Fischer's Middlegame : Defending an Attack

After writing the posts on Fischer's Middlegame and Fischer's Middlegame : Isolating Pieces, I wasn't convinced that I had understood the concept behind 'isolating his opponent's pieces from the battlefield'. Fortunately, the Soviet authors of 'Fischer's play: An analysis' (see that first 'Middlegame' post for references and links) provided a second example of the mysterious technique.

Unlike the well known Portisch - Fischer game seen in 'Isolating Pieces', the 1967 Maric - Fischer game is almost unknown, at least judging by the number of references on the web. This meant that I was on my own to locate the relevant positions. After some analysis, I decided that the position in the diagram is a key part of the critical sequence.

White has sacrificed a Pawn for a do-or-die attack on Black's King. All of White's pieces are aimed at the Black King. If the attack doesn't work, White will be off-balance for the next phase, struggling with a Pawn down.

White continued with 26.Qg4, attacking the Rook on c8 and making way for the h-Pawn. The game continued 25...f5 27.Qg5 Qxd4 28.h4 f4 29.Rg4, when Fischer unleashed a nice combination with 29...Rc5 30.Qxf4 Rxf4 31.Rgxf4 Rf5. This led to simplification into a Rook and opposite colored Bishop endgame, where Black retained the extra Pawn. Along with the passed, connected center Pawns, it was enough to win.

Maric - Fischer, Skopje 1967

After 25...Ra8-c8

Nice play by Fischer, isn't it? So I thought until I examined the variation with an engine. Instead of 29.Rg4, White has 29.Qg4!, attacking the Rook a second time and avoiding Fischer's combination. Fischer could have strengthed the variation a few moves earlier with 27...Qc4, forcing the Rook from the f-file before capturing the d-Pawn. In our time it's easy to criticize top players of yesteryear based on engine analysis, just as in former times it was easy to praise their play uncritically. Had the machine suggestions been played, the game would still have been a hard fight.

The game illustrates another characteristic of Fischer's play. After Maric's irregular first move 1.f4, Fischer continued 1...Nf6 2.Nf3 g6 3.d3 Bg7 4.e4 O-O. He often used the King's Indian formation as Black against unorthodox openings. The idea is simple : play the first five moves without much thought, then see what the opponent has cooked up in the same time.

Fischer's Middlegame : Isolating Pieces

Let's return to Fischer's Middlegame one more time to look at a point which mystified me. The Soviet authors of 'Fischer's play: An analysis' wrote,

7. Typical of Fischer is a flair for isolating his opponent's pieces from the battlefield. [ala Capablanca]

along with giving a few concrete examples, including one Capablanca game. Since this was a concept I hadn't encountered before, I decided to take a closer look. The first example from Fischer's games is one I've discussed in the past: Portisch - Fischer, Santa Monica 1966 and Watch Out for 'Etc.'. It was annotated at different times by Fischer, Portisch, and Kasparov; see those two posts for references.

The top diagram shows the best known position from the game. Portisch played 14.Qxa8, to which Kasparov gave a '?' and commented,

Portisch is seduced by the traditional evaluation 'two Rooks are stronger than a Queen'. But in the given instance it is just the opposite: the more numerous White army is unable to achieve coordination!

The italics are mine and are meant to highlight a phrase that corresponds to 'isolating pieces from the battlefield'. In other words, isolated pieces are uncoordinated pieces, and vice versa. (*) The game continued a few more moves before reaching the bottom diagram.

Portisch - Fischer, Santa Monica 1966

Here we see what the commentators mean by isolated / uncoordinated pieces. The White pieces are unable to whip up any threats and are ultimately overwhelmed in the endgame.

There is an unusual angle to this instructive example. The Capablanca game (documented in the aforementioned 'Fischer's Middlegame' post) appears to have little to do with this topic. It was a rather poorly played game by Capablanca. His opponent, William Winter, overlooked a winning move, blundered instead, and resigned immediately. It's not the sort of game one uses to illustrate an important positional theme. I wonder if the Soviet authors of 'Fischer's play' mixed it up with another Winter - Capablanca game, William Winter vs Jose Raul Capablanca; Ramsgate 1929. That game, although I didn't take the time to analyze it any depth, has distinct similarities to the Portisch - Fischer game.

***

(*) Kasparov considered that Portisch was 'seduced by the traditional evaluation', but Portisch wrote,

White has no compensation for the doubled Pawn and he is condemned to passive defense. Therefore I decided to give up my Queen for the Rooks in a hope to save the game, which nearly succeeded.

He knew he wasn't gaining material -- he was sacrificing material.

Anand's W-L-D Record 2004-2008

Continuing with Viswanathan Anand's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (1983-), after creating Anand's TMER PGN for the years 2004 to 2013, I started adding the events, including W-L-D (win, loss, draw) data, to the TMER index page. I managed to work through 2008 before running out of time. These were among Anand's best years and included three World Championship events:-

• 2005 San Luis
• 2007 Mexico City
• 2008 Anand - Kramnik

He finished 2nd-3rd in the 2005 title tournament, won the 2007 title tournament, and defended the title in the 2008 match. The entire list of events can be found in my September post, Anand's TMER 2004-2008.

The Asian Team Championship

A few weeks ago, in China and India Top-20, I looked at the top-20 players in the two powerhouse nations of Asian chess. How do they fare in head-to-head competition? While China routinely finishes well ahead of India at the biennial Olympiad, the results are closer at the Asian Team Championship.

Source: OlimpBase

Asian Team Chess Championship

In the last five events, the two countries have swapped the no.1 position, but looking at the individual events, we see that India only won in years where China did not participate. For example:-

• 16th Asian Team Championship: Kolkata 2009
• 17th Asian Team Championship: Zaozhuang 2012

Thanks to the detailed records maintained by OlimpBase, we can drill down to the records for individual countries in specific team competitions. Here are the team records for the Men's Asian Team Chess Championship.

• China, Team Record
• India, Team Record

Which Asian country is no.3? I would have expected to see the Philippines, but the chart above shows Vietnam as next in line for the last four competitions. It turns out that the Philippines hasn't competed since 1999. What's the story behind that?

Chess in Schools in Central Park

A week ago, for Video Friday, I wanted to feature a clip for the recent Chess-in–the-Schools Central Park event, but I got sidetracked by the Fischer News Clips 2004-2005. This week, for Flickr Friday, I was happy to find the following photo.

Chess in Central Park © Flickr user Laddir under Creative Commons.

For more about the event, see Hundreds Compete At Largest U.S. Chess Tournament In Central Park.

The tournament is a partnership between the Parks Department and Chess-in–the-Schools, which works to teach public school students the game of chess.

I'm not sure it qualifies as 'the largest chess tournament in the United States', but it's certainly impressive.

Anand on World Championship Opening Preparation

At the end of my previous post, Opening Wisdom from Anand, I noted,

The last set of quotes I collected were related specifically to World Championship opening preparation [...] a topic I've covered many times in this blog.

The wrapup for the initial series was World Championship Opening Preparation - Summary, followed a few months later by World Championship Opening Preparation in 2010, on the Anand - Topalov title match. Although I never addressed the preparation for the 2012 match itself, there's a photo of the team on my World Championship blog: Anand - Gelfand Wrapup. The 2008 Anand - Kramnik match is still unexplored on this blog, so I hope to come back to it eventually.

As for the 1995 PCA match with Kasparov, Anand discussed several aspects in 'My Best Games of Chess'. The following page references are to the 1998 edition of the book.

Preparation for a World Championship match needs to be extremely thorough -- one must not only take the existing theory a little bit further, but in fact almost reinvent the lines you expect to use since it must withstand several months of scrutiny by a team of grandmasters. (p.137)

The days when chess was a game between two players are long gone.

When I finally reached the Kasparov match there was a feeling of anticlimax, as if I was already spent from the earlier efforts. I had the feeling that, having played so many matches, I was fairly exposed because I had already shown most of my best ideas trying to reach the World Championship itself. The champion can be much better prepared, as he only has to play when and where he chooses and can just wait to see how the cycle develops. Of course, every challenger says much the same thing! [...]

I had to assemble a team in a hurry, and it was a unique experience suddenly going from having at most two seconds to having four. [...]

It was amazing how much more you could accomplish with such help, but it was also much more confusing comparing the results of one person's analysis with another's. Trying to get everybody to work together in the most efficient manner was a major task in itself. You can't have all five people analyzing on one board -- it's just too many heads and hands. On the other hand, splitting into groups analyzing the same position often leads to the groups heading off in entirely different directions and then it can be hard to decide which line you are actually going to play. Thanks to the information explosion, the amount of material you have to deal with is gigantic. [...]

With hindsight, and given that we were new to the job, I think we did a reasonably good job with our preparation. I am sure that we would do better next time, based on our experience in 1995. Still, this was an area where Kasparov had an advantage due to his vast experience preparing for World Championship matches. His preparation was able to survive the close scrutiny of a World Championship match while mine took some heavy blows. (p.181)

The following quote isn't about preparation, but is still worth noting.

I had noticed that a number of players had been badly affected by match defeats. [...] After my defeat by Kasparov, I gave some thought as to how to get my career back on track. The memory of the chess world can be very short-lived -- you can become a nobody within a year if you don't back your reputation up by good results. (p.188)

The value of the preparation lasts long after the match is over.

A position on which I had done a lot of work for the Kasparov match. Although I wasn't so successful in the match itself, the analysis paid off over the succeeding months. At the time this game was played, I was still far ahead of other grandmasters in my understanding of this line. Later on they caught up with me, but not before I had notched up several wins. (p.202)

With only a month to go until the Anand - Carlsen title match starts, I imagine that the teams are in full swing.

Opening Wisdom from Anand

After creating the file of World Champion Anand's games over the past ten years (see Anand's TMER PGN for background), I started to study the games to see what I could learn. The first thing I looked at was his basic opening repertoire -- what early moves does he favor, up to the fifth move or so. I discovered that his repertoire tends to follow the current trend: sharp variations of today's most popular openings.

Not seeing how I could write a post around that observation, I opened his book 'My Best Games of Chess' (I have the 1998 edition) to see what I could learn there. I discovered many pithy examples of grandmaster wisdom applied to the opening, especially in the context of chess as a game between two players. Here are a few given with the game reference from the book. To play through the full game, see the collection My Best Games of Chess by Vishy Anand on Chessgames.com.

Anand vs K Ninov, 1987

These were still the pre-computer days, when players were much more intuitive. Nowadays everybody goes home and checks everything with [an engine]. The use of computers has made people more sceptical and now they are more prone to go Pawn-grabbing unless there is definite compensation.

Anand vs S Agdestein, 1987

[My opponent] is fond of offbeat systems [...] I was quite happy to see it on the board. White can play natural moves and there is not much risk even if he commits a slight inaccuracy -- a pleasant situation when placing the top seed.

Tal vs Anand, 1989

How do you explain a move that violates the rule not move the same piece twice in the opening? Well, I can't really find a general principle that justifies it, but it does seem to work!

Anand vs Spassky, 1989

During the course of his career, [my opponent] has played just about every opening there is. [...] I felt that [his] knowledge of the main lines would be much greater than mine, so I tried, with some difficulty, to find a relatively unexplored continuation.

R Kuijf vs Anand, 1990

Technically, it may be a novelty, but I am reluctant to call it that. To my mind, novelties should be at least a bit difficult to find. If you play the most obvious move and then discover that by an accident of history nobody has played it before, I am not sure that it deserves any special appellation.

Anand vs Kasparov, 1991

I hadn't really bothered to prepare for this game -- I decided that whatever I did, it would be inadequate. He'd played this line so many times I couldn't hope to outprepare him, so I preferred to concentrate on keeping a clear head for the game. Although the strategy worked well on this occasion, it would be easy to exaggerate its advantages!

Anand vs Ftacnik, 1993

I had quite a few interesting ideas [in this line], but this is a very difficult and complex variation to analyze. It has taken many years for theory to converge on what are now considered 'main lines'. The positions are so tricky that you can never be sure that your ideas are correct; the advantage is that your opponent has the same problem!

(ditto)

In such messy and complex positions, I think it is better not to calculate too much -- the tree of variations can get enormously dense. I prefer to wait to see what my opponent plays, and that immediately removes a large percentage of possible branches.

Anand vs Kamsky, 1994

At the time [my opponent] played many openings, but I wasn't sure whether he had really studied them or whether he gave priority to being difficult to prepare for. Later it became clear that he does study and understand a lot of different openings, but not too well! I often encountered holes in his repertoire.

Anand vs Timman, 1995

Even chess professionals are human beings, and if you have seen a position hundreds of times then it is possible to become stale. A bit of variety helps to keep one's interest alive.

The last set of quotes I collected were related specifically to World Championship opening preparation. Since that is a topic I've covered many times in this blog, I'll return to it in a separate post.