Monday 21 April 2008

Los Voraces 2019

11 years from now, Los Voraces, New Mexico, will host the strongest chess tournament in history. At least according to the entertaining novel "Los Voraces 2019" by GM Andy Soltis. The novel, published in 2004 describes what happens when the 14 best chessplayers in the world are taken to a small town in the middle of the desert, without computers, trainers or mobile phones, to play a tournament that essentially the rest of the world knows nothing about.
While I found the book amusing (especially as the story is narrated by the tournament arbiter) I was also impressed that Soltis peppered the novel with actual games of chess. In his introduction he states that most of the games are real, and I commend him on his choice of a number of interesting clashes.

Here is the first round clash between GM Qi (CHN) and GM Boriescu (ROM).

Qi - Boriescu [E62]
Los Voraces, 2019

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.g3 Bg7 4.Bg2 0-0 5.Nf3 d6 6.Nc3 c6 7.0-0 Qa5 8.h3 Qa6 9.b3 b5 10.cxb5 cxb5 11.a4 b4 12.Nb5 Qb6(D)
13.Ne5 dxe5 14.dxe5 Rd8 15.Be3 Rxd1 16.Rfxd1 Qa5 17.exf6 Bxf6 18.Rac1 Bd7 19.Bxa8 Bxb5 20.Rc8+ Kg7 21.axb5 Qxb5 22.Rdd8 1-0


If you are interested, this game appears to be based on the game Busch - Gosev 1990, which is identical up until move 18.

2 comments:

Kevin Bonham said...

This is indeed a very entertaining book. It was serialised on chesscafe.com during 2001 and, for a while, available for free in PDF form through the Archives section, but I just looked quickly and I couldn't still find it there.

Anonymous said...

Avaiable from ACE.

See http://www.chessaustralia.com.au/index.cfm?p=detail&o=0786416378

Brian Jones