Raaphy Persitz (1934-2009)

Raaphy Persitz, one of BCM's oldest friends and contributors, has died aged 74. I was sent the sad news by Amatzia Avni, who also kindly appended the following tribute to Raaphy. I am indebted to Amatzia on both counts. The news of Raaphy's death came as a particular shock to me as, only a couple of weeks previously, he had sent me a fax saying how moved he had been by the tribute I had written to Bob Wade in the January issue of BCM. That was typical of his kindness towards me which dated back to when I took my first tottering steps as BCM editor in 1999. We never actually met in person but spoke occasionally on the telephone and exchanged faxes (Raaphy didn't seem to communicate by email). As a long-time reader of the magazine I had enjoyed his 'Student's Corner' column in the magazine, which was initiated by Abe Yanofsky in the early 1950s and which Raaphy inherited in 1958. I was particularly delighted when, in 2004, after I had written about his 1954 feat in winning his Varsity match game and a county match against English no.1 Hugh Alexander on the same day, Raaphy consented to write another 'Student's Corner' column (which appeared in the May 2004 issue of BCM). I never succeeded in getting him to write another one but it was such a pleasure to have him write for the magazine during my spell as editor.

R.I.P. Raphael Joseph Arie (Raaphy) Persitz
Born 26 vii* 1934 (Tel Aviv)
Died 4 ii 2009 (Tel Aviv)

* Gaige's Chess Personalia gives May rather than July for Raaphy's month of birth but all online sources give July - can anyone tell me which is correct?

I shall be writing more on Raaphy in the March issue of BCM. I should be grateful for any reminiscences that others may have of him - please send to me at editor@bcmchess.co.uk or append to this blog entry.

The photo shown above is of the Oxford University team which won the 1953 British Lightning Club Championship - left to right: Raaphy Persitz, John B Sykes, Leonard Barden, OI Galvenius, David M Armstrong. (note: the 2008 ECF Yearbook seems to think that this lightning championship was first contested in 1954, but BCM confirms it first took place in 1953).

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What follows is Amatzia Avni's personal tribute to Raaphy...

Ordinary people have a mixture of good qualities and bad ones. After 20 years of friendship with the late Raaphy Persitz I can attest that he was a distinct type: one sided, positive-only; pure gold.

I first met him in 1989. Just wrote my first chess book (in Hebrew) I was searching for someone to write me an introduction. The word was that Persitz was back in town, after long years abroad. Having seen glimpses of his amazing linguistic skills, I contacted him and he agreed immediately. He didn’t know me, hadn’t read a single sentence of the book, yet he didn’t hesitate: “yes, sure, I’ll be glad to”.
That was typical Persitz: always ready to help, unconditionally. The introduction, needless to say, was a sheer delight, a class or two above the rest of the book.

In latter years he gave me a hand several times, polishing my texts and making them more reader-friendly to English speaking readers. Somehow he seemed to know what I wished to express better than I did. His suggestions enabled me to convey my meaning in a clear and precise manner.

Raaphy was modest and reserved. Once I called him and realized that he was upset. “My mother had passed away some weeks ago” – he said. I was puzzled why he didn’t tell me the sad news at the time. “I didn’t want to bother you” – was his reply.

A couple of years ago I stumbled upon Bruce Hayden’s old book “Cabbage heads and chess kings”. One of the book’s articles was headed “Raaphy Persitz – star or comet?”. I learned that in the 1950s Persitz won some bright victories in England against Penrose, Alexander, Milner-Barry and others. Searching in Chessbase I found out that he also did battle with some outstanding international players. Yet in all our meetings and hundreds hours of conversation he never said a thing about that!

Persitz was a master of understatement. I learned that if I wrote “very fine” or “extremely strong”, the ‘very’ and ‘extremely’ would fly out of the window. If I made a firm stand on a certain issue, he would add “probably”’ “apparently”, or “it may be argued that”, because it was indeed only an opinion, not a fact. Over time, following his train of thought made me improve the way I expressed myself and thought about chess.

Persitz’ distinctions in chess, in linguistics and in journalism are evident to anyone who ever read his chess books and articles. He also excelled in economics, but I am unqualified to comment on this.

God bless you, Raaphy. I feel privileged to have known you.

Amatzia Avni

Bob Wade: The Father of Modern English Chess

The funeral of Bob Wade (1921-2008) was held at Eltham Crematorium on Tuesday 16 December at 10.15am. There was a very large turn out of people for this great man of chess - so much so that the stalls was soon filled and many people had to stand in the large auditorium.

I took a few photos of people who came to the funeral, and have scanned in the programme - click here

The speakers included Jon Speelman (who referred to Bob as his first and only teacher); David Anderton (who gave a warm and witty appreciation of Bob); Malena Griffiths (who spoke about Bob's enormous contribution to women's and junior chess); and Tony Gkountintas (who was a close friend and neighbour).

Amongst those present at the funeral: Murray Chandler (who travelled from New Zealand to be there), Stuart Conquest, Jovanka Houska, Michael Stean, Stewart Reuben, Malcolm Pein, William Watson, Ray Keene, Peter Wells, Jonathan Mestel, David Levy, Robert Bellin, Shaun Taulbut, Les Blackstock, Henry Mutkin, David Sedgwick, Jane Seymour, Peter and Rose-Marie Hannan, Peter Wilson, Peter Kemmis Betty, Tony Stebbings, Alan Hanreck, Bill Linton, Michael Bolan, Mario Houska, Alan Martin, Brian Smith... and many, many more. Bob's surviving brother and sister (he was one of seven children) are elderly and it was too far for them to travel.

In his appreciation, David Anderton referred to Bob as "the father of modern English chess" - and that is an excellent summary of a man who did so many things in chess. Sad though the occasion was, David's speech was peppered with wit, tailored to an audience which knew Bob well and loved him as much for his occasional moments of fatherly rage as for his (much more frequent) good humour. Looking round at familiar faces in the audience, David said: "there can be few of us who didn't feel the sharp edge of his tongue at some point" and the many chuckles in the audience confirmed the truth of this statement. As David said, "Bob was as fierce in debate as he was over the board" - but it was all geared towards the greater good of chess. David had been Bob's captain for Olympiad teams - "he was never the easiest man to tell he had been benched". But actually these little outbursts were very endearing. Bob didn't have it in him to get cross for long and within minutes he was at great pains to kiss and make up.

A very great man and completely irreplaceable. We shall all miss him. RIP

Obituary of Bob Wade (by Leonard Barden in the Guardian)

The Perfect Marriage: Chess and Cricket

It's official: chess and cricket have got married. The world's greatest sport has finally decided to formalise its natural partnership with the world's greatest game.

The ceremony was performed in Chennai on 11 December, with Indian cricket captain MS Dhoni doing the honours for cricket and world chess champion Vishy Anand representing chess. The photo shows Dhoni slipping a diamond ring on Vishy's finger. Best man duties at this, the celebrity wedding of the year, were performed by Nigel Short and Peter Svidler, while Vishy was 'given away' by FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov (bravely masking his disappointment that chess had decided to marry cricket and not the Olympic Games, with which it had previously conducted a long but pointless flirtation).

OK, I'm getting a bit carried away with this skit, so here's the real story. The photo does not lie - that really is MS Dhoni placing a ring on Vishy Anand's finger. It was a present to celebrate the world chess champion's 39th birthday on 11 December. And, while on the subject, I'd like to wish Vishy all the best myself. A really great champion and one of nature's nice guys.

Rather surprisingly, the birthday celebration took place after day one of the India v England test match in Chennai. As Matthew Turner has already commented, it might explain India's woeful batting on the following day. Can you imagine England's cricket team taking time off during a test match to make a birthday presentation to Mickey Adams or Nigel Short? As Geoffrey Boycott might have said: "tha's roobish plannin', is tha'!"

Vishy was quoted as wishing Dhoni and the Indian cricket team luck in their ongoing encounter against England. “Good luck for the next four days, though I hope it gets over in three,” he said. He might yet get his wish but possibly not in the way he'd hoped. His birthday celebration could have caught the cricket team in the corridor of uncertainty.

Now, have I ever told you about the time I went to The Oval and saw Brian Statham bowl his last test-match spell? Well, it were 1965 and I were nobbut a lad and ... (continued page 94)...

[The original story and photo here]

Carlsen and the Candidates Debate

Just when we thought the world championship had sorted itself out... suddenly it’s all up in the air again. The latest news is that Magnus Carlsen has withdrawn from the Grand Prix cycle and this series of tournaments looks as though it could fall by the wayside.

Before going any further, perhaps I’d better state my prejudices when it comes to world championships. The important thing for me is that the whole thing ends with a one-to-one match. Thankfully they are back in fashion and I am glad of that, though I think they should play a few more games – 16 would be ideal. I found the old knock-out system, with its scores of rapidplay and blitz games, utterly abhorrent as a world championship system and as far as I’m concerned Khalifman, Ponomariov and Kasimdzhanov were not world champions (I always use the term ‘FIDE champion’ when referring to them), and Vishy Anand only became one recently. Though Kasparov was arguably wrong to break away from FIDE in 1993, he and his successors, Kramnik and Anand, still represent the ‘apostolic succession’ of world champions and I’m not prepared to be fobbed off with any inferior alternative.

So now, with the world title match system finally repaired, it seems that we must go through the pain barrier with the next tier of the championship. My strong preference is for a Candidates competition of 8-16 players. I think I would prefer a matchplay knockout of (at least) six-game matches rather than a tournament but the latter option is probably a lot easier to organise in this recession-hit world we live in.

Unfortunately the current qualification cycle – until this week – consisted of nothing of the sort. Instead, FIDE had cobbled together a ‘system’ which consisted of a watered-down version of their old knock-out world championship (called the FIDE World Cup) and a series of tournaments called the Grand Prix. The winner of each of these would meet in a match, and the match-winner go on to play a world title match with Vishy Anand.

Appraising this system, one finds a couple of plus points but rather a lot of negatives. One apparent plus point – and this goes for the old knock-out system too – is that it provides a good pay-day for quite a large number of grandmasters. By the same token, it was egalitarian and inclusive. But do we really need – and can we afford – the world championship to be quite so democratic? What is the point of giving a sizeable chunk of cash to people who are inevitably going to be knocked out in the early rounds of a qualifier? A complicated system of national and zonal qualifiers made sense in the days before we had the rating list but now everybody has a rating which, by and large, is trusted and accepted as a true measure of their strength. Given that we now have 30+ players rated over 2700 and a world champion on the brink of 2800, it seems reasonable to exclude anyone below 2700 from taking part in a world championship system.

The FIDE World Cup is an excellent tournament but far from ideal as championship qualifier to a play-off match. Like most chess fans, I enjoy watching the matches online and thoroughly enjoy the spectacle. But when relegated to being a qualifier for a Candidates event it makes perhaps a bit more sense. This seems to be what FIDE is now planning.

The Grand Prix series of tournaments has a number of advantages – one being the complete elimination of rapidplay and blitz play-offs – but I think there are a number of serious practical problems which are hard to overcome. One is that players have to fit four lengthy tournaments into their schedule which can’t be easy to do. But the really big practical problem is that FIDE has to organise and secure sponsorship for six different events worldwide. This would not be easy to do even if they were more competent than they are. We now learn that the Doha and Montreux events have been called off – one can speculate that they have fallen victim to the worldwide recession – so that rather underlines the problem. Looking back, we have to say that the whole concept was ludicrously optimistic.

Another major practical problem with the World Cup/GP system is how a dethroned world champion re-enters the system. Under the old-time Interzonal/candidates system, an ex-world champion (or unsuccessful challenger) would slot in at the Candidates stage. The lack of provision for this is a glaring hole in the World Cup/GP system. How was Kramnik supposed to re-enter the fray? He wasn’t in the GP, probably because it clashed with his world championship preparations and match. So presumably he was expected to take his chances in the World Cup. This just seems preposterous to me. Can you imagine a post-2000 Kasparov playing in one of these bun-fights? He baulked at playing in an infinitely more respectable and sensible candidates event in Dortmund in 2002 so one shudders to think what his reply would have been to an invitation to a Siberian slugfest. Any qualification system has to take account of world championship runners-up and allow them to re-enter at a level which is appropriate to their status and at a time which is fair and equitable.

I can fully understand Magnus Carlsen and others being disgusted with FIDE’s decision to change the qualification system in mid-cycle and have sympathy for the situation they find themselves in. But perhaps FIDE has finally woken up to just how rotten their system was and that for all manner of reasons it has to be replaced with a Candidates competition. One tournament, to include all the main contenders, should be relatively easy to organise and fund (even for FIDE). It was quite apparent that the overly ambitious and unwieldy GP series was coming apart at the seams so they probably had to do something immediately and of course this was bound to hurt those players involved in the GP - they have my sympathy.

Re the Carlsen withdrawal: looking at it another way, perhaps the Carlsen family have simply made a pragmatic decision. They have a legitimate grievance which effectively gives them a way out of the ailing GP cycle. Having exited, they can now concentrate their energies on parachuting Magnus straight into the Candidates. And why not? Magnus looks even more like a future world champion. Not only does he play chess like Garry Kasparov, he can politick like him as well. To be a world champion one must make good moves off the board as well as on, and this looks like a pretty good one.

So who will be the Candidates in 2010? Let’s assume Vishy successfully defends his title against Topalov/Kamsky, then we will have Topalov, Kamsky, the GP winner, the next World Cup winner, the nominee of the host country plus three other guys from the top of the rating list. So long as those qualifiers and nominees include Kramnik, Carlsen, Morozevich and perhaps Aronian and Ivanchuk, we should be assured of a competition that is reasonably representative of current world title contenders. The way we got here has been fraught with bad decisions, wrong turns and hurt feelings but finally we might be arriving at the right place. I did say “might”...

P.S. Has another Fischer record been broken? Magnus Carlsen, born 30 November 1990, withdrew from the Grand Prix on 5 December 2008, aged 18 years 6 days. Fischer made his first major competition withdrawal on 13 August 1961 (or thereabouts) when he withdrew from his match with Reshevsky at the age of 18 years 5 months 4 days old.

Chess on Mastermind Part 2

Well, in the end I did get to see Mark Hannon answering questions on Bobby Fischer on Mastermind tonight. Despite not having access to my own TV, I managed to watch via my computer using a TV tuner card. Isn't modern technology wonderful?

Mark Hannon did extremely well, scoring 13 points (and no passes) on his Bobby Fischer questions. I think he failed to get two of them - one, on the number of consecutive games Fischer won in the 1971 Candidates Matches - he said 20 when the answer was 13 (I think he misheard the question and added the games Fischer won at the back end of the Palma 1970 Interzonal). And he couldn't remember which piece Fischer had sacrificed against Spassky in one of the key 1972 match games (the answer was bishop and he said rook - for my part I cannot remember which game was being referred to). But 13 was a very good score under pressure (I think I got about 11 - under pressure of the glass of wine I had drunk shortly before). The questions were a good deal fairer than the last time chess featured on Mastermind. There were one or two tricky ones (where he had to remember the opening variation played in games) but he rose to the challenge.

But it was a case of "the operation was successful but the patient died." Mark piled up another 12 points on the general knowledge questions (some very tough questions in there) to score a very creditable 25 points overall. But another contestant just pipped him to first place, scoring 26. Never mind - the honour of chess was maintained.

Chess on Mastermind

Mark Hannon, a Welsh player of around 2000 strength, wrote to tell me recently that he is to be one of the four contestants of an episode of Mastermind going out on BBC2 on 7 November 2008 (Friday) at 8.00 PM. His specialist subject is "Bobby Fischer - Life and Career". Good luck with that, Mark.

The fact that Mark wrote to tell me about is perhaps an indicator that he did well, but I wouldn't guarantee it. I recall that a previous chessplayer contestant on the show in 2005 also tipped me off about his participation despite the fact that he had bombed horribly answering questions on the history of the world chess championship. But then so would most of us with some of the completely daft questions he was asked. For example, "in how many moves did Spassky beat Petrosian in game 19 of the 1969 championship?" - and I cannot think of a reply to that which isn't either rude or obscene. The number of moves played in a game of chess is an utter irrelevance - the equivalent of asking a football specialist how many throw-ins there were in the 1966 World Cup final. I would be hard pushed to tell you the number of moves played in any game of chess, either one of my own or a famous one such as Morphy versus the Duke of Brunswick, though I could probably give an approximation in many cases. Of course it is a big clue that the question setter knows little of chess and in compiling questions has simply looked up a few facts on Wikipedia.

Should Mark get one of these ludicrous "how many moves" questions I can see me getting very hot under the collar watching tonight's show. But fate has taken a hand to ensure that I don't burst a blood vessel. It so happens that my TV set will be inaccessible tonight as the sitting room floorboards are being treated for woodworm today and we won't be able to enter it for 24 hours. Probably just as well...

Armageddon in Nalchik

I've just been watching edited highlights of the Armageddon game between Monika Socko and Sabine Foisor in round one of the Women's World Championship in Nalchik.

Monika Socko of Poland had White and six minutes to win, playing against Sabina Foisor of Romania who had Black and five minutes to get a draw. It came down to a clock-thumping finale which was caught on film by a bystander. The final minute or so can be seen as part of this report on ChessBase.

The moves were being blitzed out as a tremendous rate with pieces being knocked over right left and centre. It came down to king and knight versus king and knight and a few seconds later Foisor's time ran out ("flag fall" in old terminology, though there is no flag on digital clocks).

The arbiters on the spot ruled that the game was drawn on the grounds that White could not force a win, though it is possible for Black to allow herself to be mated (e.g. wKc7, wNb6, bKa8, bNa7 - later note: credit to Sean Hewitt for noticing that the original position I gave here was not checkmate! I have moved the black knight from b8 to a7...). However, this is not the most logical interpretation of article 9.6 of the laws of chess ("the game is drawn when a position is reached from which a checkmate cannot occur by any possible series of legal moves, even with the most unskilled play...") and the appeal committee overruled the arbiters and awarded White a win.

However, one thing that nobody else seems to have noticed so far is that Foisor could have forced a draw in the final sequence. I reconstructed the game from the video and the diagram on the left above shows a position which arose just before the end. The game proceeded: 1...Ke6 2 Nc5+ Kf5 3 Nd3 Ke4 4 Nb4?? and now we reach the position on the right, above. Amazingly, Black didn't snap off White's knight with 4...Nxb4 which would have given her the draw she needed to qualify, but played 4...Kd4?? 5 Nc6+ Kc5 6 Ne5 Kd6 7 Nd3 Nf6 8 Nf4 Nd5 at which point Black lost on time. In truth, it is very hard to see the actual moves played but I'm pretty sure they were as above. I do hope poor Sabina Foisor doesn't watch the video as she will be kicking herself for missing a 'draw in one'.