When FIDE President Kirsan Nikolayevich Ilyumzhinov and former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer met at Budapest in 1996, the conversation quickly got stuck on the future of Fischerandom chess. The Kalmyk billionaire, for fear of resistance from the notoriously conservative chess community, intended to introduce it gradually, a little at a time, but the impatient Fischer blurted out: “Teach people to play new chess, right away. Why do you offer them a black and white television set, when there is a set in colour?”(*).
But the community preferred the comfort zone of the black-and-white TV set. Of course, inevitably. If Anatoly Yevgenyevich Karpov gave Fischer’s chess a cold welcome: “The harmony of the game suffers a little”, other colleagues of his, such as Swedish Grandmaster Ulf Andersson, were much less diplomatic: “I refuse to discuss it even if only as a joke. It’s a very stupid thing”. Garry Kimovich Kasparov was no less categorical; in a 2004 interview to the Russian website ChessPro argued: “In truth, 95% of the 960 starting lineups are poison to the eyes”.
Even the guru of chess analysis, Mark Izrailevich Dvoretsky, in his very interesting article “Polemic Thinking (Part Two)” reproaches Fischer’s chess for not fulfilling in all 960 starting positions the quintessential concept of “chess geometry” intrinsic to the magical position number 518. The example he gives is not banal:
But the community preferred the comfort zone of the black-and-white TV set. Of course, inevitably. If Anatoly Yevgenyevich Karpov gave Fischer’s chess a cold welcome: “The harmony of the game suffers a little”, other colleagues of his, such as Swedish Grandmaster Ulf Andersson, were much less diplomatic: “I refuse to discuss it even if only as a joke. It’s a very stupid thing”. Garry Kimovich Kasparov was no less categorical; in a 2004 interview to the Russian website ChessPro argued: “In truth, 95% of the 960 starting lineups are poison to the eyes”.
Even the guru of chess analysis, Mark Izrailevich Dvoretsky, in his very interesting article “Polemic Thinking (Part Two)” reproaches Fischer’s chess for not fulfilling in all 960 starting positions the quintessential concept of “chess geometry” intrinsic to the magical position number 518. The example he gives is not banal:
Levon Grigori Aronian – Étienne Bacrot
Mainz, 2005
rkrbnqbn/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RKRBNQBN w CAca - 0 1
Posizione #941
Mainz, 2005
rkrbnqbn/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RKRBNQBN w CAca - 0 1
Posizione #941
Notes by Dvoretsky. 1. e4 e5 2. Nd3 Ng6?! 3. f4 Bf6? (3. ... Nf6) 4. Nc5 Rd8 5. Qb5 Nd6 6. Nxd7+ Rxd7 7. Qxd7 and White parlayed his Exchange plus into a win.
Dvoretsky concludes: “This is all very curious and funny — but that’s all. The level of play demonstrated here by grandmasters isn’t much different from (to take an example from traditional chess) the efforts, successful or unsuccessful, to exploit the weakness at f7 from the starting position, and deliver the ‘scholar’s mate’. Of course we need to take into account the fact that in Mainz, the games were played in rapid chess; however, I suspect that, even under a classical time-control, the quality of play would not have risen very much”.
Exactly for the same reasons, Fischer invented his Fischerandom, just “to put the spontaneity back” (ipse dixit). Like Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, Fischer never looks back: imperfection is a new take on old science.
(*) Svetozar Gligoric, Shall We Play Fischerandom Chess?, B.T. Batsford Ltd, Londra, 2002, p. 71.
Exactly for the same reasons, Fischer invented his Fischerandom, just “to put the spontaneity back” (ipse dixit). Like Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, Fischer never looks back: imperfection is a new take on old science.
(*) Svetozar Gligoric, Shall We Play Fischerandom Chess?, B.T. Batsford Ltd, Londra, 2002, p. 71.
