These are four types of chess events in which the essential rules of chess remain the same, but are nevertheless a little different from standard chess events. In the first three there are restrictions on who can play, while in correspondence chess the time limit is wholly different. In this short chapter we shall be looking at the special features of each.
Unfortunately, relatively few women play chess – maybe no more than 5% of all chess players. This is despite the proportion being far higher among young juniors, with many girls tending to give up the game in their pre-teen years. I do not propose to speculate here why this is. Social conditioning must be a contributing factor, while just about every other reason has been advanced, from a supposed genetic “inferiority” to the view that women are far too sensible to waste their time playing chess. One thing that does seem clear: women players are not on average weaker chess players than their male counterparts; they are distributed throughout the rating lists very much as one would expect a small random sample to be.
Rightly or wrongly, plenty of women-only events are organized. These include women’s tournaments, a women’s world championship, a women’s Olympiad, and women’s prizes in open tournaments. There are women’s titles (WGM, WIM and WFM), which can be gained in much the same way as the corresponding titles GM, IM and FM, but do not require the same level of competitive success; additionally, to gain the women’s titles, a certain proportion of the games have to be against other women. Note that there are no men-only events, so it is completely wrong to talk of the “men’s” Olympiad, “men’s” titles, or the “men’s” world championship. There are a handful of WGMs (the title is roughly equivalent to FM in terms of minimum playing standard) who also have the GM title, and quite a lot with the IM title. Women’s national championships are often contested by the women playing in the overall championship, with whoever scores the most points being declared champion. The danger with this is that by rewarding a low standard of achievement (in junior events the girls’ prizes often go to those who scrape the most draws), the players’ full development is not encouraged.
Does all this help to encourage more women to play chess? Opinion is sharply divided on this point. One view is that it is patronizing and counterproductive to award titles and prizes to women who play at a level for which a man would receive no such accolades, and that this is the main reason why so few women play chess, and why there are only a handful of women in the world’s top thousand players. An alternative view is that everything should be done to encourage the women who are interested in the game to continue playing, and that to have high-profile women’s events is good for chess generally, not least from a marketing viewpoint. I suspect that from a long-term perspective the former view is right, but in the short term the latter. If women’s events and women’s prizes were all of a sudden halted, women’s chess would become very low-key. Many women who currently can justify a career in chess would have to give up. In time, though, the strength of the top women would increase, since those who had ambitions would need to aim higher than is currently the case.
For sponsors, women’s and girls’ chess is very attractive. It is interesting for newspapers and presents a good image for chess and the sponsor. The yearly Women vs Veterans tournaments, sponsored by the millionaire Dutch chess patron, Joop van Oosterom were a good example. Although Van Oosterom did not aim to get massive exposure for his tournaments, events such as this are highly marketable.
The fact that there are special veterans’ tournaments comes as rather a surprise to those who imagine that chess is a game played by old men. Experience counts for a lot in chess, but speed of thought and physical stamina are even more vital over the board, so a player’s strength tends to decline gradually from about the age of 40 onwards. Many elderly players therefore prefer to play in veterans’ tournaments, where they can play interesting games against their peers. Although there can be an interesting clash of styles when a young lion meets an old warrior, the types of games that result can be unsatisfying for both: for instance the elder might outplay the younger, only to be swindled in a time-scramble; or else the young player, more highly motivated to study chess theory, might blow away his older adversary with some new idea in the opening.
However, there is certainly no segregation of chess along ageist lines, but veterans events and prizes are a growing area. Since they do not affect the development of up-and-coming players, they cause no real controversy. If it means that players of the calibre of Smyslov, Portisch and Spassky, with their deep understanding of chess, continue to play in high-profile events, rather than be lost in the midst of huge Swiss-system tournaments, then it is no bad thing.
There is little doubt that juniors should be encouraged to play chess, and that events organized specifically for juniors are a good thing. This in no way holds back the strongest of the juniors, who will take part in “senior” events from an early age, normally in addition to playing junior chess. Note that I am thinking mainly of ages 8 to 18, though many of the comments in this section apply to student chess (ages 19 to 21) too.
Junior chess activities fall into the following areas in roughly ascending order of playing level: school chess clubs, junior chess clubs, inter-schools chess, inter-regional junior team events, junior coaching, international junior tournaments, and junior championships (both national and international).
Many schools have a chess club, but the organization is often haphazard, depending mainly on a teacher (or a parent, or a trusted older pupil) being sufficiently interested to run the club. With this in mind, school chess clubs vary greatly in the range of activities they provide.
At worst, they are just a handful of players gathering around a chess board every now and then, or a place to go to get out of the rain; at best a thriving environment for chess, with a variety of internal competitions and regular matches against other school teams, or against senior chess clubs in a local league. This, then, is effectively a “real” chess club that just happens to be in a school, and draws its members exclusively from its students.
Also, there are a few schools – few and far between – that specialize in chess, and actively seek chess players as students. In England, Oakham School has had close links with chess, in particular with the series of biennial junior internationals from 1984 to 1992, which became the most important junior event in the world, after the World and European junior championships. In Denmark, Tjele Efterskole provides chess tuition alongside the more traditional subjects. Many Danish juniors are educated at Tjele, and as far as I can gather they enjoy the experience of being at school with so many other chess enthusiasts, and emerge as better players.
Discovering which schools in your area have a good chess club is not necessarily very easy. I would suggest speaking to someone at the local chess club, or contacting your national federation, who might be able to put you in touch with an organization that could advise.
Junior clubs provide an ideal alternative to a school club (which is not available to many children) and full membership of a predominantly adult chess club. However, this is an area where far more could be done. There are very few junior chess leagues, apart from schools’ leagues. Although it seems natural for any chess club to want to have a thriving junior section, relatively few actually do. Like most things that go wrong in the world of chess, this is not due to any failure to see that the concept is good, but rather the lack of the necessary personnel. Running a junior club requires a lot of time and a regular commitment and involves a great deal of responsibility. Collecting small amounts of money from the children each week will hardly cover the costs of the equipment. At a chess club AGM it is hard to imagine the members agreeing to a higher annual subscription to pay someone to run a junior club; at that point it seems a better idea that the juniors just become members of the senior club – as the best of them will.
In some cities there are leagues in which school chess teams compete against one another on a regular basis, but in many places it is more problematic for school teams to meet, with just occasional matches being played. A strong school chess team in this situation should definitely consider entering a team in the local chess league.
Most countries have a national schools chess competition. In Britain, this is sponsored by The Times, and is a very well established event. The initial stages are played on a regional basis with winners of the regional qualifiers going on to the national stages. Age handicaps are used, a little crudely, to give schools with a low age range a chance against those that can field a team of experienced players in their late teens. The main problems with the event are that very much the same set of teams tends to emerge as the winners in each of the regions every year, and that a big chunk of the sponsorship money is spent on the finals in London, in which only four teams are involved, of the hundreds originally entering the competition.
From a British viewpoint, this means county chess. Almost all counties have a junior team, and many of the larger counties have several. Junior county matches are great fun for the players: a day out, and, since they tend to be played over many boards, a chance for the less experienced players to see some big names in junior chess in action.
In the former Soviet Union, promising players were identified at an early age and given expert tuition in chess. Many of them went on to become grandmasters. In the USA and Western Europe, the situation has always been far more random. Most Western players who have become successful professionals have needed to work a lot on their own, and still suffer from gaps in their technical knowledge of chess. The strength of the English national team in recent decades owes much to the coaching programme set up mainly by Bob Wade and Leonard Barden in the late 1960s and early 1970s. From that era emerged players such as Miles, Keene, Speelman, Mestel and Nunn. In turn this provided the competitive background from which a younger generation, including Short, Adams, Sadler and McShane, could emerge.
Coaching can take many forms, but the central part has to be an experienced player sitting across the board from the junior and giving one-to-one tuition on the game, both general and specific. Good coaching can correct general flaws in chess thinking that might otherwise fester and damage the player’s understanding of chess for ever more. Good coaching can also inspire the pupils to work on their game in the most profitable way in their own time. For instance, the Dvoretsky/Yusupov school only met occasionally, but in the few days they had at the school, the pupils were encouraged to think in new ways about the game. As a result, they tended to become resilient, self-sufficient masters, who returned for the next session of the school as stronger players than they were on their previous visit.
Most national chess federations will organize some coaching for the strongest of their juniors, but there is generally a limited budget for this, and the all-important one-on-one coaching is rare. For instance, as a junior I was invited to just one coaching weekend, at which an IM or GM would go through games on a demonstration board. It was interesting, but not inspirational. The best things about the weekend were the flick-chess games against Michael Adams. He was good too.
There are a great many people offering private chess tuition, especially in major cities. I’m far from convinced that all these people offer good value for money. If you are unsure, it is best to check with your national federation, who may have a register of approved chess teachers, or a local chess expert, if you can find one (try your local chess club). However, the federation will not necessarily have a clear idea of who is any good. There is no examination chess teachers need to take, and an international chess title is no guarantee that a player has any aptitude for teaching. Chess teaching is often used as a way to scrape an existence by those who would like to make a living as chess players or writers, but aren’t good enough. Online coaching is also available, and may well be a preferable option; this removes any transport issues at the cost of losing the face-to-face contact.
As a rough guide to how much one can expect to pay, in major cities the going rate tends to be �30 ($50) per hour for IM tuition. If this price seems high, then consider the travelling involved, the various overheads and the preparation necessary. Prices elsewhere, and for non-IM tuition, tend to be somewhat lower. Some GMs charge premium rates, but unless the pupil is really talented, this seems inappropriate. The most important thing is that the teacher is strong enough as a player to perceive the ways in which the pupil can improve, and good enough as a teacher to explain how to do so.
This is quite a new phenomenon, as in the past there were few junior IMs, let alone GMs, and so, while juniors frequently played in international events, their titled opponents were, for the most part, adults. Now that there are generally a handful of teenage grandmasters and dozens of teenage IMs at any time, sponsors see junior international tournaments as attractive events that are not too difficult to arrange.
These events are fun for the players, and tend to feature highly enterprising, aggressive chess, and little of the “halving out” (i.e. those out of the running for prizes drawing lots of short games) that can plague events featuring more mature players.
The highest level of junior competition are the world junior championships, with the European championships not far behind. They are held each year, often at exotic venues. They are very strong events, even in the lower age groups. The top-scoring players in each age group would typically have ratings such as the following:
| Open | Girls | |
| U-20 | 2650 | 2475 |
| U-18 | 2575 | 2400 |
| U-16 | 2475 | 2300 |
| U-14 | 2375 | 2200 |
| U-12 | 2250 | 2100 |
As you can see, junior chess at world championship level is tough, with some really good players fighting it out for the medals.
National championships take various forms. In some countries they are played at the same time and place as the senior national championship in the particular country. While this makes it a wonderful get-together for the players, the drawback is that the very best of the juniors will play in the senior championship, thus devaluing the junior events by depriving them of the strongest competitors. An alternative is to combine the junior championships with the senior events, as, for instance, was done with the British Under-21 Championship some decades ago. However, it then ceases to be a real event, and more of an afterthought when the prize is awarded. Certainly, when I played in the British Championship in 1988 and 1989, it never crossed my mind that I was competing in the Under-21 championship! Also, if players need to qualify to play in the senior championship, then this denies many players the chance to participate at all.
In some countries the junior championships are held as a separate event in their own right. The problem then is that it is not such an exciting tournament to play in. The children get little chance to see the top players in their country in action – an inspirational influence that should not be underestimated. One popular way to pep up a junior championship is to make entry open to foreign junior players, with the championships of course awarded only to home players, but with prizes and the title of “Open Champion” to attract strong foreign juniors. This formula is popular in mainland Europe, and seems to work well.
To many people, regular “over-the-board” chess players included, the idea of playing chess by sending a move, and waiting days for the reply to arrive from the opponent, is rather odd. Nevertheless, correspondence players enjoy their variety of chess and make a good case for it. The main benefits of playing by post (or following a similar regime, but transmitting the moves by e-mail or server) may be summarized as follows.
There are many levels at which correspondence chess is played, ranging, as in standard over-the-board chess, from simple club events (correspondence clubs do not, of course, need to have a narrow geographical focus) through national leagues to national championships (both team and individual) to Olympiads and individual world championships. In high-level correspondence chess, the use of computerized assistance goes without saying.
In the past, the length of games used to depend heavily on the geographical locations of the players and the speed and reliability of the postal service between them. In domestic events the games tended to last only a few months, whereas at international level, individual games could last several years. Nowadays, games are increasingly being played by e-mail or via a server, so the main factor is the time-limit that is being used.
Traditionally, players have normally specialized in either over-the-board chess or in correspondence play, with few simultaneously playing at a high level in both disciplines. The names of the top correspondence players have tended to be unknown outside the world of correspondence chess. The exceptions are players who took up correspondence chess after a successful over-the-board career – notably Jonathan Penrose, for many years Britain’s leading player, who established himself as one of the world’s best correspondence players. Also, there are some players who played correspondence chess when they were young as a way of practising their analytical skills before concentrating on the over-the-board game in later life. Paul Keres is the outstanding example here, though in his case this was partly due to the difficulty finding tough opposition closer to home. However, there is now a trend for players to compete in both disciplines simultaneously. Swedish grandmaster Ulf Andersson has tried his hand, with great success, at correspondence chess, while the Scottish Correspondence Chess Association has been remarkably successful at recruiting members of the regular national team, with the result that Scotland now possesses one of the world’s finest correspondence teams.
It is no surprise that the larger, more sparsely populated countries are strong in correspondence chess: Scandinavia has many of the top players, as does Russia. Canada and Australia are more significant forces in correspondence chess than in the over-the-board game. But, in line with the situation for over-the-board chess, it is Germany that has the largest number of internationally rated correspondence players.
If you are wondering whether correspondence chess is for you, a revealing comment was made to me by one very strong player, Peter Millican, when I asked whether the fear of being attacked, or the elation of playing a brilliant attack, was at all like the sensations experienced at the board. His view was that the emotions were just the same, and just as strong, except that they last for months, rather than minutes or hours!
Here are two games from a recent world championship:
Marcinkiewicz – Winckelmann
23rd Correspondence World Ch 2007–11
1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 d6 3 d4 cxd4 4 Nxd4 Nf6 5 Nc3 a6 6 Be3 e5 7 Nb3 Be7 8 Qd2 Be6 9 0-0-0 Nbd7 10 f4 Ng4 11 g3 Nxe3 12 Qxe3 b5 13 Kb1 Qb6 14 Qe2 Nf6 15 Nd5 Bxd5 16 exd5 exf4 17 gxf4
17...0-0 18 Qg2 Qe3 19 Rg1 g6 20 f5 Nh5 21 Rd4 Bf6 22 Re4 Qh6 23 Bd3 Rae8 24 Rg4 Bg7 25 fxg6 fxg6 26 Bxg6 hxg6 27 Rxg6 Qh7 28 Nd4 Kh8 29 Ne6 Rg8 30 Rg4 Bf6 31 h3 a5 32 a3 b4 33 axb4 axb4 34 Qf3 Rxg4 35 hxg4 b3 36 Qxb3 Qa7 37 Rh1 Rb8 38 Qf3 Rxb2+ 39 Kc1 Qa1+ 40 Kd2 Qa5+ 41 Kd1 Qa1+ 42 Kd2 Qa5+ ½-½
Geenen – Hoeven
23rd Correspondence World Ch 2007–11
1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 d6 3 d4 cxd4 4 Nxd4 Nf6 5 Nc3 a6 6 Bg5 e6 7 f4 Qb6 8 Qd2 Qxb2 9 Rb1 Qa3 10 e5 h6 11 Bh4 dxe5 12 fxe5 Nfd7 13 Ne4 Qxa2 14 Rd1 Qd5 15 Qe3 Qxe5 16 Be2 Bc5 17 Bg3 Bxd4 18 Rxd4 Qa5+ 19 Rd2 0-0 20 Bd6 f5
21 Bxf8 Nxf8 22 Nd6 Nbd7 23 0-0 Qc5 24 Qd4 b5 25 Rb1 Rb8 26 Rb3 Qxd4+ 27 Rxd4 Nf6 28 Rd1 Bd7 29 Ra3 Rb6 30 Bf3 b4 31 Nc4 Rb5 32 Rxa6 Rc5 33 Ne3 Rc3 34 Rd3 Rxd3 35 cxd3 Bb5 36 Rd6 Kf7 37 d4 N8d7 38 Bc6 Bxc6 39 Rxc6 f4 40 Nc4 Nd5 41 Ra6 Kf6 42 Ra7 N7b6 43 Nxb6 Nxb6 44 Kf2 g5 45 Kf3 Nd5 ½-½
1st Ch, 1950–3: Cecil Purdy
2nd Ch, 1956–8: Viacheslav Ragozin
3rd Ch, 1959–62: Alberic O’Kelly de Galway
4th Ch, 1962–5: Vladimir Zagorovsky
5th Ch, 1965–8: Hans Berliner
6th Ch, 1968–71: Horst Rittner
7th Ch, 1972–5: Yakov Estrin
8th Ch, 1975–80: Jørn Sloth
9th Ch, 1977–83: Tõnu Õim
10th Ch, 1978–84: Vytas Palciauskas
11th Ch, 1983–8: Fritz Baumbach
12th Ch, 1984–91: Grigory Sanakoev
13th Ch, 1989–95: Mikhail Umansky
14th Ch, 1994–9: Tõnu Õim
15th Ch, 1996–2002: Gert Jan Timmerman
16th Ch, 1999–2004: Tunç Hamarat
17th Ch, 2002–7: Ivar Bern
18th Ch, 2003–5: Joop van Oosterom
19th Ch, 2004–7: Christophe Léotard
20th Ch, 2004–11: Pertti Lehikoinen
21st Ch, 2005–8: Joop van Oosterom
22nd Ch, 2007–10: Aleksandr Dronov
23rd Ch, 2007–11: Ulrich Stephan
24th Ch, 2009–12: Marjan Šemrl