and what made Candidates Matches special and in how far are they different to other top tournaments in which the stakes are high?

I have always thought that the Candidates Tournament is the most important tournament in the calendar. When I was young I immensely enjoyed reading the books about the Candidates tournament or matches in 1959, 1962, 1965 and 1968.

A young Boris Gelfand

I always wanted to qualify and do well in these events, it was more important to me than keeping or improving my rating. Thats what was missing in the years 1996-2006 and it badly affected my performance in this period. The difference between the Candidates and a regular tournament is that only victory counts, one cannot be satisfied with being second. There is no "good performance", there is only the winner.

What does it take to win in the Candidates and to become a World Championship Challenger?

It needs a combination of factors: the ability to fight under the highest pressure, to be well prepared chess-wise, physically and mentally. And you need luck as well, as usual.

How do the players prepare for such an important event?

I always arranged a couple of training sessions and invited some colleagues to join my trainer Alexander Khuzman and me during such training camps.

Lets go back in time. Do you still remember how it felt to qualify for and to play in the Candidates Matches in 1991?

Yes, I do remember. I was just 22 and had unlimited confidence. So I considered myself as one of the strongest players in the World and thought that my qualification was very natural.

And how did it feel to play in the Candidates Tournament in 2013 as a former World Championship Challenger who almost became World Champion in 2012 you had to fight against the younger generation of top players?

I was very motivated to win London and to qualify for another match. I was familiar with all the players and tried my best. The tournament was not successful but my preparation paid off in the following events. I believe that in 2013 I played the best chess of my career.

From 1991 to 2013 you played in seven World Championship cycles. Do you have any memories of these events that are particularly fond to you?

Yes, sure. I am proud of my play in the Candidates match vs Vladimir Kramnik in 1994 and in the World Championship Tournament in 2007 in Mexico, where I shared second and third place with Vladimir Kramnik. I was excellently prepared and played well. However, between 1998 and 2007 I had almost no invitations to top events and this prevented me from playing more confidently and I missed number of opportunities.

How do you think chess has changed in the last 30 years and how did you experience this change?

Many things have changed. Nowadays everyone has access to huge databases. A lot of high level chess has been played in these 30 years and it helped to reassess a lot of positions. Engines have become an important part of chess and helped to open the boundaries of chess game.

30 years ago it was important to get information. Nowadays we are overloaded with it. It is much more important to analyze it and to my make correct conclusions. However, the key factors to success are the same: talent, work ethic, a strong character and believing in ones vision of chess.

You are a great admirer and fan of Akiba Rubinstein. Did you see the influence of Rubinstein (or another classical player) in any of the games that have been played so far in the Candidates or is "Modern Chess" completely modern now, with no regard to the classics?

It is a very rare to see that a modern game copies the exact same idea or maneuver from a classical game. But the absolute majority of top players have studied classical games well and it has influenced their chess. Magnus Carlsen is the best example. When he quotes a game like Flohr-Goldberg, played in 1949, in his press-conference no further comment is needed.

Your books Dynamic Decision Making in Chess and Positional Decision Making in Chess appeared in 2015 and 2016 but are already considered as classics. In these books you give deep insights into the mind of a top grandmaster but what I found even more fascinating is your seemingly unlimited enthusiasm for analyses and your love and passion for chess that shines through virtually every page of the book. What kindled this passion and what has kept it going throughout your long and illustrious career?

I am amazed with the richness of chess and I am happy to start my day with chess and finish it with chess. It makes me happy.

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"Chess makes me happy": An interview with Boris Gelfand - Chessbase News

Imagine that, overwhelmed by a dire national emergency, the Government were to summon a group of chess grandmasters to become theguiding lights to identify and implement the solution to the crisis. Sounds farfetched? It has happened once before.

This singular story is told (with some dramatic licence) in the award-winning film, The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the genius who designed the computers for the decryption programme, Ultra, which ultimately broke the Enigma military codes used by the Nazis.

By the start of World War Two, British intelligence had already established a high security operation at Bletchley Park, where code-breakers assembled to try and crack the secret cyphers of the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. Turing, indeed, arrived at Bletchley on September 4, 1939, the day after war had been declared. It was in a good cause. It has been estimated that the work of the Bletchley team may have shaved two years off the war and saved 14 million lives.

The Imitation Game quite rightly glorifies the vital role played by Turing, if embellishing the facts. The film also acknowledges the role of the chess experts by including as a leading character Conel Hugh ODonel Alexander. Known for understandable reasons as CHOD, he was twice British Chess Champion and vanquished the coming World Champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, in the 1946 Anglo-Soviet radio match .

However, what comes across less clearly is that Bletchley recruited virtually every leading chess master in the UK. The sole exceptions were B.H. Wood, a talented chess writer and editor, who, however, was suspected of being a Communist, and William Winter, who actually was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

Apart from Alexander himself, who went on to a glittering career at GCHQ, the UK government listening post, and who was awarded the CBE, the chess fraternity at Bletchley also numbered Harry Golombek, thrice winner of the British Chess Championship, who later received the OBE as well as promotion to Grandmaster Emeritus. Harry was also my predecessor as chess correspondent of the Times.

Yet Golombeks chief distinction in the chess universe was to write a series of chess books which inspired a generation of chess aspirants, including myself. They included accounts of the 1948, 1954 and 1957 world championship matches, as well as classic anthologies of the best games of the great Cuban world champion Jos Raul Capablanca and the Hypermodern pioneer Richard Rti. Golombek was more of a stylist and annotator than an historian of the game.

Golombeks most spectacular game was a sensational draw in 1952 against the Soviet Grandmaster Yefim Geller, while his most illustrious victim across the chessboard was the Dutch former world champion Dr. Max Euwe, here .

By no means least amongst the chess illuminati at Bletchley was Stuart Milner-Barry, also a member of the British chess team. Milner-Barry rose to great eminence in the civil service, was awarded a knighthood and came close to becoming British chess champion, though the best he eventually achieved was silver medal.

Milner-Barrys most prominent victim was the Hungarian-American grandmaster Pal Benko, twice a candidate for the world championship, in this 1956 game .

In the film it is Turing who delivers the vitally important letter to Winston Churchill, requesting vastly increased resources for the cypher breakers, resources which enabled Turing to build his longed for decryption engines. In reality, it was Milner-Barry who was entrusted with this task.

Churchill reacted promptly, turning to General Ismay with the memorable command: Action this day. The Red Sea of obstructive bureaucracy duly parted.

I never played against Alexander, who retired from active play before my time, though I did serve many times under his captaincy in the British Chess Federation team. Indeed, Alexander captained the team which featured in my recent column for TheArticle Smokescreens. There I recounted my efforts to extinguish the conflagration which threatened to engulf the game between Jan Donner and Jonathan Penrose, when the Dutch Grandmasters ashtray burst into flames.

Having encountered Golombek twice across the board, I found him to be extremely solid: both games ended as draws. Milner-Barry was a knight of the old school, who hated draws and always steered uncompromisingly for the most aggressive course. He tended to overplay his hand and I found him relatively easy to defeat.

The Bletchley chess player whom I never even met was Alan Turing. Turing was fascinated by chess, but was by no means in the same league as Alexander, Milner-Barry and Golombek. Indeed, Golombek told me that in his games against Turing, he would turn the board around after Turing had (invariably) resigned and proceed to beat Turing again from the position the computer genius had already abandoned as hopeless.

Turing may not have excelled at chess, but he did create the first viable chess programme. Computer science was not yet sufficiently advanced during the 1940s for a physical computer to be able to play chess, but Turing did the next best thing, given the resources of the day. He developed algorithms on paper which could lead to selection of chess moves, and thus play a computer generated game.

Here is a link to a game by Turings chess-playing paper computer. Two things stand out. The first is an inexplicable blunder by the computer at the end. The other striking point involves the twin advances of the white pawns on the a and h files at the two extremities of the chessboard. This is eerily predictive of the style of the Alpha Zero computer programme, brainchild of another British computing genius, Demis Hassabis CBE.

As Grandmaster Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan demonstrate in their book, Game Changer, such flank pawn advances are a commonplace of the winning strategies of what is probably the strongest chess engine the world has seen, or perhaps will ever see. In that sense Alan Turing displayed truly astonishing prescience. Though his contribution to the victory in World War Two was rewarded by the OBE, after his conviction for gross indecency, the heartless authorities punished him with chemical castration for his criminal homosexuality, leading to his probable suicide in 1954.

On December 24, 2013, after a gap of nearly sixty years, Turings criminal conviction was finally overturned under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy.

Justice had finally triumphed, though, as Shakespeare (another chess player, see my column here ) put it in Richard III: But he, poor man, by your first order died, /And that a winged Mercury did bear; /Some tardy cripple bore the countermand, /That came too lag to see him buried.

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Chess: Breaking the Code - TheArticle

Written by Shivani Naik, Sandip G | Mumbai, New Delhi | Updated: April 24, 2020 5:46:34 pm Viswanathan Anand, Gary Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik are set to play in the Online Nations Cup

A well-lit room, smartly-placed roving Webcams, a Screen-share setting on Skype, an arbiter sitting remotely while accessing the players computer and alert to any out-of-place ambient sound, and oodles of trust in the top respected names of the game: Those are the logistics of the Online Nations Cup in chess, perhaps the highest profile sporting action thatll take place between May 5-10 at multiple venues coinciding with chess famous residential addresses.

A set of arbiters will also monitor every move (speed of reactions and patterns), vetting them on anti-cheating software to look for engine aids.

Six teams Russia, the USA, China, India, best of Europe and Rest of the world, will go up against each other in a double round robin, blitz 25-minute team format, as the cerebral sport mainstreams playing arenas hitherto frequented by amateurs which will now be headlined by the pros: online chess rooms sitting at home. This was necessitated by a world cornered into restrictive lockdowns forced by the Covid-19 pandemic.

While players and fans are happy that atleast chess can stay afloat while global travel is at a standstill and all sporting action has paused, the biggest test for the organisers and those overseeing the competition fashioned to be like chesss Ryder Cup will be to ensure that the online setting leaves no doubts about fair play, and cheating is completely ruled out.

It is an elite event. Only the best players in the world. They would never risk their reputation, says David Llada of FIDE, while adding that the world body will do everything technology permits to guarantee that conditions for the event cannot be corrupted by anyone participating. With names like Gary Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik and Indias Viswanathan Anand set to be involved in playing and guiding capacities, FIDE is banking on reputations to ensure nothing silly is indulged in.

However the online setting will keep everyone on their toes, given the sheer scope for manipulations. The players will be playing from home. They are required to have a couple of webcams, so the arbiters can see their room and their computer screen. These will be rapid games, so there are no toilet breaks which would pose a challenge. Chess.com also has some anti-cheating systems that are able to track, with a high degree of reliability, when a player is making too may moves that coincide with the engines recommendations. All things combine we can guarantee the conditions for the event to be considered safe, Llada adds.

Online chess is not a novelty and FIDE says an estimated 16 million games were played online since the lockdown began. But this will be the biggest event to take off on an online platform. Prof Anantharam, one of Indias leading arbiters whos also on the FIDE panel says that backroom work for arbiters will now include tracking every move and tallying it with engine databases in forensic ways.

At this high level, players wont take risks. But as a governing body, we have to take all precautions. There are a couple of checking tools a fast one which flags a move for the fair play team if the software suggests the players analysis could be engine-aided within seconds and then detailed checks monitoring the next moves in a match. Noone is naive to think cheating doesnt happen in online chess.

READ | Georgian Grandmaster caught cheating

Just that technology catches it, he says, adding that cash prizes upto Rs 10000 were withdrawn after some lower-rung amateurs were found cheating. Both chess.com and the other popular website lichess.com have developed anti-cheating provisions now.

Magnus Carlsen, the biggest name in chess, is currently hosting another online tournament, and besides the livestreams and live commentary, the emphasis is on a 360 degree monitoring of the rooms via webcams. The sport is not immune to mischief with an IM using the pretext of a weak bladder to take help from his phone hidden in a dustbin in face to face chess to win an Abu Dhabi tournament. The professor, one of the sharpest arbiters in the country once caught a player in Kochi using some kind of transmissions through a Bluetooth device.

Itll be best if cameras used for the FIDE event have audio feeds. As an arbiter of online games, one would need to observe players movements to see if they are checking tools as well as their computer screens to make it footproof, he says. While reiterating that cheating is unlikely at this level, Prof Anantharam maintains that as arbiters theyll need to be on their toes nevertheless. Someone holding a placard but not in cameras view is not a stunt anyone will try, but after a GM recently found intrepid new ways of cheating, FIDE wont take any chances. One person will need to keep watching the player, he says.

GM Dibyendu Barua, while stressing that no top players will attempt cheating, adds that safety measures are important so that no one can blame anyone later.

Keeping the webcam on for the whole duration, a well lit room and supervision will happen ofcourse, he says adding that hes heard of mobile devices being used for cheating at lower rungs. Itll be exciting to watch mixed teams (1 woman out of 4 players mandatory) and besides watching strong chess countries like China, interest will be high in certain matchups. Just seeing Anand match wits with Kasparov again for the younger generation, or Kasparov-captaining against the young Iranian sensation Alireza. Mischief wont be on top of anyones mind, but we dont want exceptions, he says.

Chennai-based RB Ramesh, a former player and current coach, says that the shorter time controls (25 minute rapid) dont lend themselves to any hanky-panky. With technology, cheating can be curtailed in blitz games. But if its longer formats with 300-400 playing, its tough to monitor. But its why online tournaments are not rated officially and FIDE has software like the plagiarism tracker so to some extent you can mitigate cheating, he says.

Captaining a FIDE age-group team once, he insists that both video and audio cameras need to be live, to erase suspicion of someone standing off camera and suggesting moves. One cant obviously say definitively that cheating doesnt happen online, just the chances here are very low, he says.

While FIDE has reacted quickly to the dramatically altered sporting scene globally,concerns of fair play remain at the back of their mind. 50 years ago there was this big USSR vs Rest of the World that was really massive: Now, the world is differentIndia, China they are claiming their place not only in the chess board, but also as superpowers. India is rubbing shoulders with the US, Russia and Europe, Llada says, adding top players were all a bit worried about having all the over to beard tournaments cancelled. But they were relieved to see that chess organizers, including FIDE, reacted very quickly and are now holding all top-level competitions online.

The last word of wisdom are reserved for Viswanathan Anand, who stresses that due caution will need to be taken. Logistics is easier, but they should do some testing. Like some anti-cheating measures because you are after all playing at home.

The idea is you will share your screen with arbiters. In Skye you have a setting, screen-share, you can do that. The arbiter will have access to your computer and know what you are doing. He knows whats happening in the room. The best would be if we didnt have a lockdown, you could arrange a chess player to go to everyones house as an arbiter and make sure that nothing is going on. But right now I think every once in a while they will look around the room and something like that, he explains.

The multiple world champion from India offers an insight into the future saying online chess simplifies a lot of things for the organisers: travel and venue and other minor practical aspects, while hoping online is not forced into becoming the norm. Its turned out very useful in this situation. Having said that, the whole world hopes that we are not living with Corona for the next 10 years. Hope it would not become necessary to play online all the time. For the moment, it keeps us going.

While stressing that online chess has been around for ages and the world neednt act as if its a new thing invented now, he reckons trust in fellow players is the key.

I think its a question of trust. I think chess players trust each other. If someone is caught, its the end of his career, so everyone will hope it wont happen. If they are obsessed with checking every single thing, it will get unpleasant very fast, he says of the mild irritants thatll be so crucial to maintain fair play in the taut-nerved sport.

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Chess greats face off online, webcams, arbiters to watch moves - The Indian Express