Those questions

BY: BOBBY ANG

(As published in Chess Piece, BusinessWorld, January 15, 2009.)

London Chess Classic 2009
Dec. 7-16, 2009

Final Standings
(All participants are GMs)

1. Magnus Carlsen NOR 2801, 5.0/7
2. Vladimir Kramnik RUS 2772, 4.5/7
3-4. Michael Adams ENG 2698, David Howell ENG 2597, 4.0/7
5. Hikaru Nakamura USA 2715, 3.0/7
6-8. Nigel short ENG 2707, Ni Hua CHN 2665, Luke McShane ENG 2615, 2.5/7

Average elo: 2696 <=> Category: 18

Time Control: two hrs for first 40 moves, then one hour for next 20. After that you get 15 minutes for the rest of your moves with 30 second increment starting move 60.

The Christmas season has left us a bit behind in our coverage of the big tournaments, so here and the next few columns will represent my own feeble attempts to catch up.

The 1st London Chess Classic, held in December last year, was organized by IM Malcolm Pein, the indefatigable proprietor of the London Chess Center. It is the strongest chess tournament in England in the past 25 years and pitted four of the top players in the world against England’s best four players.

The winner of the tournament is the Norwegian chess star GM Magnus Carlsen, half a point ahead of Vladimir Kramnik. This victory added 3.9 points to Carlsen’s FIDE rating and kept him ahead of Bulgarian GM Veselin Topalov for the bragging rights to the "highest rated player in the planet" title.

A few days after the tournament an interview came out in Time Magazine entitled "Magnus Carlsen: 19-year old King of Chess." You can read it online on:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1948809,00.html

Two questions struck me:

The first one is "How many moves ahead can you calculate on the chess board?" This is a question which all chessplayers have been asked at one time or another -- we will discuss this on Monday.

The other is "Chess has had prodigies, most notably Paul Morphy and Bobby Fischer, who have been lost to madness. Do you fear that trying to master a game of near-infinite variation can make you insane?" I was sad to hear this question.

Chess has a lot of educational values. While kids are moving about their kings, queens and rooks they are learning valuable lessons in concentration, coordinates, thinking strategically, and foreseeing consequences. Every time they play chess they are weighing options and making decisions. Some people have called chess the perfect teaching and learning tool, and in fact it is part of the elementary school curriculum of many countries, not the least of which are Singapore and the Philippines.

And that is the impression of some people -- that chess can drive you crazy.

In one of Bobby Fischer’s early radio interviews of a few years ago, still available online in several sites, including: http://bobbyfischerpage.tripod.com/ he says that he is proud about having changed the world’s perception of Americans. Before he came into the scene (remember, this is according to Bobby) Americans were only known for physical sports -- baseball, basketball, football. It was only after he won the world chess championship that the world realized that Americans are good too in intellectual games.

I am not too sure if that is true, but Mig (a well-known chess journalist) got it right, that this is an "illustration of Bobby Fischer’s true and lasting influence on American chess: he got it into every American’s head that to be a great chess player you must be a freakish man-child of dubious sanity and without a trace of social aptitude."

A great pity.

Going back to the London tournament, the decisive game was played in the first round, when Magnus Carlsen met Big Vlady over the board. Here is what happened:

Carlsen, Magnus (2801) -- Kramnik, Vladimir (2772) [A29]
London Chess Classic ENG (1), 08.12.2009
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Wasn’t the game superb? And Carlsen’s execution marvelous? Yes, that it is. And now we learn another thing about chess. Aside from being the best teaching and learning tool, it prepares you for life and, perhaps the most important of all, it has the power to make men happy.