Joys of Chess – My favourite

My favourite

Every chess player probably has his favourite game. It is often Byrne-Fischer from the Rosenwald Tournament 1956 in New York, Kasparov-Topalov, played in 1999 in Wijk aan Zee, or for chess romantics the Immortal Game Anderssen-Kieseritzky from 1851. All of these are games which caused some furore.

My own favourite game is far less prominent, yes one could even say a little bit forgotten, a tiny enclave of the marvellous hidden in obscurity. The whole game is dominated by a series of sacrifices which run right through it in a continuous stream. The now US-citizen and grandmaster Greg (Grigory) Serper sacrifices a whole primeval forest of wood against the Greek grandmaster Ioannis Nikolaidis, he promotes two pawns, loses one of the resulting queens again and leads his surviving group of pieces to victory. All that in 48 moves. A post-modern immortal game with a romantic touch.

I first saw this game in Chess Informant, Volume 60, 1994, where a friend pointed it out to me. Since then, I have come back to it many times over the years and analysed it with the help of various software. It continues to be heart-warming.

Not just a piece of high art, but a masterpiece for the treasury of chess. Black is brought down by a series of sacrifices of epic proportions, which raises the game far above the normal. It awakes in me memories of the potlatch ceremonies of the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia, when – in order to establish who is the most powerful without resorting to violence – a chief will demolish all his material possessions in an incomparable orgy of sacrifice and challenge a rival chief to sacrifice riches which are at least as great, otherwise ‘his name will be broken’. Serper put all his pieces on the line to achieve victory, seven beautiful and effective piece sacrifices. In return, Nikolaidis counter-balanced this with the sacrifice of pawn, bishop, rook and queen.

Note: The Joys of Chess contain an extensive seven-page list of bibliography with references to works that were used in researching its 94 essays. This list is not included here with the above sample chapter.

The Joys of Chess is an unforgettable intellectual expedition to the remotest corners of the Royal Game. En route, intriguing thought experiments, strange insights and hilarious jokes will offer vistas you have never seen before.

The beauty, the struggle, the culture, the fun, the art and the heroism of chess – you will find them all in this sparkling book that will give you many hours of intense joy.

Christian Hesse is a Harvard-trained professor of Mathematics who has taught at the University of California, Berkeley (USA), and since 1991 at the University of Stuttgart. He has written a textbook called 'Angewandte Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie'.

Chess and literature are his main hobbies, and he also likes fitness and boxing. His heroes are the ones who fall to the bottom and rise again, fall and rise again…

From the foreword by by Ex-World Champion Vishy Anand: "A rich compendium of spectacular highlights and defining moments from chess history: fantastic moves, beautiful combinations, historical blunders, captivating stories, and all this embedded into a plentitude of quick-witted ideas and contemplations as food for thought."

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