Speed Champion Crowned for 2024 - Meet Lev Psakhis

 

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 1^st place with an incredible score of 12.5/17! The 3^rd 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 1^st 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.”