The TOPS School Gymnasium. If you squint, you can see, left to right, some of the exhbitiors: Ye Jiangchuan, Wang Lei, Boris Gulko, Joel Benjamin, Gregory Kaidanov, Xie Jun. And that some of the kids are kind of large. Parents were allowed to fill in for no-shows.
It was a natural. The Seattle Chess Foundation is devoted to the promotion both of elite chess and of chess among school children. They were going to have a US - China Summit Match, so how to involve the kids. Next best thing to a celebrity dunk tank is the grandmaster simultaneous.
Twenty-five Summit participants, most of them grandmasters, each took on two teams of six players. That's 300 players in all. A special scoring system rewarded a win four times as much as a draw. In fact, the winning team managed one won game, the only defeat suffered by the Summit players. The second place school had three draws, but on the day, draws were not good enough. The prizes? The top teams won equipment from International Chess Enterprises for their schools.
The introductions. Gregory Kaidanov, Camilla Baginskaite, Alexander Shabalov, Zhang Zhong, Zhu Chen, world champion Xie Jun being introduced (she is who they're clapping for), Qin Kanying, Peng Xiaomin, and Xu Yuhua.
The Summit players were very patient when the children were not ready to move, but the most interesting boo-boo was committed by one of the grandmasters.
Alexander Ivanov was more concerned about figuring out whose move it was because so many of the players didn't follow the etiquette: move as the master comes to the table. So he saw a king on d7, and a queen in a geometrically suggestive position, and played Nd5xf6 check, forking those two pieces. His opponent, undaunted, played Qe8xKe1, end of game! OK, we all know that in chess, if you make an illegal move, you can take it back and make another legal move with the piece that you tried to move. But in Blitz chess, the opponent can take your king. So, what to do here? GM Ivanov was quite willing to swallow defeat, if that was the detention to be meted out. But he wanted a ruling. Impresario (IM) Georgi Orlov decided that the game should continue. So Ivanov moved the knight to block the check and eventually won the game.
The biggest celebrity, in the arcane world of simultaneous chess, was Chinese perennial top board Ye Jiangchuan who, from January 1st until 28 February 2001, held the record for simultaneous chess, playing 1004 opponents in 28 hours, 33 minutes, an average of 1 minute 42 seconds per game. He won 912 and drew 76 of the games. The exhibition was a kind of new millenium (it started December 31st, 2000, the last day of the 2nd millenium) celebration in Tian Yuan, China.
Ye's record was erased by Anna-Maria Botsari (1,102 players in about 30 hours) and then by Susan Polgar (1,131 players in 17 hours) on August 1-2, 2005. All numbers refer to consecutive simultaneous play, where the exhibition is set up on a smaller number of boards (say 326 in the Susan Polgar example), then when a game finishes a new game is started, sometimes with the same player.
Ye polished off his dozen opponents in 40 minutes. But he was not out to set any records and did not seem rushed. He did keep in mind that the point of the game is to give checkmate. It's just a small thing, but in this position:
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Ye, without breaking stride, played 1.Ng5xe6, allowing his opponent the strategic pin 1...Rb8-e8, winning a knight. Of course, he saw that 2.Rd7-g7+ Kg8-h8 3.Ne5-g6 was mate. I did, too, after five seconds, but Ye saw it in zero seconds.
Afterwards, I asked Ye about the experience with the gang of 1004. We had a little communication problem. With my one word of Chinese, and Ye's 1003 words of English, there was only one language we could try. The Habla espanol? gambit would not work. He described the simul experience as dangerous, without elaborating. I guess a real journalist, after needling him for clarification, would be content to let it stand at that. Here is my interpretation: if you start such an ambitious project, you must finish it, because so many people depend upon you. From personal experience, I know that playing 50 opponents is quite a mental strain. Twenty times that many? No way! And, finally, Ye is a tall man, about 6 feet in height. Unless he was walking in a pit, or unless they provided special high tables, posture is a challenge. Do you bend your knees, or tilt over the table, or slouch? And let's not think about the strain on your knees, coming to a new move (and often stopping) 30,000 times or so in one session. Ouch!
Some day, I must ask Grandmaster Ye what he really meant by the word dangerous!
What he really wanted to talk about was the Chinese children who, having played and studied chess for a couple of years, were already formidable opponents.
Marcel Duchamp was one of the great artists of the 20th century. But he gave it up for years to play chess, and became one of the best players in France. He said that chess players were purer artists than painters because to be a prominent chess player you merely have to play well, but painters have to curry favor with customers, clients, and gallery owners.
It's cool to play good chess. But, let's face it, it's even cooler to play good chess and look smart. The two cool pix for simul night are Zhu Chen (individual gold medal winner at the Istanbul Women's Olympiad) and Boris Gulko.
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Last modified August 7, 2005