MARK RUBERY CHESS

One of the more profound insights in chess is offered by the British author Martin Amis in his book ‘The War against Cliché. Essays and Reviews 1971-2000’ He states, in his inimitable style, that it is the complexity of chess that gives it its beauty, and warns that diminishing the difficulty for the public consumption could rob the game of its mystique. In an era of faster time limits along with Magnus Carlsen’s advertising of trendy leisurewear to make the game more available to the masses, one wonders what the ultimate effect on the aura of the game might be. ‘…Chess waits in the wings, taking deep breaths, ready to burst on the stage as a planetary spectator sport…. Chess offers its audience the soap opera of opposed personalities in genuinely bitter combat, deploying an unbounded repertoire of feint, bluff , trap, poeticism, profundity, brilliancy, together with a complementary array of blunders, howlers, squanderings… …What stands in its way? Not the epic slowness of the game, nor its frieze-like immobility. What stands in the way is the gap, the chasm, the abyss that lies between the watcher and the watched. The difficulty is the thing separating the ordinary player from Garry Kasparov. The difficulty is the difficulty.’ ‘Chess-promoters should not try to meddle with or minimize the near-infinite difficulty of the game: they are absolutely stuck with it. It is what surrounds the board with holy dread the exponential, the astronomical.’

The author of ‘Money’, which was incidentally Peter Svidler’s favourite book, also writes the following on facing Nigel Short in a simultaneous exhibition: ‘As positions simplified and opponents resigned, he seemed to be constantly presenting me with his round, bespectacled, full-lipped face. This face was not so much ageless as entirely unformed: you felt it would still light up at the sight of a new chemistry set, or a choc-ice. But somehow his hands bestowed terrible powers on the white pieces.’