MARK RUBERY CHESS

The Russian/Dutch GM, Sergei Tiviakov is a player with a vivid imagination-an ideal element in a strong player’s armoury. This sometimes amusingly spills over into real life as when he returned from playing a tournament in Egypt. On viewing an image on one of his pictures taken with a digital camera at the pyramid of Chefren he declared the following:

‘This photograph of this creature, the asuri, a creature from a parallel world, invisible to the human eye, is the only picture of its kind in the world! Nobody else in human history has ever managed to capture this creature on a photograph inside one of the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Before, this creature has only been met inside the caves of Tibet and Himalayas, by the expedition of professor Ernst Muldashev, well-known scientist/ophthalmologist, explorer.’

This photo evoked the following response from a website that deals with investigations into the paranormal.

‘No, the “creature” is not the obvious one with the glasses; that’s the chess-player. Look at the lower right, and you’ll see a tiny neon-orange shape has captured a smeared image of the tiny pilot-light on the air conditioner. To register the entire image under the poor light conditions inside the tomb, the camera shutter stayed open, and during the long exposure (probably several seconds) the hand-held camera moved in a short jerk up and to the left, then back again. What would normally be a point-image of the neon light, has become a trail, a trace, of orange light… A famous missed opportunity from Bronstein during the 1953 Candidates Tournament in Zurich.

BLACK TO PLAY AND WIN

“I like going for the king because mate ends the game. This is sometimes forgotten in modern chess where there is all this concern about pawn structures. Forget it, checkmate is checkmate”-N Short