Jon Speelman: Scholars and gentlemen

Extremely young title contenders

[Note that Jon Speelman also looks at the content of the article in video format, here embedded at the end of the article.]

It's now well over 60 years since my cousin taught me the rules of chess on Boxing Day (December 26^th) 1962 - the day when the Big Freeze began, which left England with the odd thaw under snow until March.

Of course, he introduced me to the joys of Scholar's Mate (4.Qxf7) and I have a very vague and, possibly, false memory that he started with Qf3xf7 and perhaps having shown me how to defend along the file then switched to Qh5xf7.

Undeterred I got my mum to buy me what turned out to be the excellent Chess for Children by Raymond Bott and Stanley Morrison, and I think that finding it useful I learnt to read properly from it. Later she got me the sequel, The Chess Apprentice, but my first "proper" chess book, presumably from some time late in 1963, was Bob Wade's account of the Botvinnik v. Petrosian World Championship match. Of course, it was much too much for me then, but I have dipped into it with pleasure many times since.

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Botvinnik won game one when Petrosian was like a rabbit in the headlights, but the latter equalised in the famous game five when they adjourned with the white king on g7 and subsequently won. Because the Armenians had sufficient leverage in the Kremlin, Botvinnik had lost his right to a return match and Petrosian beat Boris Spassky the first time round before losing in 1969, after which Spassky in his turn lost the famous match to Bobby Fischer in Reykjavík 1972.

Checking now (not in fact from the book, but a database) I see that the 1963 match was played in the spring, which means that Mikhail Botvinnik was 51 and Tigran Petrosian was 33. Of course, chess players mature much younger nowadays, but it's still notable that when Gukesh Dommaraju defends his title at the end of the year against Javokhir Sindaroiv he will be 20 and Sindarov either 20 or 21 depending on whether they play before during or after his birthday on December 8^th. Their combined ages will therefore be a decade short of Botvinnik's and well short of half of their combined ages.

Tigran Petrosian facing Mikhail Botvinnik in 1963 | Photo: Chess in Armenia Magazine

After Sindarov's incredible performance in the Candidates, it seems almost a forced move to talk about in this time. In advance, I had imagined that he would be dangerous but simply too inexperienced to mount a viable challenge - but how wrong I was. Backed by an obviously tremendous team, he not only played great chess at the board but demonstrated fantastic preparation and remarkable understanding of the tournament situation as it unfolded. His six wins were fantastic, and he was in serious trouble only twice: against Andrey Esipenko in the first round (how different the tournament might have been if Esipenko had kept his nerve) and against Fabiano Caruana.

For all the wins, the game that impressed me most of all was the draw with Caruana when he got into a really foul position and managed to defend himself - something which I think most of the world's top players would have failed to do. So I'm revisiting it here, concentrating on the decision-making by both players.

Over the last few days (I'm late writing this because of the 4NCL last weekend), Sindarov (whom my infuriating voice-recognition software has just rendered as "Cinderella of") has been out of sorts at the Super Rapid & Blitz in Warsaw, but that's hardly the point. When he does play Gukesh, he will presumably be the favourite, though I'm sure that in single combat to defend his title, Gukesh will be a formidable adversary.

Like all top players, Sindarov is a wonderful tactician, though this may manifest itself in different ways. Going back to Petroian, he somehow projected his prowess onto the enemy, fearing that they would find the moves that he himself would have played and therefore normally preferred to avoid the mess. Sindarov, though, is more than happy to mix it when the time is right. I thought I'd end with a vignette from Warsaw, where Sindarov did play badly in the rapidplay tournament, but at least had this nice finish.

50...e5 blocked the long diagonal. What did this prepare?

Select an entry from the list to switch between games

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