Last August, Rishi Sunak announced in the garden of 10 Downing Street that £500k of government money would be used via the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to back elite chess and hopefully restore the English game to its status of 40 years ago. Then, England were three times silver medallists behind the Soviet Union at the biennial Olympiads.
In 2024, England is the No1 nation in senior chess for over-50s and over-65s, with several gold and silver medals in recent world team championships, plus individual world titles for John Nunn and Michael Adams, as the golden generation lives on.
At the other end of the age scale, three of the 2015-born children ranked in the world top 10 by Fide, the global chess body, are English, including the No1 Bodhana Sivanandan, who heads the list ahead of all the boys and has been setting historic performance records for a girl of her age.
Sivanandan, who was present at the Downing Street launch last August and discussed chess with the prime minister, was the centre of attention this week at the Vera Menchik Memorial, an all-female 10-player international tournament commemorating the first woman world champion, who lived in London and was killed by a V1 rocket at her Clapham home in south London in 1944. The games were played at the London Mindsports Centre in Hammersmith.
It was a tough debut at such a high level for Sivanandan, who came to the event without a break from last week’s Reykjavik Open, where she scored an excellent 5.5 out of 9, losing only to a grandmaster and an international master. The Menchik Memorial was physically testing, with two games and a possible 10 hours play every day.
The nine-year-old’s style is patient and strategic rather than tactically creative, so that her games often went the full distance. Her total of three out of nine, six draws and three losses, was slightly below par, but included two missed wins caused by moving too quickly in rook endgames which are normally her strength.
First prize in the Menchik Memorial went to Harriet Hunt, the former England No1 who has made a recent comeback after a break for her academic career. Hunt and the Scot, Ketevan Arakhamia-Grant, who finished joint second with 6.5/9 to Hunt’s 7, were the class acts in the field and played at a higher level than their opponents .
England’s other young talent, Shreyas Royal, 15, was in action this week in a 10-player master tournament in Peterborough organised by the Four Nations Chess League (4NCL) and also backed by Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) funding. Royal is closing in on the grandmaster title and David Howell’s age record of becoming a GM at 16, but the final norm is proving elusive, and he fell short again at Peterborough, as did England’s other two aspirants there. Marcus Harvey, 28, got closest, drawing after a six-hour battle in Wednesday’s final round when a win would have secured his first GM norm.
Overall, the innovative DCMS funding has got off to a promising start, and should prove a significant boost to England’s young talents. Realistically, though, there are now fewer world class prospects than in the golden era of the 1970s, when the Bobby Fischer v Boris Spassky match sparked the interest of teenagers at grammar and public day schools, and St Paul’s alone produced four grandmasters.
The DCMS has allocated a further £250k to providing open-air chess tables in parks throughout the country, and there are numerous reports of these being successfully introduced.
Puzzle 2524
Vladimir Fedoseev v Magnus Carlsen, world rapid, Riyadh 2017. White played 1 Ke2? a3 after which the knight could not stop the pawn. Fedoseev is a strong grandmaster, but did not know the drawing trick for this and similar positions. What should White play?
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