MARK RUBERY CHESS

The South African blindfold record of ten games is held by the legendary English master Joseph Blackburne (affectionately known as the Black Death), who stopped off briefly in Port Elizabeth during the 1880’s whilst on his way to Australia. In more recent times Michael O’Sullivan and John Fienieg given exhibitions close to this number, but last year a very strong visitor in the guise of super GM, Wesley So, scored 9,5/10 during his tour here. Surely if he was aware of Blackburne’s record he would have comfortably broken it…. According to chess historian Leonard Reitstein one of the best blindfold exhibitions recorded in South Africa took place in Pretoria in August 1907 when A.J.A. Cameron defeated all six of his opponents. Here is one of the games A.J.A. Cameron [C26] Blindfold ,1907 .1.e4 e5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Bc4 c6 4.d3 h6 5.f4 Qa5 6.fxe5 Qxe5 7.Nf3 Qa5 8.0-0 d5 9.exd5 cxd5 10.Bb5+ Nc6 11.Ne5 Qb6+ 12.d4 Bb4 13.Rxf6 gxf6 13...Bxc3 was better 14.Nxd5 Qa5 15.Bxc6+ bxc6 16.Nxf6+ Kf8 17.Qh5 Be6 18.Bxh6+ Ke7 19.Nxc6+ 1-0 Cameron also played six games blindfold against players of the S.A. College in Cape Town in 1916. A century later the American based grandmaster, Timur Gareev, broke the world blindfold simultaneous record at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Gareyev played against 48 opponents at the same time, more than any player before and scored 35 wins, 7 draws, and 6 losses after almost 20 hours play. In 1947 Miguel Najdorf set a record of 45 games that stood for 64 years when it was finally bettered by a German master, Mark Lang, who played 46 players in 2011. risen-chess often used to be a seamless garment as one super GM rolled up an opponent who made an error. The top GM games were Napoleonic in conception. Now they are fragmented and guerrilla in natureif someone is going down strategically he now mixes it - computers have propelled this fragmentation process-to dinosaurs such as myself modern top level games often seem to lack a theme or continuity-but that doesn’t mean they are worse - I think it means that hidden resources are sought and exploited and the nature of the battle leads to more errors - so do faster time controls. (Raymond Keene)