More Potpourri

The chess world is a busy place.

Big events, small events, and the weird and arcane are all about in the chess world. Let’s dig in and have a look.

1. The Decapitated King. I had forgotten about this utterly bizarre event from the penultimate round of the U.S. Championship. Probably intending to grab a captured piece from the side of the board to twiddle while his opponent, Hans Niemann, deliberated over his move, Sam Sevian instead grabbed Niemann’s king, popped the cross off, and then hung on to the king while Niemann wondered what the heck he was doing. Then Sevian randomly shoved the king back to Niemann (rather than putting it back where it was), and he then seemed to be inviting Niemann to “take it outside”, as they say, though the “official” line was that he was proposing that they go in search of glue to fix the king’s cross. Absolutely bizarre, and as far as I know and have heard, it was completely unprovoked. Here’s Niemann talking about the incident, Maurice Ashley’s take, and a bit of snark from Fabiano Caruana the next day.

2. Rules, schmules. Many of you will be familiar with Adriaan de Groot’s famous experiments with chess players. In particular, he had grandmasters, masters, and club players look at positions for a few seconds, and then try from memory to recreate the positions they had seen. When they were shown realistic positions, the results were unsurprising: grandmasters got practically everything right, masters did almost as well, and club players did consistently worse. But then came the twist: the players were shown nonsensical positions, and in that case the GMs barely outperformed the other players. What it showed was that top players weren’t necessarily blessed with an eidetic memory, but had developed a great memory for chess (as played in real games). Chess players learn and chunk patterns, and if there are no patterns they will be as much (or nearly as much) at sea as the rest of us.

   So why do I bring this up? Because of the funny incident linked at the start of this second entry. In the ongoing Fischer Random World Championship, Wesley So had prepared to meet an otherwise devastating check by castling. The mechanics of castling will vary in Chess960 relative to standard chess, in that the king and the relevant rook could be almost anywhere (though the post-castling position will be the same as in standard chess), and this difference apparently confused So. The problem, though, is that it’s completely irrelevant: regardless of where the rook and king are at the start of the intended castling operation, one cannot castle out of check - it doesn’t matter if it’s standard chess or Chess960. Get us humans out of our element, and we’re capable of the oddest, most elementary errors.

3. On the other hand…. Let’s see what humans can do at their best, even when forced to ad lib. From the same event, Magnus Carlsen found a brilliant idea against Hikaru Nakamura as early as the very first move. Nice.

4. Speaking of the tournament…more here.

5. An even bigger event? It’s not a world championship, but it is the Candidates for the Women’s World Championship, a well-established title that has been around for a long time, unlike the Chess960/Fischer Random championship. The organization of this event is rather weird. The eight players are split into two groups or “pools” of four players, the first facing off now while the second will run from late November. Pool A features the Muzychuk sisters Anna and Mariya, who are in four-game matches against Humpy Koneru and Lei Tingjie, respectively. The sisters both lost in the first game, with Black, while both matches saw draws in round 2. The winners of these matches will then immediately face off, so that the one survivor will be determined before the second pool gets started. Once the second group of four (consisting of Aleksandra Goryachkina, Alexandra Kosteniuk, Tan Zhongyi, and Kateryna Lagno) has done its job of narrowing the four down to one, the winners of each pool will face off in a six-game match in early 2023, with the winner going on to face Ju Wenjun in the summer of 2023.

6. A reader asked me to mention chess for the blind, if only once. In fact, I already did so, at least once, and just last year (on the previous site), but I’ll do so once more. He noted a small and not particularly strong event, but there are major events for the blind in which even titled players participate. Case in point, from several months ago.