David Ionovich Bronstein was born on February 19, 1924 in Bila Tserkva (near Kiev) in Ukraine. He learned to play chess at the age of six from his grandfather. He was trained by an International Master, Alexander Konstantinopolsky as a youth. At age 15, he came in second place at the Kiev championship. He earned a Master’s title at age 16.

Upon graduating high school, WWII broke out and interrupted his plans to study Mathematics at Kiev University. After the war, he attended Leningrad Polytechnical Institute for one year. Chess took precedent over his studies. In 1944, he defeated the Soviet Champion, Mikhail Botvinnik at the USSR Championship. This launched him into playing on the Soviet team during the famous 1945 USSR versus USA Radio Chess Match.

It was during the 1948 interzonals in Saltsjobaden where he won the tournament that earned him a grandmaster title. The win earned him a spot in the 1950’s Candidates match in Budapest. His best friend, Boleslavsky and David both won the match and had to endure a play off. He beat Boleslavsky and went on to contest Botvinnik for the Championship. The Moscow World Championship Match in 1951 ended in a draw ( 12-12) and Botvinnik retained the title. He came real close to taking the title leading by a full point by game 22. Speculation about Bronstein being forced to lose the match was rumored. He was quoted as saying ( in his book, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice:

"I have been asked many, many times if I was obliged to lose the 23rd game and if there was a conspiracy against me to stop me from taking Botvinnik's title. A lot of nonsense has been written about this. The only thing that I am prepared to say about all this controversy is that I was subjected to strong psychological pressure from various origins and it was entirely up to me to yield to that pressure or not."

They meet again in round 28. By this time, Smyslov was in clear first place with 16 points and Reshevsky and Bronstein were even with 14 ½ points. The heat was still on. They go into a main line Ruy Lopez 18 moves before Bronstein takes the first detour. He plays 18 g3 to prevent Black from landing on f3 with a knight. The middle game then struggled around White preventing black from landing his knight on d3 while trying to land his own on d5. Reshevsky offered draws on several occasions as time pressure loomed. Bronstein plays a trap against the American under time pressure and it works. Black was forced to give up the exchange ( rook) or face being mated.

These three games were the highlight of the drama and tensions felt at the Zurich event. I’d like to point out one of the other nice wins that has some technical merit. His first round win against Taimanov was a nice Benoni with a queen side attack with Bronstein playing a pawn sacrifice in the opening. The b5 line undermined White’s d5 advance and opened the a- and b-files for a marauding raid on the queenside.

Epilog:

The concession of placing second was to write the epic tournament book that is still instructional today. He qualified for the 1955 Goteborg Interzonals and landed a another near miss at the Candidates match in 1956 Amsterdam where he tied for third through seventh place behind runner up Keres and winner Smyslov. He had to Qualify for the 1958 Interzonal in Portoroz but didn’t make it to the candidates match in 1959 by ½ point. He missed the next round of zonal qualifiers in 1962 as well.

Bronstein was also a six times winner of the Moscow Championships, and represented the USSR at the Olympiads of 1952, 1954, 1956 and 1958, winning board prizes at each of them, and losing just one of his 49 games in those events. Along the way he won four Olympiad team gold medals. In the 1954 team match against the USA (held in New York), Bronstein scored an almost unheard-of sweep at this level of play, winning all four of his games on second board.

He had successes in other international events like Hastings 1953-54, Belgrade 1954, Gotha 1957, Moscow 1959, Szombathely 1966, East Berlin 1968, Dnepropetrovsk 1970, Sarajevo 1971, Sandomierz 1976, Iwonicz Zdrój 1976, Budapest 1977, and J?rmala 1978.

His greatest legacy in my opinion was in his books. Zurich International Chess Tournament 1953 reached the largest circulation and he continued to write until his 70’s with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice being an autobiographical section along with games that amplify the ideas behind the player’s moves. His work gives insight to a romantic vision of chess.

His contributions to several openings extends this legacy with special regards to his work on the king’s Indian defense.

Bronstein was a chess visionary. He was an early advocate of speeding up competitive chess, and introduced a digital chess clock which adds a small time increment for each move made, a variant of which has become very popular in recent years. ICC wouldn’t have some of the time limits today had it not been for this genius.

He was married three times. His first wife was Olga Ignatieva, a Soviet woman International Master, and they had one son. Little is know about his second wife Marina Viktorovna. He was divorced in the mid 1960’s. Then, in 1984, he married Tatiana Boleslavsky, the daughter of best friend GM Isaac Boleslavsky.

His health was in decline in his last couple of years, suffering from high blood pressure. He died on December 5, 2006 in Minsk, in the arms of his wife Tatiana.

“I still wonder why people in general have respect only for world champions and not for all chess players,” he wrote. “Is it not clear that we all play the same game of chess?”

The first two chapters are the most useful, because they cover Soviet chess through the end of WWII, a period when its development was largely off the radar of Western chess publications. The Soviet federation joined FIDE in 1946, Botvinnik became World Champion in 1948, and the unrelenting progress of Soviet chess was on everyone's radar thereafter. The sections of the first two chapters, showing what Richards considered to be the major milestones, are:-

I. The Early Years of Soviet Chess, 1917-30
01 - Chess During the Revolution and Civil War
02 - The 1920 Olympiad
03 - Apolitical Chess, 1920-24, and Opposition to it
04 - The Establishment of Marxist Control and the Creation of a Mass Movement
05 - Soviet Championships of the Early Twenties
06 - The 1925 Moscow International Tournament
07 - Chess and Psychology
08 - International Chess Movements of the Twenties
09 - The Capablanca - Alekhine Match
10 - Soviet Championships of the Late Twenties
11 - Chess and Industrialization
12 - The Role of Chess in Soviet Society in the Twenties
13 - Why Chess Became so Popular in the U.S.S.R.

II. Consolidation and New Achievements, 1930-45
01 - The Organization of Soviet Chess in the Thirties
02 - Championships of the Early Thirties
03 - Botvinnik's First International Successes
04 - International Workers's Chess in the Thirties
05 - Chess among Women and Juniors
06 - Botvinnik's Victories of 1936: 'The classical land of chess'
07 - The Soviet Style of Chess
08 - A.V.R.O. 1938 and Hopes for a World Championship Match
09 - The Last Pre-War Years
10 - The War Years, 1941-5

I'm going to use those chapters to develop a timeline of Soviet chess development, similar to the timelines I used in The Botvinnik - Keres Rivalry, The World Championship Interregnum, and USSR vs. USA/GBR 1945-55. Timelines are useful tools for understanding the chronology of a historical subject and for exploring it in more depth.

What got us into the Final Four

Initially we were ranked 10th in the 2008 Pan-American Championships because of our rating. So how did we manage to get 3rd in the final standings in Dallas? I was not supposed to tell you about our secret, but here it goes. Now don’t tell anyone.

· INFRASTRUCTURE. Our chess team is at the top of the university’s list of assets. As a result, a few months ago our general headquarters moved to the Student Union, generally used for enhancing the college students’ lives. Specifically, we are now in possession of a huge office that makes our guests woo. You can tell we now have some extra motivation to train harder.

· TEAM SPIRIT. One day Dan Fernandez came up with an idea and nominated himself for the position of Sports Coordinator. His initiative started paying its fruits since the team grew more united. And healthy as well, I assume. Now every Sunday you can see us playing tennis. I know that there are other days for intramural activities like basketball, “Wii” sports and videogames. Personally, I prefer the more sedentary game “Risk” but my pals do not like it anymore since it brings out the Machiavellian side of some (golden moment: “I will not attack you in Europe”—and later, “I didn’t say I wouldn’t attack you in Asia”) and besides, it takes forever to finish a game.

· GIRLS. Is there any other team with two ladies on its roster that made it to the Final Four?

· SAWYER. Our killing machine. Awarded top player on 3rd board with 5.0 points out of 6.0 possible.

Without doubt, there are more factors and people involved in our success. One such person is our coach, Gilberto Hernandez, who has been the top Mexican player for many years. As our trainer, he is responsible for our improved chess. Also, Russell Harwood, director of the program, is responsible for its good management.

For further details about all McFarland books, please visit:

http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/

Missed a review? Pop along to my archive:

http://marshtowers.blogspot.com/2007/12/chess-review-archive.html

Culture échiquéenne oblige, nous vous proposions mercredi, une photo d'archive inédite sur le thème de la longévité.

Andor Lilienthal en compagnie de David Bronstein, disparu en 2006

From time to time on this site I have tried to discuss chess from a philosophical point of view. No wonder: chess is very often the subject of philosophical discussions. In the past, famous philosophers like Rousseau and Wittgenstein have used chess in their thinking. In the recent book Philosophy Looks at Chess (edited by Benjamin Hale) twelve contemporary professional thinkers discuss various aspects of our royal game.

Let me start by telling you how to judge a non-fiction book in ten seconds: you simply look up your heroes, i.e. favourite writers, chess players, philosophers etc. in the index, and see how many ‘hits’ you score. It’s simple, but very effective, especially if you don’t know the author(s). When I read a book on philosophy and chess, I want it to at least mention Jonathan Rowson’s book Chess for Zebras. I want it to discuss Dennett’s and Searle’s views on artificial intelligence. I want it to mention Kasparov and Deep Blue and Rybka or Fritz. And hey, let’s toss in some Plato as well. Otherwise, it’s simply not a book on philosophy and chess.

In fact, all of these names are indeed mentioned in Philosophy Looks at Chess (published this year by Open Court Publishing) and this made me a fairly happy man within ten seconds … all of them, except two: the Dutch writer Tim Krabbé, and the father of the phrase that ends this review. Several authors, including the editor, have failed to mention Krabbé’s monumental work Chess Curiosities (1985) which deals, among much else, with retrograde chess analysis and computer chess – two topics that are also discussed extensively in the book we’re discussing here.

Indeed, the first essay, written by Bernd Graefrath, is about retrograde chess. In brisk and crystal-clear prose, and with equally effective examples, the author introduces us to the ideas of the logician Raymond Smullyan, who has composed many retrograde problems to illustrate crucial philosophical questions, such as: can something be true yet unproveable? Well, using retrograde analysis, this has indeed be shown in brilliant and funny way by Smullyan. It’s a great and highly accessible article to start with, and serves as a nice appetizer for the rest of the book.

As could be expected, most articles in the volume deal with computer chess and artificial intelligence. I guess one of the problems the authors of these articles had to overcome is that there has been written so much about it already. The articles by Andy Miah and Tama Coutts are pretty good, but also pretty technical. They deal wiith questions such as: is chess suitable as an indication of machine intelligence, and is there a difference between how humans and machines understand chess? Important ideas like the Turing Test, the importance of the Kasparov-Deep Blue matches, weak and strong Artificial Intelligence and the Chinese room argument are explained nicely.

Another good overview article is Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen’s ‘who’s who’ of philosophy and chess (or, more generally: games). What did philosophers like Saussure, Wittgenstein and Habermas have to say about chess? For anyone who’s always wanted to know, this is the article to read. However, I should also mention that in all these three essays, I somehow missed a ’spicy’ bit of love for the game, which was definitely present in Graefrath’s article.

Kasparov playing with 3D glasses against the program X3D Fritz | Photo © Owen Williams

On the other hand, John Hartmann’s love for the game and the practical problems that players have to deal with in everyday chess life is undeniable. His article (with the great title Garry Kasparov Is A Cyborg) elaborates on the idea that ever since we started using chess engines to analyse our games and – most vividly – to prepare our novelties, we have all really changed. When Kasparov unleashed his partly Fritz-based home preparation upon Anand in the 10th match game of their 1995 World Championship match, that wasn’t really Kasparov playing – it was a, well, a kind of cyborg. What I like about Hartmann’s approach is his down-to-earth style of writing about chess. He gives several simple and recognizable examples from his own experience and still manages to cram a lot of philosophical ideas into his article, as well as a good overview of John Watson’s and Jacob Aagaard’s recent ideas on modern chess.

I now come to the two ‘heaviest’ essays in the book – sometimes a bit too heavy if you ask me, but hey, what’s a philosophy book without difficult sentences and references to people you’ve never heard of? Let’s start with the article that had me gripped despite the occasional lack of understanding: Prof. Evan Selinger’s article on ‘Chess-playing computers and embodied grandmasters‘.

The character Max von Sydow playing chess against Death in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal

Selinger compares two existential depictions of chess: one from Hubert Dreyfuss (who was introduced to us already by John Hartmann) and one from the movie director Ingmar Bergman (in his movie The Seventh Seal). Selinger’s general point is clear enough: playing against another human is different from playing against a machine. The reason is that humans also play against themselves (who hasn’t hated himself after a stupidly lost game?), and also against nature (not only because humans are mortal, and therefore time is an important factor in chess, but also because humans are biological entities which evolved to react to things like body language and so on.)

Well, you should really read the article yourself. It took me quite some time to appreciate it, but even when I didn’t understand everything, I still liked the way Selinger illustrates his ideas not only with ‘learned’ philosophical theories but also with concrete and modern examples, for instance Jennifer Shahade’s book Chess Bitch and psychologist Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller Blink.

The article I had most problems with, was Bill Martin’s ambitiously titled The Difficult Ways of God and Caïssa: Chess, Theodicy, and Determinism in Gadamar. This essay was simply one bridge too far for me. While I felt Martin does make some good and interesting points, he just tried to write about too much in this article. In fact, I sometimes got the idea he seemed to want to incorporate all of philosophy in his article. His name-dropping really got to me at some point, not to mention his overlong sentences and his many ‘asides’. Here’s an example:

(…) In this perspective, the contingent and the ‘absurd’ (in the form of the ‘irrational’ at least as it applies to calculability, and in the form of that which apparently happens ‘without meaning’ or ‘without reason’) may indeed govern ‘reality, at bottom’, reality in its ‘foundations’, or ‘reality’ in some ‘timeless’ sense, but the fact is that we humans are temporal beings, even ‘temporalizing’ beings (to use Heideggerian language) and the things we have to do in our lives in this world for the much greater part, at least, have little or nothing to do with the timeless or with metaphysical foundations. Pragmatism, at least in the forms practices by William James, George Herbert Mead, John Dewey and Richard Rorty, is geared toward the ‘human scale’.

You still there? Further on, we get musings like these:

‘Determiniation’ cannot ultimately be the right term here, because the point is that it is in the nature of the good and the beautiful that, if they are simply the result of calculations, then they are not what they are.

At this point I desperately started searching where I had missed the introduction of the concepts of ‘the good and the beautiful’, but I found nothing. I’m not saying Martin doesn’t have a point (I think his point is that if chess cannot be ’solved’ by calculations, then ‘absurd’ moves which are still good, are a real possibility, and so there can be a kind of ‘godly justice’ in chess!), but I wonder how many readers will follow his argument until the end, even if he sometimes does make nice points.

On a more serious note, I have the feeling Martin’s theories are not only vague, but simply based on a wrong assumption of how chess works. For instance, he gives the example of a player opening with an theoretically ‘absurd’ opening move (1.h3), who nevertheless wins the game. If I understand Martin correctly, he thinks that winning the game could somehow tell us something about the perceived absurdity of this opening move. This is clearly incorrect: winning (i.e. a practical game) is completely irrelevant since any chess game is full of mistakes. Only analysis can really tell us anything about the absurdity or correctness of a move. This may sound futile, but Martin stresses this practical winning of a game time and again. Perhaps I’m being unfair to Martin and readers can point out what I’m missing in this article?

Finally, I found Martin’s ‘name dropping’ of (of all people) Eric Schiller as ‘renowned opening specialist’ a bit embarrassing, to say the least. To find Schiller’s name in the company of – in the same article! – names like Socrates, Wittgenstein, Bach, Fischer and, indeed, God himself, is really more than I can handle.

It would go too far to discuss all essays in the book, but I just have to mention two more. First, by far the funniest (and weirdest) essay in the book. It’s written by Tommy J. Curry, who does research in ‘critical race theory’ and ‘africana philosophy’, and is about … chess and hip-hop. I agreed with virtually nothing in his article (I can’t imagine any sensible person who would) but that’s just a minor point really. His description of, for instance, the ‘Black players on the south of Chicago’ is simply hilarious, and, well, so are his theories about race and chess psychology. This article is a huge relief after the tough theories of Martin and Selinger!

Stuart Rachels

Okay, I’ve saved the best for last. Stuart Rachels’ essay The Reviled Art is a real gem. It’s a personal story about Rachels’ love for chess, his experience in the U.S. chess scene and his ideas about beauty and justice in chess, and its (lack of) popularity to the ‘great public’.

I don’t think it really qualifies as a ‘philosophical’ essay (it has more of a cultural-sociologicial critique) but who cares what it’s about if it’s so well written? His analysis of the U.S. chess climate (’our country’s deeply engrained anti-intellectualism’) seems pretty accurate to me, and here’s what he has to say about boxing:

Perfect play (…) cannot guarantee a beautiful game. For one thing, it is not enough that you play perfectly: your opponent must also play well. (…) Muhammad Ali’s defeat of George Foreman in the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ in Zaire was beautiful only because Foreman’s power posed enormous problems for Ali.

I cannot resist to toss in a few more quotes from Rachels:

A master cannot see the bishop on e3 as a chunck of dead wood, and more than you can look at your best friend’s face and see a meaningless matrix of colors and shapes.

Chess writers often refer to chess as a sport. One can understand why they want it to be a sport. Many sports are popular. Sports stars get rich. They sign autographs and appear on TV. Movies and books lionize them. They are allowed to perform at the Olympics. They are mobbed by admirers. Chess players would be happy if just one of these things were true of them. When chess players call chess a sport, this strikes me not only only as false, but as pathetic. It’s pathetic in the same way it’s pathetic to ask someone out on a date who said no the last three times you asked. American culture has rejected chess. For the chess player to insist that chess is a sport is a way of not taking the hint.

How I love writers like Rachels who can not only write well and clearly, but who can also make a deeper point without sounding pompous or using difficult words. In Philosophy Looks At Chess, many deep points are made, and most articles are extremely well and clearly written.

This book is highly recommended to anyone who is interested in chess – not as a sport, not even only as an art. But as a way to think about life, the universe, and everything.

Link:

• Philosophy Looks at Chess

Decepcionante comienzo del esperado match Anand-Krámnik.

Volodia, con blancas, se metió en una "tablífera" Variante del Cambio de la Defensa Eslava planteada por Anand y no sacó nada.

Tablas, que esperemos que sean de las típicas de un primer asalto… .

Kramnik,V (2772) - Anand,V (2783) [D14]
World Ch Bonn (1), 14.10.2008
[ICC y Rybka 3 32-bit]

Rybka 3 32-bit es manejada aquí por Jiménez,A. 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 Defensa Eslava. 3.Cc3 Cf6 4.cxd5 La siempre "tablífera" Variante del Cambio. 4...cxd5 5.Af4 Cc6 6.e3 Af5 7.Cf3 e6 8.Db3 Y esta es la línea que se trae Krámnik bajo el brazo. No impresiona demasiado. 8...Ab4 9.Ab5 0-0 10.Axc6 Axc3+! 11.Dxc3 Tc8! 12.Ce5 Cg4 Diagram

Recibid un cordial saludo,

Angel Jiménez Arteaga

aarteaga61@gmail.com

Last week I dreamt that I willfully swallowed a few pills that would kill me within a few hours. After the suicidal act, I had several final meetings with friends and family. Through it all, I was full of regret over my obviously poor decision. The idea of pumping my stomach occurred to me, but this was a rational thought, and in my dream state, it only flitted in and out, unable to take form.  The emotions in dreams are more pure and intense than in waking life, because human rationality, mostly absent in dreams, tempers both joy and sadness. I woke up and at first I was very happy to be alive. But I also felt guilty and depressed the rest of the day.

To cure myself, I visualized my dream, refused the pills and went running instead. This is a technique that my former therapist taught me in New York. It’s also in lines with Rodger Kamenetz’s book, The History of Last Night’s Dream, which is an ambitious and literal analysis of dreams. Kamenetz, who also wrote the Jew and the Lotus, often uses the Old Testament as a source. In the chapter, "Jacob the Hero of the Revelation Dream", Kamenetz writes about how Jacob’s initial response to going up a ladder to god and heaven is appropriate awe, but then turns into analysis of how he can use the dream to improve his waking life: "Jacob turns a brilliant promise (to be protected by god) into a mere bargain."

I worry that the many biblical quotations limits the audience of Kamenetz’s book, and I wish there were more dramatic examples from the lives of others, especially women and children.  But the book did affect me in that my inkling about dreams has now turned into a conviction. Dreams may be related to life, but I prefer to think of them as an opportunity for a second life. Last night I dreamnt about a man sliding through the most dangerous streets of Philadelphia on a board, his face toward the concrete.  I don’t care why I dreamt it, I want to tap into the  pure fear and sensual pleasure in it.   Sure, it would be great if my dreams could reveal to me the secret of happiness, but maybe for that to happen, I need to focus on dreaming happy dreams.

 Dreams are a tricky subject, very similar to drugs in that the experience of having them tends to be interesting only to you, your mother and your lover. This week, I was reminded of the two risky "dr’s" when I went to a "story slam" which totally packed a fancy Philly Old City bar at 8:30 on a Tuesday night. Despite my lack of a seat, I was thrilled. In spite of the limitless joys of facebook, Wii and reality TV, we want to go out! Summer is here!

 Although the overall quality of the participants was pretty high, several of the contestants wrapped their stories around drugs. I felt like I could be talking to any dude in the world about how fucked up he got the night before. I mean, what do people want after stories like that? An Advil and some congratulations on still being alive?

Drug and alchohol experiences and dreams are difficult topics because they resist a beginning-middle-end. Instead they are "experience" stories in which you go into a bubble, have a great time, and leave the bubble, essentially unchanged unless you actually did something dramatic due to the dream or the drug: It’s the drugs are boring paradox. 

The concept of dreams being boring was best expressed to me in the Built to spill album, Almost Perfect. Unfortunately, the transcription of the lyric will not do justice to the line, so I suggest you buy the album.

Another thing you should do if you live in New York is attend the Whitney Biennial by the end of the week. (Closes on June 2) I loved a piece on blind people touching elephants. It reminded me of day-long photo shoots with my friend Gabi in the abandoned Brooklyn pool where the video was shot. It also reminded me of being 19, when I was mostly driven by the pursuit for new sensations. Sensuality now has to share space with ambition: A tough pill to swallow, but not worth dying over.