Introduction: From The Skittles Room
Feature: King's Kibitzes
WGM Jennifer Shahade Book Signing
Member Profile
Dubov's Explosive Italian, by NM Han Schut
Positional Chess Class by NM Tag Taghian
Chess Toons En Passant
Problem of the Week Editor's Note
From The Skittles Room
Welcome back dear readers to this edition of the Marshall Chess Club's bi-weekly newsletter The Spectator. The month of May wrapped up with our new monthly pizza social and casual chess event last night. In honor of the Russian chess legend, GM Yuri Averbakh who passed away at 100 years old, the club organized a themed blitz tournament where the starting position was the King's Indian Defence: Averbakh variation (E73): 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Be2 0-0 6.Bg5. The event was very well attended!
Keep an eye on our calendar for the next casual chess and pizza social night in June!
The Monthly Under 2400 was well attended with 66 chess players! WFM Sophie Morris-Suzuki won clear first with 4.5/5 and the first place prize of $488! There was a 4-way tie for second with FM Marcus Ming Miyasaka, WIM Ellen Luojia Wang and Adi Murgescu winning $135.67 each, and Jenny Zhu winning the $244 class prize.
Three players in the the G-50 Open & U1600 on May 29 had their ratings improve by more than 100 points. Mila Antonios' rating rose 152 points to 1214, an all time high. Arya Borumand and Rassul Khalizov each rose more than 130 points in the same event, both also all-time highs in their rartings. Congratulations on your rating gains! This is very exciting for us to see. For some kids, we see ratings suddenly move up when they start to play at the Marshall and play against higher rated adults. It's not always about winning events; sometimes you can get a big boost in your rating even if you don't win enough points for a prize. A higher rating is a better prize for some.
Others have also gained a bunch of points recently. As usual, you can see them all here.
The Rated Beginner Open continues to be a consistently popular event, with 40 chess players registered for the May 22nd tournament. There was a 4-way tie for first place with Maximilian Almers, Sascha Mayers, Valery Zajkov, and Raf Goldman finishing with a perfect 3/3 score and taking home $63 each.
Juan Sena's Action tournament on May 19th attracted 25 chess players with FM Marcus Ming Miyasaka garnering the clear first spot with a perfect 4/4 finish and a $138 first place prize, while Oliver Chernin, Bryan Weisz, Roman Malyshev, and Kyle Mathew Anderson tied with 3.5/4 points and got $34.50 each.
Another flagship event worth highlighting was the Monthly Marshall Masters tournament, which took place on May 17th. Grandmaster Mark Paragua took home the $80 first place prize with a perfect 4/4 score.
Looking ahead, on June 14th, WGM Jennifer Shahade will have a lecture and a book signing at the club. This event is for members only, but non-members who are women and girls are welcome! Women and girls should email td@marshallchessclub.org with "Jennifer Shahade event" in the subject line to register. All participants will have to upload an image of their vaccination card to our website before attending.
The Ukrainian chess community is helping Ukraine in the war against Russia. The chess genius Vasyl Ivanchuk is giving online simuls to raise funds. European champion and Olympic gold medal winner Natalia Zhukova is working as a politician in Odessa. And FIDE World Champion Ruslan Ponomariov coordinated this wonderful collection of chess games from Ukrainian players, published by New In Chess. All games were nominated and annotated by the players themselves. The proceeds of this book will support Ukrainian charities.
The book also covers the three legendary Olympic victories by Ukraine, in 2004 and 2010 for the men’s team and 2006 for the women’s team. Oleg Romanishin remembers his training match against Mikhail Tal. And Jan Timman has a look at his favorite Ukrainian study composers.
With contributions by Vasyl Ivanchuk, Ruslan Ponomariov, Anna and Mariya Muzychuk, Anton Korobov, Vladimir Tukmakov, Pavel Eljanov, Andrei Volokitin, and many, many others. We hope that you will consider supporting the cause by purchasing a copy of this incredible book.
— Greg Keener, Editor of the Spectator
King's Kibitzes: Furniture Removers
In a letter toEdward Winter’s Chess Notes, English organizer and arbiter Stewart Reuben recalled hearing a midcentury London kibitzer refer to players who were eager to trade off all of each other’s pieces as “furniture removers”. This phrase came to mind a couple weeks ago when one of my online blitz games reached a pawn ending after only 18 moves:
Alex King (2677) - “Betweenlines” (2496) lichess.org, 16 May 2022
I wondered if there were notable examples of strong players “removing furniture” efficiently. The earliest example in Mega Database of a pawn ending reached in under 20 moves was the following game from 1891:
Abel Blackmar - Emil Kemeny Staats-Zeitung Cup, Skaneateles NY, 27 Jul 1891
A remarkably similar ending to my online blitz game above, but here White failed to restrain Black’s queenside pawns, and even lost after many mutual mistakes:
Expanding our scope of investigation from pawn endings to any type of ending - byMark Dvoretsky’s definition"the stage of a chess game when at least one side has no more than one piece (in addition to the king)" - the previous game reached an ending after only 15 moves. The earliest game in Mega Database to reach any ending in fewer moves than that was a recent high-level online blitz game which reached a rook ending in 14.5 moves:
The ultimate expression of furniture removal is to trade off all the pieces, even the pawns. This took me and FM Leif Pressman 50 moves to achieve in a game played almost a decade ago at the Marshall:
This “game” is in fact the solution to a puzzle composed in 1895 by our friend frommy last column, inveterate trickster Sam Loyd. This move sequence is not unique - there are other ways to reach the diagram position in 17 moves. By the conventions of chess problemry, these “dual” solutions constitute an aesthetic flaw, and in 2012 the computer chess expert Francois Labelle found a bare-king position with a completely unique move sequence leading to it:
Francois Labelle, 2012 Proof game in 19.5
If and when you despair of discovering the solution yourself, you can find it onLabelle's website - just leave yourself a few hours to marvel at all the wonders to be found there.
Until next month…
— FM -elect Alexander King, Spectator Columnist and Marshall Kibitzer Emeritus
Member Profile: Thomas Lay
When did you start playing chess and how did you learn?
My dad taught me when I was six or seven, and I got better with the help of a handful of books we had. There was no chess in schools in those days, at least in Austin, and no internet chess, but we had an active local club, and I'd go there once or twice a week. At one point, Anatoly Karpov found himself in Austin (some sort of Lion's Club exchange, of all things) and gave a simul, and since there were scarcely a dozen scholastic players in the whole city, I got to play him. (About the game itself, the less said the better.)
By high school, other interests overtook me, and I went a good twenty years giving chess scarcely a thought. Then, in 2018, a news article caught my eye, about how an American was off to an early lead in the Candidates Tournament, and I somehow found myself following it. My day job is as a book editor, and around the same time, I was working with an anthropologist named Bob Desjarlais. Bob's book for me was on photography, but I noticed that his prior book had been an ethnography of the chess world, based partly on fieldwork at the Marshall. So I read the book (Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard—still one of my favorite accounts of the game) and all of a sudden remembered everything that had so fascinated me two decades prior. It weirded me out by how much came back to me. My calculation skills (never great to begin with) had deteriorated, but I somehow still had a decent intuition for where pieces and pawns belonged in a given position.
(Tom and Cora examining possibilities in Tal–Smyslov, 1959)
How long have you been a member of the club?
I think I joined only a few months before the pandemic, though I'd been playing tournaments at the Marshall for a couple of years prior. With kids, I can only manage one night a week. Since my job as an editor means working with words, and since raising a 5- and 6-year-old means more words still, I think of it as the four hours I set aside for something beyond the scope of language. It's uncanny how social the ritual remains, despite the silence. You sit down with someone you scarcely talk to, but within fifteen moves or so, the two of you are sharing a position never before seen in the history of the world by anyone but the two of you. And even though this person is your opponent, and it's a zero-sum game, the task before you requires that you be their intimate collaborator, insofar as you have to make sure you can see the position in all the ways they can.
What's your favorite opening trap?
I used to have a real soft spot for the Gothenburg Variation of the Najdorf -- which among other things, originates in one of the rollickingest tales in the history of chess, complete with Cold War rivalries, a high-stakes tournament setting with a trio of copycat games, and a spectacular sacrificial refutation (13. Bb5!!) found over the board by Geller (and copied moments later by Spassky and Keres) that brings together spellbinding tactical and positional insights. The trick is that, if you really know what you're doing as Black, White has nothing better than a draw. And when White can't believe that could be true, they'll sometimes try for more and find themselves busted. Unfortunately, there are a couple of less spectacular lines that lead me to mostly avoid it these days, but who knows?
Any great game you've played at the Marshall you'd like to share?
Maybe not great, but I couldn't complain about this recent one.
Lay, Thomas 1689 vs Nizhegorodtsev, Sergey 1911
Marshall Wednesdays
(Play through the gamehere.)
1. Nf3 Nf6 2. g3 g6 3. Bg2 Bg7 4. O-O O-O 5. d4 d6 6. c4 c5 7. d5 b5 The Benko isn't my usual repertoire, but I'd played it as a kid and still kind of remembered the ideas, so, on a whim, I trotted it out. It helps that White's having committed to a fianchetto means I avoid the line that gives Black the worst problems. In that one, bishops get exchanged on c1, whereas here, my light-squared bishop is active on a6, and White's is buried behind the blocked d5-pawn.
8. cxb5 a6 9. Nc3 Nbd7 10. bxa6 Bxa6 11. Re1 Nb6 12. e4 Nc4 The right idea, though perhaps a move premature. This allows White to go Bf1, admitting that the g2 bishop isn't doing much and is best used in liquidating my knight. If I'd started with 12 ... Nfd7, on the other hand, I'd have had another knight ready to back it up from b6.
13. Qc2 Nd7 All my pieces are now either well placed or a move a way from being well paced. Somehow this even includes two good bishops in a closed position. Seems well worth the pawn.
14. b3? A mistake, but White's in good company. Several strong players have overlooked
Black's reply, including Robert Hess, in a blitz game against Jeffrey Xiong.
14... Qa5 Black wins material in all lines.
15. e5 My opponent invested a good half hour here and indeed came up with what looks like the most resilient try. (15. bxc4 Qxc3 and Black wins the exchange, as in the main line, but here Queens need to come off because any attempt to avoid a queen exchange loses more material still) (15. Bd2? Nxd2 16. Qxd2 Bxc3).
15... Ndxe5 16. Nxe5 Bxe5 17. Rxe5 Nxe5 18. Bh6 The dark squares were making me nervous, but somehow I retain enough initiative to keep them from ever being a problem.
For some reason, I'm blind to the utility of pushing c5-c4 here and next move. A habit, I think, from old Benko games where White's b-pawn falls off, and Black holds the passed c-pawn as an ace in the hole until there's no stopping it. Trading it off wasn't even on my radar, but with my more active pieces and queenside space, it would have been a good decision.
21. Qd1 Bf5 22. Na4 Qa6 23. f4 Bg4 24. Qb1 Qd3 25. Qxd3 Nxd3 26. Re3 Nb4 27. h3 Bf5 28. g4 Bb1 29. Nc3 Bxa2 30. Nxa2 Nxa2 31. Bf1 Nb4 32. Bxb4 Rxb4 33. Bc4 A stubborn defense, and worth a try. My rooks have a rather circuitous journey in order to become useful, but there's not much White can do in the mean while.
What about yourself would you like other members to know, that we may not know! Any surprising facts?
I own a chess set that once belonged to one of the great players of the nineteenth century. At least, that's the family legend, and I'm sticking to it. My uncle is a musician, and he studied with the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, who had been a close associate of Arnold Schoenberg. My uncle used to play chess with him, and Kolisch gave him a set he had purportedly been given by his uncle, Ignatz Kolisch, who won the 1867 Paris tournament ahead of Winawer and Steinitz and narrowly lost a match to Anderssen. (Please don't point out to me that the birth/death years don't line up. I don't want to hear it.) The pieces aren't in good condition -- in particular, one knight had been gnawed on by Rudolf's dog (named Pierot, after one of the masterpieces of musical modernism that Rudolf had helped premiere). But they're stylish in their way, and it's an interesting oddity to own.
My daughter is now becoming every bit the devotee I once was, only better, so maybe this set will one day find a succession that isn't avuncular.
— Thomas Lay, Marshall Chess Club Member
Dubov's Explosive Italian
Ian Nepomniachtchi and Sergey Karjakin were sharing the lead with 7 out of 10 before the last round of the 2020 Russian Championship. Nepo made a quick draw against Maxim Chigaev, and all eyes were now on the game between Daniil Dubov and Sergey Karjakin. Would Dubov be able to create any chances against Karjakin, the "Minister of Defence?"
Dubov played a masterpiece that many will remember for the spectacular queen sacrifice on move 19. Karjakin had just played 18... Be6 and now Dubov played the "move of the year."
19. Qxg6!! Dubov sacrifices his queen for two minor pieces, a passed pawn and a menacing attack on Black's king. Karjakin resigned on move 38, which handed Nepomniachtchi the 2020 Russian Championship title.
Few people will remember the novel opening that Dubov used to create these chances. It was the first time that this opening was used at the highest level and another example of the creative and inspiring play of Dubov.
Dubov suggested to his coach Sasha Riazantsev that this would be an amusing line for a blitz game. His coach took it to the next level and provided some deep analysis that made it suitable for over-the-board play at the highest level. Dubov's assessment of the variation is: 'All in all, the line looks decent for White; I don't see a way for Black to get an advantage, which is quite something for such a sharp position.'
Last year I created a Chessable mini-course for this variation. My courses are designed with the club player in mind: the variations have been chosen and prioritized based on the Lichess Rapid and Classical database. The course contains an introduction, 15 variations, 16 puzzles and 6 model games. Easy to learn, exciting to play and only $8. For this mini-course, I used the article Dubov's Challenge by IM Yuriy Krykun in New In Chess Yearbook 138 (2021) and the analysis by Daniil Dubov of his game against Sergey Karjakin for New In Chess Magazine 2021 #1.
So far, more than 500 people have bought the course. The course has been well received and is rated 4.8 out of 5. The artwork is not mine; tastes differ!
My first OTB game with Dubov's Explosive Italian
Thursday, May 25, I returned to over the board chess after a COVID hiatus of more than two years. In the second round of Juan Sena's action, my beloved Dubov's Italian appeared on the board. My 9-year-old opponent improved over Karjakin's play with 12… g5. Black was much better after I played 14. Qh5 instead of 14. Nf3. Under time pressure, Black got too greedy and after 16.c2 I was able to win the game with a nice combination.
Schut, Han (2188) - Borumand, Arya (1283) Marshall Action 05/26/2022
(Play through the games here.)
Comments by Daniil Dubov for New In Chess Magazine.
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.c3 Nf6 5.d4 exd4 6.b4 Bb6 7.e5 Ne4 Most common is: 7...d5 8.exf6 dxc4 9.Qe2+ Be6 10.b5.
8.Bd5 Nxc3 9.Nxc3 dxc3 10.Bg5 Ne7 11.0–0 h6! If 11...0–0?! 12.Bb3 h6 13.Qd3! ! and now: and now: 13...hxg5? is impossible because after: 14.Nxg5 Ng6 15.Qxg6 Black gets mated.
12.Bh4 Dubov on Karjakin's 12... 0–0: A very logical move and hard to criticize, but...
13.Nxg5! Nxd5!? Also decent. 13...hxg5 14.Bxg5 d6 15.Qf3 Be6 16.Bxb7 d5 17.Bc6+ Nxc6 18.Bxd8 Kxd8 19.Qxc3 "and White doesn't seem to be worse." I'll show one of the lines I like, just to make you understand the amount of work Sasha had done: see below the variation with 14. Nf3.
14.Qh5? I forgot the correct continuation 14.Nf3, having never faced this line before. 14.Nf3 Ne7 15.Bf6 Rg8 16.Re1 a5 17.Qc2 axb4 18.Qh7 b3 19.Rad1! Bxf2+! 20.Kf1! Bxe1 21.e6 Rf8 22.Ne5 dxe6 23.Rxd8+ Kxd8 24.Nxf7+ Ke8! 25.Nd6+ Kd7 26.Qxe7+ Kc6 27.Qxf8 b2 28.Ne4 b1Q 29.Qc5+ Kd7 30.Qe7+ "with a perpetual." Dubov.
14...Qe7 15.Ne4 Qxb4? My young opponent, who was already low on time, got too greedy. After 15...Qe6 Black is better.
Han Schut writes for New In Chess about National Champions, celebrating diversity in chess. He has authored six Chessable courses, is a certified Chess Steps Trainer and coaches chess students online. You can follow him on Twitter @hanschutchess
—Han Schut , Marshall Chess Club Member
Chess Toons
En Passant
Chess News En Passant:
– Andrew Soltis Turns 75! The American Grandmaster and renowned writer gave an extensive interview in which he talks about his chess and his writing career, chess in New York, the Marshall Chess Club, playing blitz against Bobby Fischer and about Fabiano Caruana and Magnus Carlsen.
– Nodirbek Abdusattorov won the 5th Sharjah Masters in the UAE. After nine rounds Abdusattorov and Saleh Salem shared first place with 7.0/9, but thanks to tiebreaks Abdusattorov won the tournament.
– The 10th Norway Chess tournament takes place in Stavanger May 31st to June 10th 2022. The field is: Magnus Carlsen, Wesley So, Shakhriyar Mamedyravov, Anish Giri, Teymur Rajabov, Viswanathan Anand, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Veselin Topalov, Wang Hao and Aryan Tari (in to replace Richard Rapport who since qualified for the Candidates and is now prioritizing that.
Problem of the Week
S. Loyd, 1868
White to play and draw.
Ever the jokester, Loyd here pokes fun at the fact that a bishop is normally overwhelmed by a chain of pawns. Here, we have the Revenge of the Bishop, as our pointy friend controls no fewer than the maximum of 8 pawns.
---
Solution to Alexander George, 2007:Black has made an even number of moves. So if it is White's move, White must have as well. White's knights and the a1 rook together have made an odd number of moves. Hence, White could only have made an even number of moves if his king has moved (to free the queen to make an odd number of moves) or if the h1 rook has moved (to make an odd number of moves). Either way, castling is illegal. (And if it's not White's move, then obviously White can't legally castle either.)
—Alexander George, Marshall Chess Club Member
Editor's Note
As always, if you have any feedback, comments, or would like to submit an article please contact me directly at gregk@marshallchessclub.org.
Enjoy, and thanks for reading!
—Greg Keener, Editor of the Spectator
The Marshall Chess Club Address:23 West Tenth Street New York NY 10011 Contact:212.477.3716; td@marshallchessclub.org Hours:M-F 1pm-Midnight; S/Su 9am-Midnight
