Raymond Keene

Records have fallen at the biggest-ever British Chess Championships. The nine-day event in the University of Warwick ended with something almost too neatly symbolic to have been invented: two record-breaking young stars of the game carrying away the two greatest prizes.

This summer has been a stressful period for presidents and aspirants of world sporting bodies. The President of FIFA, the world football federation, Gianni Infantino remains under severe pressure. Similarly KIRSAN Ilumzhinov declared his candidacy for the presidency of FIDÉ, the world chess Federation, on Monday July 20, World Chess Day. Within days he had withdrawn, allegedly obeying a diktat from The Kremlin. Meanwhile, the incumbent Russian office holder, Arkady Dvorkovich has also suddenly resigned in ignominy, after being sanctioned by the EU. His place — as interim President — has been taken by former world champion, Vishy Anand, while Arkady's electoral campaign mantle has been inherited by Kazakhstan billionaire Timur Turlov. Meanwhile, no fewer than two separate aspirants from Germany have emerged.

I have been in Crete on vacation. Rather than leave my loyal readers in the lurch, with no weekly chess column, I hav...

Having completed last year my annual pilgrimage to Glyndebourne for their new version of

Back in the Cretaceous Period, when babes and sucklings knew their place, instead of instantly qualifying to be Grandmasters, as they do now, we all wanted to play like that swashbuckling Wizard of Riga, Mikhail Tal. Our Bible was an anthology of Tal's most impressive victories, compiled and annotated by Peter Clarke, a fine player and writer himself, who had represented the British Chess Federation on top board at the Havana Olympiad of 1966. In spite of facing such tough opposition as the Great Dane, Bent Larsen, then nearing the height of his powers, as well as the mighty Najdorf, whom we encountered last week as a connoisseur of Bobby Fischer's exploits, Clarke only lost one game in this gruelling competition. And it wasn't against Larsen or Najdorf!*

In my column Prelude to Armageddon, I dwelt on the abundance of Jewish chess [...]

There is something particularly appropriate in the fact that Uzbekistan should have won the Open section of the 2026 Chess Olympiad upon its own soil, in Samarkand. The Uzbeks defeated Ukraine 2½ –1½ in the final round and thereby claimed their second Olympiad title after Chennai 2022. India took silver, following a 2–2 draw with Hungary, while Germany secured bronze with a 2½ –1½ victory over the Netherlands.

Posterity has named the following line of the Caro-Kann Defence as the Bronstein/Larsen Variation. However, my hero Aron Nimzowitsch introduced it already in 1907, before either of the two unintentional usurpers were even born. The variation goes like this: 1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. Nc3 dxe4 4. Nxe4 Nf6 5. Nxf6+ and now …gxf6. Nimzowitsch introduced this, wielding his new weapon with consummate success, so it is quite unfair that David Bronstein and Bent Larsen (who have, admittedly adopted the line to considerable effect) should have been credited with the eponymous invention.

I have recently acquired Fidel Castro's personal chess set (above), together with one of the specially designed tables used for the 1966 Havana Olympiad. The historic set and tables were created by María Victoria Caignet, a prominent Cuban designer. In 1960, she had joined the Furniture Department of the Ministry of Construction (MICONS), where she worked on major projects promoting Cuban design during the early years after the Revolution.

Chess960 (also known as Fischerrandom or Freestyle Chess) is often presented as a bracing corrective to the alleged decadence of modern chess. It takes the pieces of the back rank and shuffles them into one of 960 possible starting positions, and its advocates insist that, by abolishing opening memorisation, it restores honesty to the game, compelling players to think for themselves from the very first move. There is some truth in this claim. Yet it is equally true that the question of fairness, which is generally brushed aside with a flourish of rhetoric, is far from settled. Recent studies suggest that certain starting positions may confer a measurable advantage upon White, thereby disturbing the comfortable assumption that randomness and justice are necessarily the same thing.