After Bobby Fischer and before Magnus Carlsen, the "Best in the West" was the Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman. Twice a world championship finalist (if only of the FIDE variety during the split title era), Timman was for many years the most consistently successful player outside the USSR (and once it fell, the countries that comprised it). Timman is also a fine author and study composer, but it is his over the board play we'll examine in our show this week.
Timman played many games against former world champion Anatoly Karpov - including two title matches - and while Karpov had (much) the better score overall, Timman got in his licks too, beating Karpov no fewer than 11 times over the course of their rivalry. Their games were generally very rich in content (with few short draws), and we will see just such a game in this week's show. Played in Mar del Plata in 1982 - won by Timman, who was two points ahead of Karpov! - Timman played a Scheveningen Sicilian, allowing the then-feared Keres Attack, and gradually outplayed Karpov in a fine game.
This was an exceptional performance on several levels. First, beating Karpov was extraordinarily difficult in those days, especially with the black pieces. Second, to do so in one of Karpov's favorite lines was even more impressive, and to do it by outplaying one of the greatest positional players of all time (maybe even the greatest) is the icing on the cake. It's an instructive game too, so I hope you'll join me as we take a closer look this Wednesday night at 9 p.m. ET (that's 3 a.m. CET for my overseas viewers). To watch, log on to the Playchess.com server at that hour, go to the Broadcasts room and then find and select Karpov-Timman under the Games tab.
Watching is easy, the show will be fun, and I hope to see you there.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 11:03AM