Believing the impossible  | TheArticle

Much of my professional career in chess has been involved with organising world chess championships in London: namely, those of 1986, between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, 1993, which

saw Britain’s Nigel Short fail in his challenge to Kasparov, and 2000, when Vladimir Kramnik finally terminated Kasparov’s 15-year reign as champion. As a corollary, hoc opus hic labor est, 

I fought to get chess covered on television, convinced that if snooker could make it, so could chess.

I would never have believed it possible that the current and increasing statistics for viewing chess via online TV could have become so staggeringly successful. One advantage chess has over

snooker is that viewers can actually play online, as well as watch. An up to the minute press release from Chess.com indicates the dramatic extent of this media triumph for our game.

In May 2023, Chess.com membership soared past 140 million worldwide, which represents a 355% increase since January 2020, with 150,000 new users being registered each day. The site also had

more than 57 million monthly active users playing 840 million games during the month, up 550% since January 2020. Chess.com is the 114th world ranked site on the internet, while in  June

2023, Chess.com was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies.

I must admit to never having heard of FAST or Wurl, before I received this gushing press release. Living, as I do, as a dinosaur remnant from the Cretaceous period in my ivory cave,

resorting to wielding my goose quill pen, occasionally dipped in venom (with apologies to Waldo Lydecker from the film Laura), I can hardly expect to be au courant with the latest

communications technology. Now I know better.

While on the topic of impossible things: to adapt George Orwell’s notorious lines parodying socialism, all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others, of my impossible

list, some things are more impossible than others.

This is from Lewis Carroll’s chess-based fantasy Alice through the Looking Glass. I have gone into Stakhanovite overdrive and doubled the regulation six impossible things, as prescribed by

the Red Queen, to be believed before breakfast.

Here is my list of twelve impossible things in which I have succeeded in believing.

And as a bonus to my golden dozen, the leadership of the Church of England will be converted to Christianity and start to believe in God.

A new book deserves serious attention: Re engineering the Classics is written by the dream team of Grandmaster Matthew Sadler and Steve Giddins. It’s impossible to believe that a better team

exists to undertake the particular task of subjecting a selection of celebrated games to rigorous computer analysis. The results are shocking, with time hallowed moves, previously showered

with accolades, being revealed as mistakes when subjected to the ruthlessly dispassionate scrutiny of the merciless engines.

This week I give a sensational example. Traditionally, Euwe’s …Rh8 sacrifice against Geller has been showered with exclamation marks. In fact it’s a blunder which should have converted a win

into a draw. In this week’s game selection I also include a few modest proposals to consider for selection in any sequel to which the illustrious authors might consider turning their own

quill pens.

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