Chess
Short circuit
Raymond Keene
A further Fide conference has been tak- ing place in London over the past week — continuing the series from Linares and Portorozh designed to restructure and speed up the entire world championship qualification cycle. We did not get off to a good start. Fide President Campomanes was delayed by one day on his flight from Tunis, while the first action of our other member, Alfred Kinzel, 72-year-old Presi- dent of the German Chess Federation, was to be victim of a hit-and-run accident in Kensington High Street and he spent the next day in the outpatient department of St Stephen's Hospital, instead of at the con- ference table.
Campomanes is still facing serious Rus- sian protest about the siting of the Can- didates' semi-finals in Pasadena and the United Arab Emirates. Pasadena in par- ticular, as the venue for the Kasparov- Korchnoi match, has roused the most strenuous opposition from the USSR. The latest suggestion, that the matches should be put back by a week, presumably to allow things to cool down and to give time for a compromise to be arrived at, seems unlikely to achieve anything and at the moment it appears to me that there is a serious danger of a complete deadlock.
Meanwhile, in Amsterdam, Nigel Short is doing well in the annual OHRA tourna- ment, a master-Swiss which has replaced the old IBM all-play-all. At Plovdiv Nigel showed signs of shrugging off his appalling form from Dortmund and at Amsterdam he has already inflicted defeat on Vlastimil Hort, his co-winner from last year's in- augural event.
Here is the critical position, after White's 39th move.
White: Short — Black: Hort
Hort has some pressure against White's K, but his QB is contributing little to the war effort. He decided to solve this problem by transferring his QB into the attack, at the price of abandoning the protection of his own Q-side pawns.
39 ... Bc8 40 Qxc6 Bxh3 41 Qa8 Perhaps Hort had forgotten that White can also create threats against his K. Now Black is forced to give up the exchange to eliminate White's threatening N. 41 ... RxeS 42 RxeS Rxf6 43 Re8 fixf1 44 Rg8 + No need to pause to recapture the piece. The following sequence of checks picks up Black's Q.
44 Kh6 45 Qf8 + Kh5 46 R8xg5 + Qxg5 47 RxgS + Kxg5 48 Kxf1 h5 49 Qg8 + K15 50 Qe8h4 Black's compensation would be adequate, were it not for the inevitable loss of his last Q-side pawn. 51 QxbS h3 52 Qd7 + Ke4 53 Qe7 + Re6 54 Qxf7
Rg6 55 Qe7 + Kf5 56 b5 Kg4 I f 56 h2 57 Qh7 wins, pinning Black's R. 57 a4 Rg5 58 Kg' Rg6 59 Kh2 KM 60 Qc5 Rg2 + 61 Khl Kg4 62 Qe3 d4 63 Qxd4 Black resigns. After 63 h2 64 Qxf4 + Kxf4 65 Kxg2 wins.
The latest scores from Amsterdam, after four rounds, are: Timman and Sax 3 1/2; van der Wiel, Chandler, Lobron, Seirawan and Short 3; Henley, Boersma and Lengyel 21/2.
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