Illingworth - saving the best till last

Of all the current young Australian chess players, FM Max Illingworth would be the most frequent rider of the emotional roller coaster. I've seen him score some joyous tournament victories and witnessed some of his devastating losses.
His current overseas chess journey started out not looking so good, but ended on a high, with Illingworth scoring his first GM norm. Playing the the September First Saturday Tournament in Hungary, Illingworth scored 7/9 for a 2600+ performance rating. He started with 3 wins over GM's in the first 4 rounds, before finishing with 2/2 to score the norm.
In the final round he scored a strong win with the recently fashionable Gajewski Gambit in the Ruy Lopez. I'm not sure how much 'prep' was involved by either side, but if it was, it looked like White may have missed the fact that after 15. .. f3, White scores a miserable 7.1%

Rodrigez,Lopez Rafael (2313) - Illingworth,Max (2357) [C96]
First Saturday 2011 szeptember GM Budapest (9), 11.09.2011

Pawn Stars

Flipping through today's TV guide I became quite excited at the discovery of a show called 'Pawn Stars'. "Have to watch that" I said to the wife, who simply gave me a dirty look in reply. "No, not that sort of show" I continued, "P-A-W-N Stars. Surely it must be about chess"
But of course it wasn't. It was about a real Pawn Shop, where people borrow money against the value of items they put up as collateral. Apparently it is quite a popular show, but not so interesting for me.
However, to make up for missing out on a bit of chess on TV, here is a video that GM Ian Rogers alerted me to. Chess Wars!

Mate in 5

Doing a little research I've decided that there are essentially 4 ways to checkmate your opponent is 5 moves or less, from the start of the game.
The basic patterns are 

• Fools Mate (1.g4 e6 2.f4 Qh4#)
• Touch Move (1.e4 e5 2.Qh5 Ke7 3.Qxe5#)
• Scholars Mate (1.e4 e5 2.Qh5 Nc6 3.Bc4 Nf6 4.Qxf7#)
• Nd6/Nd3 (1.d4 e5 2.dxe Nc6 3.Nf3 Qe7 4.c3 Nxe5 5.Nbd2 Nd3#)

Of course there are variants on these themes and even a combination of ideas (eg 1.e4 e5 2.f4 Bc5 3.fxe Qh4+ 4.Ke2 Qxe4#), but the general approach is limited.
As for the names Fools and Scholars Mate are well known, although most people refer to Scholars as "The four move checkmate". The "Touch Move" label comes from the story that under old rules of chess, if you touched a piece that could not move, then you had to move your king instead. In the example game, Black went to play Nc6 on move 2, but picked up the Bishop on c8 instead, and was forced to move his king to e7. I couldn't find a name for the last mate, but was tempted to christen it "Alekhine's Mate" after a famous version of it in a simul he once gave.

Alternative approaches to better chess results

The traditional methods of improving at chess (hard work, study, lots of play) can be time consuming, with no guarantee that they will actually work.  While trawling through a list of academic papers on chess I realised there may be a couple of other approaches to improving your results.

The first paper I cam across hinted that it was all in the eyes. The better you visual span, the stronger you were. The abstract to the paper is here http://pss.sagepub.com/content/12/1/48.short
The second approach is to develop better neural networks in the brain. I'm not sure how you would actually do this, but this paper at least discusses the topic. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1994-40150-001
The third, and possibly most promising, is a study that showed the higher your testosterone levels, the better your results. It wasn't that testosterone was only responsible for better physical performance (as previous studies had shown), but that when the physicality was removed, as in chess, it still resulted in better performance.  A preview of the article is at http://www.jstor.org/pss/2786687 although the full article has to be purchased to be read.

Ice Station Canberra

Canberra does not have much of a Spring. Normally we have Winter until early October, Spring happens on a Thursday, and then Summer starts. The only thing that differentiates August from September weather wise, is that it is a lot windier in September. This is particularly cruel on those that play Street Chess at this time of the year. As part of the generous sponsorship agreement with have with Chicken Gourmet and King O'Malleys ($5000 a year), come the 1st of September we move outdoors ("If they can play outdoors in Moscow, you can play outdoors here" is the advice from the sponsor). And today happened to be one of the coldest Saturdays I can ever remember. It was probably warmest at 10:30 am (half an hour before the start of the tournament), and got progressively colder as the day progressed. To a man we attributed our poor play to the cold, with a number of queen hangings and mate in 1's testament to this claim. By the end I could barely remember my openings and reeled of this novelty. 1.e4 e5 2.Nc3 Nf6 4.Bc4 Nxe5 5.Qh5 Nd6 6.Bb3 g6? Similarly afflicted, my opponent failed to notice the hanging e pawn and retreated the queen to f3. I had at least the sense to now play 7. ... f5 and eventually won the game.

Almost a rest day at the World Cup

The 2011 FIDE World Cup is down to 8 players, and maybe the length of the event is beginning to take its toll. Today saw the first game of the quarter finals, and most of the games were over pretty quickly. Two of them were drawn in under 20 moves (one was a perpetual), another took a little longer to finish wit the same result, and only 1 game was decisive. This was Ivanchuk's win over Radjabov, which is given below.
Playing through the game I wonder what players from 80 years ago would think of it.. The hyper-moderns might appreciate Ivanchuk's play (7.Nde2, 13.Rc1), but the more classical minded might frown at some of the manoeuvring. But from move 28 onwards I suspect they would be in agreement that White had emerged with a winning position.


Ivanchuk,Vasilly - Radjabov,Teimour [B70]
World Cup, 09.09.2011

FIDE's Document Dump

FIDE have released a whole raft of documents that will be discussed at the upcoming FIDE Congress. While most of the documents are fairly routine, there are a couple of ones worth reading. The audited accounts for 2010 are there, with the big dollar item being 900,000 euros in legal fees (the stoush over the 2010 election being the cause). Also listed are some financial proposals, as well as changes to the Swiss Pairings Regulations.
The documents can be found here.
It is worth noting that as this is a non Olympiad year the FIDE Congress will only have meetings for the various FIDE Commitees and the Executive Board. This means that federations do not have delegates at this Congress (only when the General Assembly meets). However Zonal Presidents are members of the Executive Board, so Oceania Zone President Brian Jones at least gets to vote on behalf of the region. Of course if a Federation (like PNG) has members on the various FIDE Committees, then it is still worth sending someone along.