Magneto's Prison

My first chess composition began while I was teaching a beginner how to checkmate with two rooks using the steamroller technique:

I wanted to test the student's ability to see how the pieces might protect each other from a double attack and so I presented this position. White to move and save both rooks:

As the beginner pondered how to save the rooks, I wondered whether such a position was possible with White to move, since Black's king is almost stalemated and he has no visible means to mark time. This got me thinking along the lines of retrograde analysis a la "The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes" by Raymond Smullyan. On top of the requirement for LEGAL moves in retrograde analysis, I wondered whether Black would make LOGICAL moves to get to this position, basically meaning can we get to this without White having to leave a rook en prise for one or more moves? I answered both questions with this new setup and sequence of moves. White to move and get to the diagram above:

1.Rf3+ Kxg4

With my current reading of Kubbel's 150 Endgame Studies, I decided to make a little composition and ran through many possible movie-themed or atomic-themed names to give a worldly root to my abstract composition: Phantom Zone a la Superman 2; hydronium ion with 2 electrons around 1 proton; maybe just helium; unobtainium which is mentioned in James Cameron's Avatar and in The Core; maybe Bose-Einstein condensate in the movie Spectral. Finally, I decided that the rooks should land at the corners and a queen should stabilize the tight square around the king. The last corner might as well be a White Knight. And finally, using the White King's opposition to force the Black King to capture the White Bishop, I thought of the prison that held Magneto at the end of X-Men (2000). Best of all, there are two knights playing chess together in this scene.

Soapstone's Chess Problem #1: "Magneto's Prison"

Dedicated to Two Knights: Sir Patrick "Jean-Luc Picard" Stewart and Sir Ian "Gandalf" McKellan

White to checkmate in 2 moves

FEN 8/8/8/5N1R/3K1kB1/3R1q2/5p2/5Q2 w - - 0 1

The solution is nearly trivial: 1.Rxf3+ Kxg4 2.Qh3#, leaving the Black King trapped in a four-cornered cage:

Stalemate Swindle

Frenez, one of my three readers, requested that I show a recent tournament stalemate. I was totally busted playing white against an 1800 player. The moves are not cleverly hidden like in Kubbel's studies; in fact, they're natural and obvious. White to play and draw:

69.b7! Qc7 70.b8=Q! Qxb8! stalemate! To my memory, this is the only one of my 540+ tournament games that ended in a complex stalemate. Now that Frenez has gotten the stalemate, I'm going to go in reverse chronological order like my Memento series and go over some of the crucial moments of this game. Feel free to change the channel when I get long-winded. I almost resigned this game prematurely. In the above diagram, I could see that b7 was going to be followed by Qc7, but Ka7 was going to be met by Qxa5+, so my only other option was to give up the b-pawn which was my only hope, but I hardly considered stalemate until I was one ply away and saw that it succeeded in giving me the draw. Notice that the Black King is at e6, blockading my passed pawn and preventing it from moving - we'll visit this later. The above diagram is already approximately equal. After 69.b7, Black has no real alternative to 69...Qc7 except perpetual check starting with 69...Qc6+ 70.Ka7 Qc7 {pinning the queening pawn} 71.a6 d4 72.Ka8 {unpinning} Qc6 {repinning} 73.Ka7, etc. Black blew the win one move earlier in the following diagram with Black to play:

Almost everything wins, EXCEPT 68...Qc5?, e.g. 68...Kd7 leads to mate in 8, 68...Qb4 leads to mate in 9, 68...Qb2 leads to mate in 10, the greedy 68...Qxe5 leads to mate in 10, and even the dithering 68...Qc4+ leads to mate in 10 as long as the follow-up is the approach of the Black King.

But before that, White blew a securely drawn position with some chances to swindle a win (white to play):

The moves just prior to arriving at this position were 59.f4 Kf7. I had realized that with my pawn back on f3, e5 was dangerous for me because of the way it can spring the d5 pawn free for a queening race. Unfortunately, playing 59.f4 and locking a bead on the hole at e5 made me think that e6-e5 had been prevented forever. It had not. With sober reflection on information that I definitely had access to, I could see that playing Kd7, Kd8, Kd7, and Kd6 would secure the draw for me. The e-file squares - e6, e7, and e8 - are crucial to White's winning chances and if he stays in contact with them, any variation that Black initiates with ...e5 fxe5 f4 e6 will probably end badly for Black because the e-pawn will likely check the Black King on the way to e8, giving the new White Queen time to execute the upstart Black Pawn on f2. With more sober reflection, I should have been more patient here and tried to advance my queenside pawns. 60.a4! is one move away from a winning position. However, if Black also reflects soberly, he can realize that e5 loses, and blockading my queenside pawns can secure a draw for him also. 60.a4! a5! 61.Kd7 Kf6 is drawn as is 60.b4 b5! 61.Kd7!= If somehow Black doesn't see the danger, then the variation 60.a4 Kf6? 61.a5! Kf7 62.b4 Kf6 63.Kc7 is won for White. e.g. 63...Ke7 64.Kxb7! e5 65.fxe5! f4 66.b5! axb5 67.a6! f3 68.a7 f2 69.a8=Q f1=Q 70.Qa6! Qc4 71.Qf6+! Kd7 72.Qd6+! Ke8 73.e6! initiates checkmate in 6 moves. If after 70.Qa6!, Black tries to hold with 70...Qf5 71.Qd6+ Kf7 72.Qxd5+ also keeps White's winning chances alive. Going back to 60.a4!, one last bit of interesting subtlety is that 60...b6 61.b4 Kf6! 62.b5 axb5! is still drawn albeit precariously.

At this point, my greed for pouncing on the queenside pawns made me impatient and I played 60.Kc7?? e5! 61.fxe5 Ke6. Note that Ke7 would have also prevented White from queening and also gives White a move if stalemate is a problem. Black correctly calculated that given a chance with 61...f4? White would have played 62.Kd7! and White is back from the dead and winning, e.g. 62...f3 63.e6+ Kg7 64.e7 f2 65.e8=Q f1=Q 66.Qe5+ Kf8 67.Qb8+ Kg7 68.Qxb7 and White is +4.0 in Stockfish's evaluation. For continuity, the moves that got us to the pivotal checkmate or stalemate position above were 62.Kxb7 f4 63.Kxa6 f3 64.b4 f2 65.a4 f1=Q+ 66.b5 Qc4 67.a5 Qxd4 68.b6

One more bit of shoulda-coulda. From the above diagram, rewind the game another 10 moves and we arrive here with White to make move 50:

Material is equal. Black's e-pawn is backward. White's h-pawn is passed. The crucial idea that I missed was that my h-pawn is vulnerable if it runs too far ahead, but if I centralize my White King, the h-pawn can be a valuable distraction. To that end, 50.Ke3! was a priority to prepare for a possibility of 50...Nf6? 51.Bxf6 Kxf6 52.Kf4 with winning advantage. Because of safe, time-wasting moves like Rh1-h2 and back, White can eventually zugzwang Black's king and or rook to allowing h5-h6, h6-h7, and Kf4-e5. Instead, I finally pushed back this troublesome knight on e4 and played 50.f3 Nf6. Here, 51.Bxf6 Kxf6 52.Ke3 Kg5=. The game went 51.h6 Ng8 52.Bf4 Kg6 53.Ke3 Nxh6 54.Rxh6+ Rxh6 55.Bxh6 Kxh6 56.Kf4 Kg6 57.Ke5 Kf7 58.Kd6 Kf6 59.f4 Kf7 and we meet the above "drawish" position.

Kinetic Linking

Kinetic linking is the way in which a boxer plants his feet and makes you feel the force of the ground in his punch. I was recently talking to a mentee and mistakenly thought the term was "chaining". I have not always been a fan of studies and problems. Of course I usually recommend Chess Tempo and Reinfeld's 1001 Winning Chess Combinations and Sacrifices. The positions look normal. To add the element of composition tends to create an artificial feeling and a sense of impracticality to over-the-board play. However, as a chess player, I recognize the need to improve my calculation ability. I usually use the computer as the gold standard with its full width-depth search and evaluation. Of course, we humans have a much slower and less thorough engine and it has been argued that we were successful at playing chess before the engine even existed. Why emulate it? Still, in the matter of perfection of analysis, it is now easy to see where humans miss things that the computer sees. Hidden resources. So I tend to reference Charles Hertan who tries to get us to calculate with Forcing Chess Moves using what he calls "computer eyes". In 1925, Leonid Kubbel published his collection of 150 Endgame Studies. They had no computers, but they did have sheer human grit and imagination. The endgame study often shows surprising resources and I believe it helps me to increase my imagination and therefore my breadth of vision on a given ply. It also helps to train my depth of calculation, especially if I try to solve the initial diagram without moving the pieces.

I didn't find Kubbel initially. A. J. Roycroft has a book called "The Chess Endgame Study: A Comprehensive Introduction." In it, diagram 13 on page 34 shows the following diagram which is #150 of Kubbel's book and also serves as the front cover:

The process of solving this study involves chaining together idea after idea until each side has played 6 more or less forced moves. Then the hard part is allowing Black a fairly safe looking formation only to break it open with a wild tactical possibility that actually works out. I think this study trains both depth and width and epitomizes my current search for clarity in my calculating ability. I'm probably missing out on complex tactics while I avoid Chess Tempo, but, oh well, this is what gives me fun at the moment.

SOLUTION: 1.Ne3++ Kg3 2.Qg4+ Kf2 3.Qf4+ Ke2/e1 4.Qf1+ Kd2 5.Qd1+ Kc3 6.Qc2+ Kb4 7.Qb2+ Nb3 (7...Ka5 8.Nc4+ Ka6 9.Qb6#) 8.Qa3+!! Kxa3 (8...Kb5 9.Qxe7) 9.Nc2#

The Rose

I haven't been reading too intensively, but Temposchlucker has been coining lots of new terms as shorthand for analysis. I'm all for acronyms and jargon as they help marshall this imperfect thing we call language into conceptual constructs. I was speaking to a beginner and using the French term "en passant" and the Italian term "fianchetto". The student asked, "Why call it that?" I had to think on my feet quickly, and decided to bluff my way into, "It's a nickname for a longer mouthful of words." The student recognized "phalanx" as Greek shorthand for "a row of infantrymen holding their shields and spears in tight formation". Phalanx was helpful to illustrate how a pawn front gets disrupted from move to move.

I have been reading Leonid Kubbel's "150 Endgame Studies". It was written in Russian and translated to German and so I am further translating it to English along with going over fun and pretty studies, and of course checking the analysis with engines. Leonid was born Karl Artur Leonid (K. A. L.) Kubbel but changed his name to Leonid Ivanovich Kubbel, apparently in response to the 1917 October Revolution.

A while back I was into wilderness survival movies surrounding Everest and other high peaks around the world. But I also came across the tragic story of Alaskan adventure gone wrong in Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild" book which was made into a movie starring Emile Hirsch as Chris McCandless. Chris seemed to want to escape his identity and rebrand himself as "Alex Supertramp", but he himself (in the movie) read a passage from Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago:

The path trodden by wayfarers and pilgrims followed the railway and then turned into the fields. Here Lara stopped, closed her eyes and took a good breath of the air which carried all the smells of the huge countryside. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the meaning of her life. She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, then, out of love of life, to give birth to heirs who would do it in her place.

The philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac observed, "Every science requires a special language because every science has its own ideas".

There is also a Confucius quote, "The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.”

But Shakespeare seems to be taking the opposite tack that the label we attach to a rose does not change its sweet fragrance. It was a helpful analogy that the feud between the Montagues and Capulets might not be a natural outpouring of antagonistic essences. I have been trying to teach my beginner that the pieces are white and black, but the squares are light and dark.

What am I getting at here? I don't know. Chess is geometry and physics and logic. If we are to finesse our way through chess' myriad formations, perhaps a richer vocabulary is necessary. It's difficult to adopt neologisms because we have to stop to explain the new definitions to everyone learning the language.

I had a time translating Kubbel's book into English since I know approximately 3 phrases in German and less in Russian. I was helped tremendously by the various web translation services of Google, Babylon, and Reverso. Still, the computers create awkward syntax, so it was left to me to exercise my skills to make smooth English. "Discovered check" always seemed to come out of the translator as "deduction chess". I also learned some new concepts of chess problems such as Indian and Roman themes

One surprising coincidence was that my last tournament game ended with my saving half a point by forcing my opponent to stalemate me. I don't know that I appreciate Kubbel's penchant for finding stalemates in his "White to play and draw" studies. They are sometimes rather funny, and, apparently to my last game, slightly practical. In my endgame obsessions, I was most intrigued by those board states that boil down to "only moves" - One move to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. I used to have an email signature from the early days of the internet "Somewhere on the board, the best move is waiting." I think there was a longer version that went like "Somewhere on the board, hidden among inaccuracies, dubious moves, and outright blunders, the best move is waiting."

It always struck me weird that a song that has a repetitive phrase "Some Say Love" is titled "The Rose". For Valentine's Day. We nurture these seeds in our lives in the hopes they become beautiful flowers someday.

Convergent Invisibility

I would say that it began with my discovery that Temposchlucker was actively blogging again. It was frustrating over and over again to see our failures as being unable to see the invisible, which is like a tautology: if we had seen it, it would have been visible. I had been casting about for self-improvement measures. iChess sent a promotional free video lesson from GM Daniel Naroditsky, to whom I once had the pleasure of losing a game when he was rated a mere 2256. The video captions his lecture with "GM Daniel Naroditsky, FIDE 2646". The catch line for the lecture was "How to be a Tactical Beast". He spent most of the time separating tactics into two branches - simple and complex - and then recommending resources for studying both. Then he walked through about 10 exercises from a chess server with pointers on how he would train. I came up with this outline of his resource recommendations:

Naroditsky's Recommended Tactics Resources:

1. Simple Tactics
   1. Online
      1. Chess.Emrald.net - simpler tactics with time pressure
      2. Chess.com - tactical trainer with time pressure
   2. Books
      1. Invisible Chess Moves - Neiman, Emmanuel & Afek, Yochanan
      2. Understanding Chess Tactics - Weteschnik, Martin
2. Complex Tactics
   1. Online
      1. ChessTempo - gold standard, but strays into complex tactics
   2. Books - Dvoretsky anything
      1. Dvoretsky's Analytical Manual
      2. Recognizing Your Opponents Resources

The word "Invisible" caught my eye. Yes, yes, teacher. Show me how to see the invisible. So I have embarked - as I have many times before - to try to work through a body of tactics within a book. I'm sort of looking at both of the highlighted books above. My method is to set up the position in ChessBase with the engine off, try to solve it by myself. And then read the book notes and see the engine analysis for a check. When I'm finished, perhaps I'll have a unique file that is like the e-book companion to the text. I looked at Temposchlucker's blog today and, after a break between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, he has posted about a dozen times in the past month.

It's a little early for resolutions, but I'm trying to get some modest mileage out of chess this year. Here are a few goals:

• Try to have fun
• Enjoy chess at our club
• Sharpen my tactics
• Sharpen my openings
• Play in a weekend tournament

For now, I'm staying away from performance-based accomplishments because they tend to burden me with a feeling like chess - supposedly a fun hobby - is sometimes a tedious chore. So no ratings targets and no tournament win targets. Aside from Invisible Chess Moves, Understanding Chess Tactics, and Chess Tempo, I am also looking at A.J. Roycroft's The Chess Endgame Study, Kubbel's 150 Chess Studies, Nunn's 1001 Deadly Checkmates, and Volokitin's Perfect Your Chess. I also began to look at QvR endgames again to try to get a handle on semi-perfect play.

Doomed Fortress

Sigh. No London Chess Classic videos today. The last 10 days had an extra motivation to get up and watch video coverage of chess on the internet with the St. Louis Chess Club coverage of the London Chess Classic round robin among the world's elite chess players. That all ended yesterday with Wesley So winning the tournament and the tour. The stories of the tournament were So's solid play (+3-0=6) taking advantage of the chances that 2800-rated players give you. Nakamura's up-and-down performance (+3-2=4) and Topalov's down-and-down performance (+1-6=2). Even though the Najdorf is too deep for me, it was fun to see the theoretical battles in Caruana-Nakamura, Nakamura-Vachier-Lagrave, Anand-Vachier-Lagrave, and Anand-Giri.

One topic that was prominent in the middle of the tournament was the concept of endgame fortresses. Anand had apparently saved some incredible draws in previous tournaments. One of the games that Topalov lost was with Nakamura. On the time control move 40, with about 1 minute left, Nakamura blundered away a winning position with Black to play:

White is under massive pressure with Black's heavy pieces on his second rank. However, White's rook and bishop are barely holding the castle doors. White needs one more man to turn the tide and it turns out that 40...e4! is just what he's looking for with a -3.4 evaluation. Instead, Nakamura chose to get initiative on the h2 weakness with 40...Qh6? Now Topalov had his whole second time control to find the defense 41.Rb4! The nasty, nasty point of it is not just to gain useful moves such as Rb4-e4, but if Black somehow gets greedy with 41...Qxh2?? 42.Rh4! Qxg3 43.Rg4+ turns the tables.

Instead, Topalov played 41.Kg2?? and this time Nakamura did not fail to find 41...e4!. Topalov recognized the danger to his position and only now moved his wayward rook 42.Rb3 Qe6 43.Re3 exf3+.

Topalov continued 44.Kxf3 Qh3 45.Rd1 Qh5+Nakamura used the open lines to win the h- and g-pawns and drove Topalov's king to d3 whereupon Topalov resigned. GM Alejandro Ramirez, analyzing the above position with the help of engines, implied that a fortress might have been available to Topalov. Topalov has to purposely lose his bishop with 44.Rxf3 Rxe2+ 45.Rxe2 Qxe2 46.Rf2:

Black's pawns on h2 and g3 should provide some shelter against Black's shattered h- and f-pawns. Since there are too many men for tablebases, I cannot say with certainty whether this is truly unwinnable by Black, but it has some potential.

Wikipedia has an article on chess fortresses. The weaker side has a material deficit which should be losing, but because of the way the pieces are situated, the stronger side has no decisive breakthrough. Wikipedia cites bishop plus wrong rook pawn against lone king in the corner as a fortress position. I wonder if the basic drawing positions of KPvK fall under a loose definition of fortress. I am more intrigued by chess fortresses that actually have walls. My most fundamental example would be, with White to move:

Again, my favorite online resource with positions under 7 pieces is the Shredder Endgame Database. Indeed, you can set up your own experiments and see that even with Black's rook in the least active spot and with White on move, this position is a draw with best play. Black will aim to put his rook on f6 to keep the White King away from g7 and then from behind the wall, with enough shuffling space between g8, h8, and h7, Black's king can taunt the enemy at the gates forever (or at least for 50 moves).

Back to Topalov-Nakamura, I tried to defend the above position against Fritz 8 and couldn't fend him off. Black has four resources that are difficult for White to avoid:

• If Black can win the rook and g-pawn for the queen, he should win. I was able to do this against Fritz simply by putting my Queen on e5, the pawn on f5, and bringing my king up to g5. White left his rook on f4 and let me trade.
• Black can advance his h-pawn to h4 and with the threat of h3, the shattered pawns provide little shelter for the king
• To hinder h5-h4, I tried h2-h4, trying to lock the pawns into a wall. This time Black broke through by placing his king at e6, keeping the white king at g2, and straight trading queen for rook on f4 and racing the king to a winning spot on d4
• The queen can be quite annoying. If Kg2, then Q occupying the a8-h1 diagonal presents a problem. If White walks into a pin with Rf3, the only way to unpin is Kf2 and rook moves. Black can then play Qh1 getting into White's weak h-pawn.

So probably Topalov's fortress after 44.Rxf3 would have been doomed. However, in the absence of a refutation, I think 41.Rb4 would have held. A fascinating exercise is to use the Shredder Database to try shifting the rook-and-pawn fortress closer to or further from the corner and seeing if the game is still drawn with best play. Usually the fortress falls if the queen can get into the back side of the fortress and drive the king out into the open, so too much space is bad for fortresses. But if the king doesn't have enough space to shuffle back and forth, the fortress can also fall. Goldilocks wants a fortress that is not too cozy and not too drafty, but just right.

As I understand history, fortresses protected the stationary farmers from being driven off their productive land by invaders, but once those invaders started using cannons, fortresses became obsolete.

SARGON

After using the search box above, I was surprised to find that none of my posts seems to have ever mentioned SARGON which seems to have been named after Sargon the Great, first ruler of the Akkadian Empire. Incidentally, the Scorpion King played by Dwayne Johnson supposedly arises from the remnants of the Akkadian tribe. I myself didn't play against SARGON, since our family had an Atari computer, but the Atari version has no eponym, so I decided to go with the winner of the first computer chess tournament. At the end of the 1982 Tron movie, the Master Control Program is defeated and he looks like an old man, implying the MCP was layered on top of a core computer chess program. In 6th grade, I played chess and even went to the state chess contest where I placed around a tie for 2-3. In 7th grade, I discovered computers and pretty much gave up chess until college. During the early years of computing, Atari Computer Chess on mere level 3 would be me so consistently that I rage quit chess. These days I have a Kindle with AI Factory's Chess Free on it. At maximum level 12, it is tactical enough that I have to be careful, but the opening book is not so good and there is definitely a horizon effect, so I can find and exploit its weaknesses. Here is the first time I beat it on maximum Level 12. The game is brief enough that following it on your blindfold board could be a nice exercise.

1. e3 {Van't Kruijs Opening} e5 2. Qh5 Nc6 3. Bc4 d5 4. Bb5 Bd6 5. Bxc6+ bxc6 6. Nc3 Nf6 7. Qd1 O-O 8. Nge2 a5 9. O-O e4 10. d3 {If you have never read The Art of Attack in Chess by Vukovic, I highly recommend the chapter on the Classic Bishop Sacrifice. Vukovic analyzes game after game with the standard piece placements and some variations to make the Greek Bishop sacrifice a success. I have only finished one tournament game that had this combination in it though. But it is the stuff of chess artistry that draws us to the game.} 10...Bxh2+ 11. Kxh2 Ng4+ 12. Kg3 Qg5 13. Na4 Nxe3+ 14. Kh2 Qxg2#

Take that, chess computer!