Thematic Tourney Next Week

The Kenilworth Chess Club will host a Theme Tournament next week, May 4, 2006, beginning at 8:15 p.m., featuring the moves 1.c4 e5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Nf3 Nc6 4.g3 d5 5.cxd5 Nxd5. The line is sort of a Reversed Sicilian Dragon and typically called the English, Four Knights, Kingside Fianchetto (A22, A29). It was chosen, in part, because it was featured in the decisive playoff game between Steve Stoyko and Mark Kernighan which decided the club championship. You can find games with the line at Chessgames.com. Kotronias considers it at length in his book Beating the Flank Openings (which I have seen at Borders, and which you can see several pages from online at Google Books). I have not heard about entry fees or prizes but predict no more than $5 with 100% return to the winners. Unrated of course.

Two ICC Games with the Bishop's Opening

White to play and win.

What is White's strongest move?

The two positions above arose in recent ICC games that began with my favorite Bishop's Opening (C23), 1.e4 e5 2.Bc4. In the first game (see first diagram above), my opponent missed a chance to mate me after I tried to avoid a perpetual, then we ended up in the diagram above with White to move. I'll tell you that the first move is easy but the second is tricky (and very cute once you see the idea). The second game began 1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 Bc5 3.b4!? -- which is a lot of fun to play. You can find more analysis of this interesting line at my Bishop's Opening site.

Marketing Chess as Art

I have had some thoughts about chess and aesthetics that I've been mulling over, and while they still remain a bit unformed I thought I'd put them down and see where they lead. Always practically minded, I've been most interested in the ways that the beauty of the game might be used to help market it more effectively, which I think is a bit of a different take on the age old question of "chess as art" (which usually gets followed by "or science or sport?")...

"Thinking about chess beauty is not an idle indulgence," notes Jonathan Rowson in his interesting essay "The Difficulty is the Difficulty" (New in Chess 7-2005, pp. 85-91), "because understanding it better might help us to promote and popularise the game." Yet, the important paradox he observes is that, "this aesthetic satisfaction is inaccessible to most spectators." Unlike with many sporting events which have an immediate visual appeal, you actually have to understand the game at a rather sophisticated level to appreciate its beauty. In fact, enjoying chess "spectatorship" is such an active process that those viewing a game and enjoying it are, "in some sense, a participant" (85).

If you are not a participant, in fact, then the things you observe will seem absolutely boring or absurd. Rowson quotes at length from a marvelous passage from Julian Barnes's Letters from London (Penguin 1995) in which he describes the Short - Kasparov match as viewed by someone who does not understand the game. The passage begins: "It is a most curious form of theatre: austere, minimalist, post-Beckettian. Two neatly dressed men crouch attentively over a small table against an elegant greay and beige set..." and "there are only entrances and exits during these four to six hour matinees: one character will suddenly stand up as if offended and depart stage left..." and "Every so often, in an audacious device, both may be off stage at the same time" (quoted, 85). Only a fan of Brechtian theatre could enjoy such a spectacle.

Despite the "Catch-22" that Rowson points up, I think he is onto something when he suggests that the game's beauty may be useful to marketing it. In a Chessville.com discussion on "Marketing Chess in the 21st Century" (something about which he obviously knows a great deal, as evidenced by his work with Susan Polgar), Paul Truong makes a similar point, emphasizing that the aesthetics of chess are especially important for getting girls into the game. As he says,

"Most women do not like violence. Most women are not into brut force. Most women approach chess with a more friendly, artistic point of view... I’ve worked very closely with Susan Polgar in the past few years and we have known each other for about two decades. When we look at various chess positions, she will always look for the nicest, most beautiful, or most artistic way to win. In the meantime, I always look for the most brutal, most crushing way to win."

Yet there is always the problem of getting girls past that "males-only" aura so that they can discover the art of it. And they have to get to a certain depth before that can happen, though perhaps it is possible for the aesthetics of the game to be appreciated at a number of different levels?

The idea of levels in appreciating chess as art comes up in a conversation between artist Ugo Dossi and Vladimir Kramnik, in which Dossi suggests that many people study Kramnik's games at various levels of understanding, and "The deeper they immerse themselves, the more they can get out of it." Kramnik responds:, "...beauty is always conveyed on different levels. In order to penetrate the depth of the game, someone must have acquired a lot of knowledge. One needs much preparation, and also experience in playing. I believe a musician experiences this similarly. But the more there are in the audience, the more intense the effect of the concert will be on everyone. When I am in a concert, I know that I only reach a certain limited depth of the music. But to feel that it goes even deeper than that, has always fascinated me."

So we return to the problem as Rowson lays it out: one of the main draws of chess is its aesthetic qualities, yet you have to become quite immersed in the game before you can appreciate them?

Puzzling over this a bit, it occurred to me that perhaps we have rejected too soon the possibilities of the surface appeal....

After all, at the simpest level, there is always something beautiful about the pieces themselves, which have a lot more character than those found in most other games. The mystery of the pieces, in fact, may be a large part of what first fascinates young players and draws them to the game. How many of us can remember the first time we held a chess piece in our hands? For myself, I remember a very unusual, 18th-century style plastic set owned by my grandparents that always interested me long before I learned how the pieces moved. I have sometimes entertained the idea of making my own set (if only I knew something about woodcarving!) -- including one with which to play "Dracula Chess." And I know that I have always been fascinated by the lovely books, such as Gareth Williams's Master Pieces or Colleen Schaffroth's The Art of Chess, which show and discuss historical and artistic sets. The Noguchi Museum in New York recently completed a show titled "The Imagery of Chess Revisited" and the book by the same name captures some of the interesting modern chess piece designs that it exhibited. (If you are interested in seeing some, ChessBase ran a story earlier this year and the exhibit was first restaged in London -- and likely the show is going on the road to a museum near you.)

Is it possible that a new chess set design "for the 21st Century" is called for, as a vehicle for marketing the game anew among the young? Perhaps the feudal mythology overlaying the currently dominant Staunton design is not the most compelling for the young today? Just a thought.

In any event, the most successful ways of marketing the game will lend it a surface appeal that can be appreciated even by those who have no appreciation for the game's depths. Celebrity Chess Showdown. Beautiful women playing the game. Chess and boxing. Speed chess. The surface spectacle seems critical as a first step.... And I think anyone who values chess should not be put off by these more spectacular ways of generating interest in the game. It seems to me that ultimately they are a necessary first step....

"Beauty in chess is closer to beauty in poetry; the chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes throughts, and these throughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. Actually, I believe that every chess player experiences a mixture of two aesthetic pleasures: first, the abstract image akin to the poetic idea of writing; secondly, the sensuous pleasure of the ideographic execution of that image on the chessboard. From my close contact with artists and chess players, I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."

--Marcel Duchamps

The New Yorker's "Planet Kirsan"

If you have not had a chance to read anything about the way FIDE president and "king of Kalmykia" Kirsan Ilyumzhinov runs his country, then Michael Specter's article "Planet Kirsan: Inside a Chess Master's Fiefdom" (The New Yorker, April 24, 2006) makes an excellent starting point. Though Specter does not discuss at any length Ilyumzhinov's work as FIDE president or his ongoing battle with Bessel Kok in the upcoming election (as covered at ChessBase News), one has to wonder why this rich and crazy ideologue should be the international face of chess, predicted by some to easily win reelection. My only answer is that where the electorate is disengaged from politics (how many of us--myself included--have any idea or any interest in how FIDE elections actually work?), and the current president is doing everything possible to keep us disengaged (with a sudden flurry of work at reorganizing the championship and reunifying the crown), then it is easy to stay in power. Ilyumzhinov's focus in his country on building Buddhist temples and other religious institutions and giving chess training to all his citizen seems all part of the same design: to keep Kalmykians quiet and mollified so that they are not so interested in politics.

Though the game as we have it in the West depicts two warring feudal families, chess takes us outside of the political realm and, in fact, offers most players a refuge from conflict. As Alexander Cockburn writes in his book Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death, reflecting on the parallel investment in chess by the former Soviet state:

"One great advantage of the game, though it may not have occurred to the policy makers initially, is that it is nonpolitical--in fact it is profoundly quietist. Chess, after all, is played at remote control, in correspondence chess, or one to one. It is silent. It is nonfigurative, in the sense that it is conducted purely in its own terms, not in generally current concepts or political or cultural ideas. Therefore...there was no possibility of bringing people collectively together in the expression of revolutionary ideas which might be subversive or discommoding to the political leadership" (Cockburn 149).

By building a nation of chessplayers, Kirsan is, at least in part, working to discourage opposition. And "with as much as seventy per cent of the labor force unemployed" and a "a man-made desert" landscape that makes traditional farming and sheep herding more and more difficult (Specter 113), the super-rich Ilyumzhinov has practically built a feudal state where nearly everyone owes him peonage. His grip on power seems absolute.

I first read about Ilyumzhinov and Kalmykia in J.C. Hallman's rather rambling but interesting book The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World's Oldest Game (in the chapter "Illuminating Ilyumzhinov"). In Hallman's account, many citizens are not simply disengaged but openly fearful of speaking their minds. And with a man in office who is an open admirer of Saddam Hussein's ability to "hold it all together" in Iraq with the "Sunnis, the Shiites, the Kurds" (Specter 114), it's easy to see why. He is seeking to build a kingdom not much different from one of the Arab states with oil as his source of wealth and the citizenry dependent upon him for their livelihoods. Chess is both a symbol of and a tool for maintaining his king-like stature in an increasingly feudal order.

That chessplayers, who have always followed the money (even to Libya and other unsavory locales), should willingly allow themselves to become pawns in his game troubles me. Yet, surveying the current landscape of funding for the game, I can see why so many are willing to follow him....

Better Anti-Danish Line

Dennis Monokroussos (The Chess Mind) has some good commentary on Karsten Müller's Danish Gambit analysis, mentioned here yesterday. Today he offers a reader's interesting suggestion of 1.e4 e5 2.d4 exd4 3.c3 Ne7!? followed by ...d5 as a much easier way of meeting White's d4-gambits than the complicated and rather drawish Capablanca Defense. The 3...Ne7 line is endorsed by John Watson in his book (with Eric Schiller) "Surviving and Beating Annoying Openings," as he mentions in his review of Danish Dynamite and discusses at some length on the second page of that commentary. I have also posted a quickly compiled PGN file you can download, featuring two great wins by Johnny Hector (one of my "opening heroes") with this rather rare variation. Judging by the games, it seems to work much better against the Danish move order than against the Goring (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 exd4 4.c3 Nge7!?) where White has a good winning percentage.

Update: the conversation continues today at The Chess Mind.