Chess
By PH11.1DOR
No. 184. M. MARBLE (First Prize, La Strategic., 1908-1909)
BLACK (10 men)
WHITE (7 men) WHITE to play and mate in two moves; solution next week. Solution to No. 183 (Loyd): Q—QR 5, no threat. 1 .. B—Q 2; 2 Q—Q 5. I . B—K 3; 2 Q—K 5. 1 .QB else; 2 Kt—B 5. 1 ... R—Q 2; 2 Kt—B 5. 1 ... R—Q 3; 2 Qx B . . and so on. (I . . . B—QB 4; 2 Q—R 1.) This was the first ex- ample of the so-called 'Organ Pipes' theme—a classic problem.
Despite its great natural interest as the semi-final tournament for the selection of the world champion- ship challenger the Interzonal tournament is in some major respects unsatisfactory, especially this year. First of all, Bobby Fischer refused to play and the only non-Russian with a real chance of becoming world champion--perhaps one should not completely rule out the other US s ar, the fifty-two-year-old veteran Sammy Reshevsky, but he must be heavy odds against---has thus eliminated himself; to my mind this is both foolish in his own interests and has taken the heart out of the event--for the R ussians as well as for everyone else. We all know how good the top half-dozen Soviet players are and how little there is between them; what we want to know is whether Fischer can beat them or not. Next, the tournament is unsatisfactory for the live Russian competitors. The top six players go on to join Keres and Botwinnik in the Candidates tournament next year--hut there is is special rule, designed to limit the number of Russians in the Candidates, which says that not more than three of the six qualifiet's can come from one country. 1 has the live Russians, at least four of whom and probably all live look like getting in the top six, are engaged in a fratricidal sub-tournament amongst themselves, the result of which will turn on their relative abilities at massacring the weaker players; as a result a player with a real chance of winning the world championship may be eliminated through a more or less chance failure against one of the comparative rabbits. This leads to the third trouble—this is not one tournament but two. Not only Fischer but also several of the' other leading Western players have opted out—Najdorf and Panno of the Argentine and Lombardy of the US—and the zonal system prob- ably lets some weak players through anyway. So there is a great gap in strength between top and bottom, illustrated by the following statistic. There are twenty-four players and at the time of writing Round 18 has just finished: the table splits sharply into two, thirteen in the top half and eleven in the bottom, and the top thirteen have played 110 games against the. bottom eleven. The score: seventy-nine wins, thirty draws, one loss. This is far too great a discrepancy. The solution? Difficult to say. One very desirable step would be to give really large cash prizes at least eqUal to those offered in other major tourna- ments: if this were done and Fischer, Najdorf and Panno again played. one could afford to drop the artificial restriction on the number of Soviet players -and let the top six, irrespective of nationality, -go through. Whether or not this is the answer, things aren't right now.
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