whats-on, music-theatre-arts, the queens gambit, chess, bobby fischer, boris spassky, hrant melkumyan
If you haven't yet watched The Queen's Gambit, crawl out from that rock you've been hiding under, turn on Netflix and strap in for about seven hours. Based on a Walter Tevis novel of the same name, the series centres on orphaned prodigy Beth Harmon, and her meteoric rise to the top of the chess world. A record 62 million households tuned in to watch the series in its first 28 days. It was number one in 63 countries, Tevis's book has hit the New York Times bestseller list 37 years after its release and "How to play chess" is all of a sudden trending as a Google search string. Almost half a century on from its zenith, chess has been thrust back into the mainstream spotlight. And unlike so many pop culture depictions of chess that have gone before it, The Queen's Gambit has been universally praised by Grandmasters and the non-playing public alike. "I thought they did it exceptionally well," Australia's first Grandmaster Ian Rogers says. "They really got the atmosphere of tournament chess back then when it was lavish playing halls in Europe, the audience wanting autographs. "It captured the feel of it very well, it had a good story. I thought it was a great piece of TV." Harmon is an exceedingly brilliant, but deeply flawed protagonist. She takes all before her in the United States throughout the 1960s before venturing into Soviet territory and pursuing the trickiest of endgames - defeating Soviet champion Vasily Borgov. Sound familiar? Back in the real world in the 1960s, it was an obsessive American chess prodigy, mercilessly beating anyone brave enough to sit opposite him at the board. A man who at the height of the Cold War dared to take on the Soviet Union at the game they had made their own, and who ended their 35-year iron grip on the World Chess Championship. The man was Bobby Fischer. His 1972 World Championship match with Boris Spassky in Iceland enthralled a global audience. It was dramatic. It was political. It was a brutal Cold War battlefield, broadcast into homes all over the world. It was chess at its peak. Were it not for the Fischer-Spassky match, Rogers' career may never have materialised, nor the trail he blazed for chess in Australia. "I had a group of three friends, we all played a bit and we went along to the local club and we stayed with it for maybe six months and then it wasn't so interesting when you're eight or nine," Rogers says. "A few years later chess was everywhere because of Fischer, I think there was a copy of Bobby Fischer teaches chess in the newsagent that I might have picked up. "I remember first of all seeing this lanky guy on Behind The News which was shown at school each day. It was on TV every night, it was about a half-hour program with some strange characters moving the pieces around and I gradually got to understand it. "I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to Ivanhoe Grammar School where I was bored silly and so I really started studying chess seriously. I left the school after one year but the chess habit didn't leave me. "It was just a lot of fun and after I started playing I really enjoyed it and kept going." SIX YEARS before Fischer defeated Spassky and the Soviets, Bill Egan moved to Canberra from Ireland. He remembers it well - it was the same week Australia switched to decimal currency. At the time, there were a handful of chess clubs in Canberra while the Doeberl Cup, Australia's largest chess tournament held in the capital every Easter, was only in its infancy. Rogers would go on to win the tournament a record 12 times. Egan became an organiser of the prestigious event for many years, and published a book in 2012, The Doeberl Cup: Fifty Years of Australian Chess History. Now 83 years old, Egan still plays chess competitively some 70 years after he first learned the game. His passion for chess has taken him all over the world. In 1971 he was on hand in Vancouver and witnessed Fischer close up in a Candidates quarter final match up against Mark Taimanov. Fischer beat Taimanov 6-0, with the latter saying in a subsequent interview that "Until the match with Fischer in 1971, everything went smoothly in my chess career. This dramatic match changed my life into hell." Egan also never forgot his glimpse of Fischer. "This guy doesn't just beat grandmasters, he wipes them out," Egan says. "With his mercurial personality, he taunted and teased people. Suddenly it [chess] was huge. "Here was a situation where the Americans could beat the Russians at their own game. The Americans hugely favoured Fischer, he was a gigantic hero. "At that time, the fact that they had somebody who was a rugged individualist, could beat these Communistic collaborators, there was a strong political angle to it as much as there was for chess. "The whole world was fascinated by it." CHESS IS one of the world's oldest two-player games. An embryonic version is believed to have emerged in India about 1500 years ago, from where it spread to the Persian Empire and ultimately onto Europe. It was here in the 15th century the game settled in its modern form. Nowadays it is played in almost every country in the world by children and adults alike, and in more recent times has boomed across China and India. Armenian Grandmaster Hrant Melkumyan learned the game as a five-year-old from his grandfather, and has since become one of the world's strongest players. "My grandfather used to live with us when I was a kid and he loved chess, he would just go outside and play with his friends all the time," Melkumyan says. "He really wanted to teach me. I loved the game and from six I already started getting coaching. "I was so excited just an hour or two hours before the coaching started I would just knock on every window and say 'Hurry up Mum, we're late'." Much like Egan, Melkumyan has become somewhat of an adopted Canberran. The World number 79 visits Australia for about three months each year, and has done so since meeting his partner Emma Guo at the 2012 Chess Olympiad in Istanbul. Guo herself was a child chess prodigy, and remains one of the finest players Canberra has produced. Melkumyan won last year's Doeberl Cup, and flew back into the country in January to defend it. Then the coronavirus pandemic wreaked chaos on the world, and Melkumyan couldn't fly home to Armenia. Last weekend, Melkumyan won the annual Vikings Weekender, Canberra's first over-the-board tournament since the COVID-19 pandemic. "Chess is a very fair game, it all depends on you, if you do your best, and play well, you win," Melkumyan says. "It's a very fair way to show your abilities and succeed. It's a very logical game as well, sometimes some weird things happen but in general after all chess is very logical. "If you can understand how to calculate, how to play logically, that usually will help you to succeed." Egan has a slightly different take on the game. "There's a close analogy in some levels between chess and rugby league," Egan says. "If you look at a game like rugby league and you look at a game like chess, they're both about time, force and space. Those are the three elements, and they apply regardless of which one you're looking at. "You have to look at those three elements as the crucial things in any game whether it's a rugby league game or a chess game, how do people use time, how do they use force, how do they use space. "Although a rugby field is very different from a chess board, the same basic principles apply. If you can gain space and use it effectively, then you give yourself a big advantage in the game and that's true whether it's rugby or chess." On the surface, much like rugby league, chess is a simple game. The old adage suggests you can learn how to play in five minutes, but it will take a lifetime to master. That's simply not true - no human will never be able to master chess. Consider American mathematician Claude Shannon's 1950 paper "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess". He postulated that there were more possible ways a game of chess could play out than there are atoms in the known universe. At the start of a game of chess, white has 20 options for an opening move. Each pawn can be advanced either one or two squares, while the two white knights each have two squares available. Should white push his king pawn two spaces to e4, the most common opening move, black already has several viable options available to him. He can push his king pawn up to e5, or pursue the fighting Sicilian, the super solid French Defence, or even the counter-attacking Scandinavian Defence among other options. After each player has made just three moves, there are already a staggering 119 million possible positions on the board. It means almost every game is unique, even at the super Grandmaster level where players are quite often still in their opening preparation after 20-plus moves. Yet for all its complexity, chess can still be thoroughly enjoyed by two young kids who have just learned the bishops move on the diagonal, and that knights move in an L shape. "For kids it's a relatively complex game, but not too complex, and I've always thought one reason that chess works as a game just for everybody is that it's big enough to be difficult, but not so large as to be impossible," highly respected Canberra chess coach and administrator Shaun Press says. "It's one of those games you know how you can get better at it, even if you can't get better at it you know what you can do to get better at it. That's an important attraction. "For someone like myself, when I was younger I felt that I was reasonably good at it so I just kept going. Whether it was beating a friend, or just finding an interesting move or in my case just reading about the history of the game and looking at famous players - all those things caught my interest. "One thing it does teach kids is how to concentrate, because you've just got to sit there for a long period of time working on the problem in front of you. And giving you that problem solving skill of just collecting all that information in front of you and then going 'What's the best solution to the problem I've got?'." WEDGED in the annals of chess history between the Fischer-Spassky World Championship match and the success of The Queen's Gambit is another major flashpoint for the game. Russian star Garry Kasparov was in the midst of his long reign as world champion. For years chess computers had been trying to beat humans and in 1997 it finally happened. The IBM computer Deep Blue prevailed over Kasparov in a six-game match, and since then, machines have become far too strong for humans. Computers are now used by top Grandmasters across the world to improve their preparation. "In a sense, Kasparov losing to Deep Blue kind of defused the computing issue in a sense, we could all move on now, we all know computers are good enough to beat anybody," Egan says. "When the motor car came along, people didn't lose interest on which horse could run the fastest. Horse racing still stayed. The fact that a car could go much faster than a horse didn't really matter. People were still interested in following horse racing or human foot racing. "That era of having to play the computer stopped and normal life resumed. Now they're very much a tool for analysis." As computer analysis improves, so does human chess-playing strength. Enter Magnus Carlsen - world champion since 2013, the strongest ever player and every bit as brilliant as Fischer, or Harmon. Not only has Carlsen advanced the game on the board, he has helped it take massive strides into the mainstream. Away from the board the Norwegian is a keen football and tennis fan. He is also a model. The most influential chess player since Kasparov launched the $1.5m Magnus Carlsen Champions Chess Tour in early November, building on the online boom the game has seen in 2020. The first of 10 tournaments, the Skilling Open, is in progress right now and Carlsen is, unsurprisingly, already through to the semi-finals. "He's the GOAT," Melkumyan says. "In tennis there's Federer, Djokovic and Nadal, it's hard to say, probably most people say Federer. In chess to me it's pretty clear, it's Carlsen. "When you look at chess now it's very competitive, there's lots of very strong chess professionals, there are some people who just sit and do chess 12 hours a day with computers. And at these times, Carlsen is still dominating the game." Much like Harmon and Fischer once did.
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ANALYSIS
November 29 2020 - 11:00AM
If you haven't yet watched The Queen's Gambit, crawl out from that rock you've been hiding under, turn on Netflix and strap in for about seven hours.
Based on a Walter Tevis novel of the same name, the series centres on orphaned prodigy Beth Harmon, and her meteoric rise to the top of the chess world.
A record 62 million households tuned in to watch the series in its first 28 days. It was number one in 63 countries, Tevis's book has hit the New York Times bestseller list 37 years after its release and "How to play chess" is all of a sudden trending as a Google search string.
Almost half a century on from its zenith, chess has been thrust back into the mainstream spotlight.
And unlike so many pop culture depictions of chess that have gone before it, The Queen's Gambit has been universally praised by Grandmasters and the non-playing public alike.
"I thought they did it exceptionally well," Australia's first Grandmaster Ian Rogers says.
"They really got the atmosphere of tournament chess back then when it was lavish playing halls in Europe, the audience wanting autographs.
"It captured the feel of it very well, it had a good story. I thought it was a great piece of TV."
Harmon is an exceedingly brilliant, but deeply flawed protagonist. She takes all before her in the United States throughout the 1960s before venturing into Soviet territory and pursuing the trickiest of endgames - defeating Soviet champion Vasily Borgov.
Back in the real world in the 1960s, it was an obsessive American chess prodigy, mercilessly beating anyone brave enough to sit opposite him at the board.
A man who at the height of the Cold War dared to take on the Soviet Union at the game they had made their own, and who ended their 35-year iron grip on the World Chess Championship.
The man was Bobby Fischer.
His 1972 World Championship match with Boris Spassky in Iceland enthralled a global audience. It was dramatic. It was political. It was a brutal Cold War battlefield, broadcast into homes all over the world.
It was chess at its peak.
Were it not for the Fischer-Spassky match, Rogers' career may never have materialised, nor the trail he blazed for chess in Australia.
"I had a group of three friends, we all played a bit and we went along to the local club and we stayed with it for maybe six months and then it wasn't so interesting when you're eight or nine," Rogers says.
"A few years later chess was everywhere because of Fischer, I think there was a copy of Bobby Fischer teaches chess in the newsagent that I might have picked up.
Armenian Grandmaster Hrant Melkumyan is one of the world's strongest chess players. Picture: Sitthixay Ditthavong
"I remember first of all seeing this lanky guy on Behind The News which was shown at school each day. It was on TV every night, it was about a half-hour program with some strange characters moving the pieces around and I gradually got to understand it.
"I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to Ivanhoe Grammar School where I was bored silly and so I really started studying chess seriously. I left the school after one year but the chess habit didn't leave me.
"It was just a lot of fun and after I started playing I really enjoyed it and kept going."
SIX YEARS before Fischer defeated Spassky and the Soviets, Bill Egan moved to Canberra from Ireland. He remembers it well - it was the same week Australia switched to decimal currency.
At the time, there were a handful of chess clubs in Canberra while the Doeberl Cup, Australia's largest chess tournament held in the capital every Easter, was only in its infancy. Rogers would go on to win the tournament a record 12 times.
Egan became an organiser of the prestigious event for many years, and published a book in 2012, The Doeberl Cup: Fifty Years of Australian Chess History.
Now 83 years old, Egan still plays chess competitively some 70 years after he first learned the game.
His passion for chess has taken him all over the world. In 1971 he was on hand in Vancouver and witnessed Fischer close up in a Candidates quarter final match up against Mark Taimanov.
the temperamental Bobby Fischer (bottom left), exits a car into a waiting crowd which includes several uniformed Icelandic policemen as he arrives for his third match with Soviet world champion Boris Spassky at the Reykjavik Exhibition Hall in 1972. Picture: Getty Images
Fischer beat Taimanov 6-0, with the latter saying in a subsequent interview that "Until the match with Fischer in 1971, everything went smoothly in my chess career. This dramatic match changed my life into hell."
Egan also never forgot his glimpse of Fischer.
"This guy doesn't just beat grandmasters, he wipes them out," Egan says.
"With his mercurial personality, he taunted and teased people. Suddenly it [chess] was huge.
"Here was a situation where the Americans could beat the Russians at their own game. The Americans hugely favoured Fischer, he was a gigantic hero.
"At that time, the fact that they had somebody who was a rugged individualist, could beat these Communistic collaborators, there was a strong political angle to it as much as there was for chess.
"The whole world was fascinated by it."
CHESS IS one of the world's oldest two-player games. An embryonic version is believed to have emerged in India about 1500 years ago, from where it spread to the Persian Empire and ultimately onto Europe.
It was here in the 15th century the game settled in its modern form.
Nowadays it is played in almost every country in the world by children and adults alike, and in more recent times has boomed across China and India.
Armenian Grandmaster Hrant Melkumyan learned the game as a five-year-old from his grandfather, and has since become one of the world's strongest players.
"My grandfather used to live with us when I was a kid and he loved chess, he would just go outside and play with his friends all the time," Melkumyan says.
"He really wanted to teach me. I loved the game and from six I already started getting coaching.
"I was so excited just an hour or two hours before the coaching started I would just knock on every window and say 'Hurry up Mum, we're late'."
Much like Egan, Melkumyan has become somewhat of an adopted Canberran. The World number 79 visits Australia for about three months each year, and has done so since meeting his partner Emma Guo at the 2012 Chess Olympiad in Istanbul.
Guo herself was a child chess prodigy, and remains one of the finest players Canberra has produced.
Melkumyan won last year's Doeberl Cup, and flew back into the country in January to defend it. Then the coronavirus pandemic wreaked chaos on the world, and Melkumyan couldn't fly home to Armenia.
Last weekend, Melkumyan won the annual Vikings Weekender, Canberra's first over-the-board tournament since the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Chess is a very fair game, it all depends on you, if you do your best, and play well, you win," Melkumyan says.
"It's a very fair way to show your abilities and succeed. It's a very logical game as well, sometimes some weird things happen but in general after all chess is very logical.
"If you can understand how to calculate, how to play logically, that usually will help you to succeed."
Egan has a slightly different take on the game.
"There's a close analogy in some levels between chess and rugby league," Egan says.
"If you look at a game like rugby league and you look at a game like chess, they're both about time, force and space. Those are the three elements, and they apply regardless of which one you're looking at.
"You have to look at those three elements as the crucial things in any game whether it's a rugby league game or a chess game, how do people use time, how do they use force, how do they use space.
"Although a rugby field is very different from a chess board, the same basic principles apply. If you can gain space and use it effectively, then you give yourself a big advantage in the game and that's true whether it's rugby or chess."
On the surface, much like rugby league, chess is a simple game. The old adage suggests you can learn how to play in five minutes, but it will take a lifetime to master.
That's simply not true - no human will never be able to master chess.
15th June 1972: Boris Spassky of the USSR reflects on his chances in the forthcoming world chess championship against Bobby Fischer of the USA. Challenger Fischer was favourite and, in the event, he won the final, played on 2 July in Reykjavik, Iceland. Picture: Getty Images
Consider American mathematician Claude Shannon's 1950 paper "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess".
He postulated that there were more possible ways a game of chess could play out than there are atoms in the known universe.
At the start of a game of chess, white has 20 options for an opening move.
Each pawn can be advanced either one or two squares, while the two white knights each have two squares available.
Should white push his king pawn two spaces to e4, the most common opening move, black already has several viable options available to him. He can push his king pawn up to e5, or pursue the fighting Sicilian, the super solid French Defence, or even the counter-attacking Scandinavian Defence among other options.
After each player has made just three moves, there are already a staggering 119 million possible positions on the board.
It means almost every game is unique, even at the super Grandmaster level where players are quite often still in their opening preparation after 20-plus moves.
Yet for all its complexity, chess can still be thoroughly enjoyed by two young kids who have just learned the bishops move on the diagonal, and that knights move in an L shape.
"For kids it's a relatively complex game, but not too complex, and I've always thought one reason that chess works as a game just for everybody is that it's big enough to be difficult, but not so large as to be impossible," highly respected Canberra chess coach and administrator Shaun Press says.
"It's one of those games you know how you can get better at it, even if you can't get better at it you know what you can do to get better at it. That's an important attraction.
"For someone like myself, when I was younger I felt that I was reasonably good at it so I just kept going. Whether it was beating a friend, or just finding an interesting move or in my case just reading about the history of the game and looking at famous players - all those things caught my interest.
"One thing it does teach kids is how to concentrate, because you've just got to sit there for a long period of time working on the problem in front of you. And giving you that problem solving skill of just collecting all that information in front of you and then going 'What's the best solution to the problem I've got?'."
WEDGED in the annals of chess history between the Fischer-Spassky World Championship match and the success of The Queen's Gambit is another major flashpoint for the game.
Russian star Garry Kasparov was in the midst of his long reign as world champion. For years chess computers had been trying to beat humans and in 1997 it finally happened.
The IBM computer Deep Blue prevailed over Kasparov in a six-game match, and since then, machines have become far too strong for humans.
Computers are now used by top Grandmasters across the world to improve their preparation.
"In a sense, Kasparov losing to Deep Blue kind of defused the computing issue in a sense, we could all move on now, we all know computers are good enough to beat anybody," Egan says.
"When the motor car came along, people didn't lose interest on which horse could run the fastest. Horse racing still stayed. The fact that a car could go much faster than a horse didn't really matter. People were still interested in following horse racing or human foot racing.
"That era of having to play the computer stopped and normal life resumed. Now they're very much a tool for analysis."
As computer analysis improves, so does human chess-playing strength.
Enter Magnus Carlsen - world champion since 2013, the strongest ever player and every bit as brilliant as Fischer, or Harmon.
Not only has Carlsen advanced the game on the board, he has helped it take massive strides into the mainstream. Away from the board the Norwegian is a keen football and tennis fan. He is also a model.
The most influential chess player since Kasparov launched the $1.5m Magnus Carlsen Champions Chess Tour in early November, building on the online boom the game has seen in 2020.
The first of 10 tournaments, the Skilling Open, is in progress right now and Carlsen is, unsurprisingly, already through to the semi-finals.
"He's the GOAT," Melkumyan says.
"In tennis there's Federer, Djokovic and Nadal, it's hard to say, probably most people say Federer. In chess to me it's pretty clear, it's Carlsen.
"When you look at chess now it's very competitive, there's lots of very strong chess professionals, there are some people who just sit and do chess 12 hours a day with computers.
And at these times, Carlsen is still dominating the game."
Much like Harmon and Fischer once did.
Read more:
War on a board: the endurance of chess - The Canberra Times