Chess no. 424
PHILID OR
J. Beszczynski (2nd Prize, Shachmaty, 1957). White to play and mate in two moves; solution next week.
Solution to no. 423 (Zabunov): B – Kt 3, threat Kt – B 4. 1 . . . Kt – Kt 3; 2 Q x Kt.
1 . . . Kt – Q 2; 2 B – B 7. 1 . . . Kt (K else; 2 B–B 6. 1 ...Kt–KB 3; 2 KR X Kt.
1 . . . Kt – B 4; 2 Q – Q 4. 1 . . . Kt (K 5) else; 2 R – Q 6. Attractive knight correction theme.
Le style, c'est l'homme
In an interesting interview with the Sunday Times, Ray Keene—the twenty-one-year-old Cambridge student who is the best British player since Jonathan Penrose came up at the beginning of the 'fifties— refers to himself as an intuitive rather than an analytic player and `describes his lack of mathe- matical grasp with relish.' Are there two kinds of player—the intuitive and the analytic, the artist and the mathematician?
Any concept of this kind is of course a severe over-simplification of the facts; if you have no intuitive feeling for the game, no immediate recognition that some moves and plans look good and some bad, you will never be any use at chess— equally, if you are quite unable to check your intuitions by analysis you will be constantly caught in tactical traps. Also, the better the player the more likely he is to excel in both intuition and analysis and the harder he will be to classify. How- ever, given these reservations, there is something in the distinction between the analyst and the intuitive player, the mathematician and the artist, the tactician and the strategist.
Amongst British players, in my day Alexander and Golombek were fairly clearcut representatives; Alexander, a mathematician, essentially an imagi- native tactical player good in open positions in which the general plan was clear but where the tactics required close analysis, but rather weak in positional struggles where it was a matter of finding the right kind of plan—Golombek, quite un- mathematical in approach but with a fine feeling for the correct general line of play in tactically quiescent positions. In a later generation the cur- rent British champion. Penrose—a better player than either Alexander or Golombek and corre- spondingly harder to pigeonhole—is basically a mathematician in approach; his contemporary Clarke is on the other side. In the rising group, Keene is the artist. Lee the mathematician, Hartston (though mathematics is his subject) a slightly mixed type.
What about world players? Here I hate to try to distinguish but there are perhaps a few players for whom one could do it. On balance I would put Alekhine and Spassky in the mathematical group; Rubinstein is probably the clearest case of the artist—there is an unforgettable passage (which nevertheless I have unfortunately forgotten!) about this in Modern Ideas in Chess by another chess artist, Riti—and if I could understand the enigmatic world champion Tigran Petrosian I should probably realise that he belonged -intel- lectually (though not emotionally) to this group.
Neither type is superior; they are complementary. A beautiful game by the artist can somftimes make you feel how simple chess is—a beautiful game by the mathematician makes you feel how difficult it is. To try to rate one achievement above or below the other is as futile as it is impracticable.
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