The Livingston County Chess
Club meets every Monday night between
4pm and 10pm
at the Buffalo Wild Wings in
the Green Oak Mall in Brighton, MI.
Stop in for some friendly chess, good food
and 'refreshments'.
Everyone of all ages and playing strength are
welcome to attend. And free lessons to all beginners!
Our annual Speed Chess Championship took place last Monday and was won by Pete Bruder undefeated at 3-0.
Congratulations Pete!
A three-way tie for 2nd with Vince V, Mike N and Tom V with 2.
Our club next tournament action will be in May with the always interesting Freestyle 960 Tournament. You want to be here for that fun event!
In the meantime, casual chess reigns! Now meet Lev Psakhis.
Many of you
who were not alive or paying attention to chess in the early 1980’s may not
know who the Russian GM Lev Psakhis is. He is a rarity in the world of chess.
He is comparable to the nineteenth-century comet like the American chess player
Harry Nelson Pilsbury.
But what do
comets do? They light up the world….. and then…… fade away.
Psakhis came
out of nowhere, as a player with almost no international experience, to win the
1980 Soviet Chess Championship! He was just an International Master at the
time! To prove it was not a fluke, he came back and won it the next year too.
He stopped even the great Garry Kasparov during Garry’s surge to the top of
world chess!
Psakhis beat
Kasparov in round 2 and then the two battled for the next 15 rounds with them
both tying for 1st place with an incredible score of 12.5/17! The 3rd
place finishers all had just 10 points.
That is the
equivalent to Watson and Nickalaus finishing 11 and 10 strokes ahead of the
field in the 1977 British Open.
But as fate
would have it, that was the pinnacle of his career, while for Kasparov it was
his springboard. Psakhis seemed to hit a wall of air and fell out of the chess
elite. No one has been able to come up with an understanding of this two-time
Soviet Champion.
Born in 1958
and learning chess at the sort of late age of 9, his family moved to
Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. So, he was a late chess starter and did not live exactly in
the center of Soviet chess. He had to basically study on his own. Does this
sound Fischer like – only worse? Fischer at least was in New York City and their
libraries and bookstores. And google ‘Siberia’ for those who are not familiar.
It makes Alaska look like Nashville as far as weather and the number of people
there.
Psakhis
claimed not to be a prodigy. But in 1973 the great Salo Flohr came to
Krasnoyarsk for a simultaneous exhibition. Flohr brought some Chess Informants
with him. Psakhis amazed Flohr by looking at the diagrams in the book and
knowing who the players were. He had memorized all the diagrams in all three
books!
In spite of
the lack of opponents and competition, when he did play in his Republic
Championship (think State Championship) at the age of 19 and not yet being a
master, he took 1st place!
After
winning this tournament he got to play in his first International Tournament in
Poland. He started out terribly, with 1 point in 3 rounds, but after that he
was unstoppable and came back to win that tournament!
Then he came
back home and won the Challenger’s Section of the Soviet Championship, and you
know what happened at that point.
Psakhis had
risen to number 9 in the world in a very short time. But he seemed to hit a
wall. In his own words, “I very gradually went from a very strong grandmaster,
to a strong one, to a good one, then to an ordinary one. Then I turned my
attention to working as a trainer.”
In
interviews especially in the West later, he has been asked if being a Jew hurt
his chess career with the Soviet authorities? Psakhis won’t go there.
Remember,
Garry Kasparov changed his name from Weinstein to lessen the effect that he was
half-Jewish. And Kasparov was a protégé of Heydar Aliev, a member of the
Politburo of the Soviet Union. Many times, it came down to who you knew. And
who liked you.
Psakhis for
a reason no one can determine was disliked and possibly hated by Nikolai
Krogius, the President of the Soviet Chess Federation. Psakhis said of Krogius,
“Although he was friends with practically no one, but I was one of the few
people he hated.”
Psakhis
seems to be at peace with the way his life has worked out. He emigrated in 1990
to Israel and played several times on the Olympic Team. He has written many chess books and trained
some of the leading chess players. He is currently working with Parimarjan Negi,
the world’s second youngest grandmaster (13).
Asked if he
would change anything he did in his life, Psakhis said, “One can never change
one’s life. As our friends the Indians say, ‘it is all karma.’ Even if I had
played the Caro-Kann instead of the French, it would not have changed anything
in my life. That is simply the way it went. And at this moment, this is where
it has led to.”
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