We don’t really know how the game was invented, though there are suspicions. As soon as we discover the culprits, we’ll let you know. – Bruce Pandolfini, Fischer’s one time chess trainer.
Early last Sunday morning, Loris Nathoo called to say that he had solved the one thousand year ‘Dilaram Checkmate,’ and insinuating teasingly that perhaps I may wish to come up with a position that truly excites the imagination, I humbly accepted the challenge, and came up with a famous puzzle. Please permit me to tell you the story surrounding that puzzle, and the chain of events which it engendered.
The story begins when Dr John Nunn, British chess grandmaster gave German chess player Frederic Friedel a chess problem to solve. Friedel studied philosophy and linguistics at Oxford, and in the nineteen eighties did a feature on computer chess and artificial intelligence. Dr Nunn sealed the solution to the puzzle in an envelope
and requested that Friedel return the envelope unopened. Together with Ken Thomson, the famous computer scientist, Friedel said he spent many hours trying to solve the puzzle while Thomson was trying to decipher the solution with the aid of a bright light. You would recall that Dr Nunn requested that the envelope be returned unopened ‒ with the solution to the puzzle of course. Both men were unsuccessful in what they were trying to do. Eventually, they tore the envelope open in humiliating defeat!
There is another intriguing story about the ‘puzzle’ when it was unleashed on the public for them to solve. In 1986, during the difficult period when Garry Kasparov had won the world chess championship title and was forced to face an immediate rematch, he and Anatoly Karpov were travelling to meet with FIDE President Florencio Campomanes in Switzerland, travelling from Zurich to Luzerne by car, a long journey. Friedel was accompanying them and for entertainment he gave the two top players Dr Nunn’s puzzle. It kept them busy during the ride and for the next few days at the hotel. They couldn’t solve it.
Friedel tells the story in his own words :
“Before we parted I did the Nunn thing on Garry: I sealed the answer in a hotel envelope and told him to return it unopened with the solution. I didn’t hear from him for many months. Then one day I came home and found a number of messages with a phone number where I should call Kasparov urgently. I did so and found him in a distraught state. ‘You are a dead man, Fred,’ he said, ‘you have put me in a very embarrassing situation.’ Turns out he was running a session of his chess school, together with Mikhail Botvinnik, and he had given the problem to his students. When they couldn’t solve it and asked him for the answer he had told them how important it was to persevere. They should not give up but try for another day. Meanwhile the hunt was on for the envelope, which unfortunately could not be located. When I told him the solution on the phone I could hear Botvinnik gasp in the background. And Garry, who like everyone else in the chess school, was convinced I had stated the problem incorrectly, couldn’t believe that he and his students had missed it.’’
Friedel continued: “Another little story? I was telling the above to Vishy Anand and Vlady Kramnik some time ago in a little restaurant in Wijk aan Zee. They listened bemused, thinking that I was probably adding a lot of journalistic dressing to the whole thing. But then suddenly a grandmaster sitting at the adjacent table turned to us and said, “Are you talking about the problem which Kasparov gave his students back in 1986? Well I was one of the students!” The grandmaster was Boris Alterman, now grown up and one of the seconds that has helped Garry in some of his matches.’’
When the puzzle was posted on the internet, a tiny number of correct solutions were received. One interesting phenomenon was that the majority of these came from East German grandmasters. Apparently the puzzle was known in chess schools there. A couple of Russian grandmasters provided correct answers also, like the then US champion Anjelina Belakovskala who wrote, “Are you joking or what? I have the puzzle in a book I wrote in 1990 and give it to my students from time to time. Don’t forget I am from the Soviet Chess School.’’
The puzzle’s winner was David Bellows, webmaster and music composer from Georgia in the US.
Meanwhile, here are Bobby Fischer’s continuing comments on his Ten Greatest Masters in History, the sixth in the series.
Dr Alexander Alekhine
“Alekhine is a player I’ve never really understood; yet, strangely, if you’ve seen one Alekhine game you’ve seen them all. He always wanted a superior centre; he manoeuvred his pieces toward the kingside and around the twenty-fifth move began to mate his opponent. He disliked exchanges, preferring to play with many pieces on the board. His play was fantastically complicated, more so than any player before or since.
“Alekhine once beat Lasker in about 23 moves; his pieces converged on the kingside and the game ended with a sudden death blow.
“Alekhine has never been a hero of mine, and I’ve never cared for his style of play. There’s nothing light and breezy about it; it worked for him, but it could scarcely work for anybody else. He played gigantic conceptions, full of outrageous and unprecedented ideas. It’s hard to find mistakes in his game, but in a sense his whole method of play was a mistake.
“Alekhine developed as a player much more slowly than most. In his twenties he was an atrocious chess player and didn’t mature until he was well into his thirties. But he had great imagination; he could see more deeply into a situation than any other player in chess history. He disliked clear-cut positions. If an opponent wanted to clarify his situation with Alekhine, he had to pay the Russian’s price. Then, it was Alekhine’s stamina that carried him to victory. It was in the most complicated positions that Alekhine found his grandest concepts.
“Many consider Alekhine a great opening theoretician but I don’t think he was. He played book lines but didn’t know them very well. He always felt that his natural powers would get him out of any dilemma.
“At the chess board, Alekhine radiated a furious tension that often intimidated his opponents.”
