Every Olympiad produces a few thousand games, and the ones that get remembered are usually the long, grinding fights. In his latest Agony column for ChessBase, Jon Speelman went the other way. He searched the Samarkand Olympiad for miniatures, meaning decisive games of 25 moves or fewer. The column leads with Igor Kovalenko’s 15.Nb1!, which trapped his opponent’s queen in round one.
The scale of the event explains why the hunt needed rules. Samarkand was the largest Olympiad ever, with over 200 teams in the open section and only a few dozen fewer in the parallel Women’s Olympiad. That meant about 800 games a day and getting on for 9,000 overall.
How he narrowed it down
Speelman set two filters. He looked only at decisive games in the open section, and he required at least one player to be rated over 2500. That left 40 games, which is still a lot of short, sharp chess.
About half of those came from round one. Speelman calls it the “massacre of the innocents,” since the first-round pairings put the top half of the field against the bottom half. Favourites with the white pieces and a big rating edge will sometimes close the game quickly, and an Olympiad this size had plenty of such pairings.
The column illustrates the phrase with “The Massacre of the Innocents”, the Biblical scene as painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his son around 1565 to 1567.
The selection
From the 40, Speelman chose the best and the most amusing, with fairly light annotations, and kept them in broad chronological order. He ended up with what he calls a “cricket team” of games, so eleven. Notes to game 7, Rapport against Demchenko, carry another mention of cricket that he describes as only slightly gratuitous.
Richard Rapport is a fitting name to find in a miniatures column. He is known for unorthodox opening choices and willingness to take risks, which tends to produce either a quick win or a quick loss.
A birthday video
There is also the usual video version. Speelman recorded it on Friday, October 2, his 70th birthday, after what he called last month’s fiasco. He did finally manage to log on to XSplit via Twitch this time. The video sits at the end of the ChessBase article, and the games can be switched from a list in the page’s viewer.
For readers who want the career behind the columnist, The Chess Herald has already looked at Speelman at 70 and the Candidates run behind a quiet career. The previous Agony column, “Beware the Centaur’s Hooves,” is linked from the ChessBase page for anyone catching up on the series.
Original source: ChessBase
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