The Queen's gambit ...

Chess has been on my mind quite a bit lately as we have been watching the miniseries on Netflix called the Queen’s Gambit. It has taken me back to a particularly happy time in my career as graduate student, the brief but glorious interlude between passing the comprehensive exams for entrance into the D.Phil. in Oxford and actually starting on the doctoral thesis. It was a wonderful summer in 1986 and I spent much of it hanging out with a good friend who was a brilliant mathematician masquerading as an engineer. After a particularly riotous trip to Portugal to unwind from the rigours of the exams we were captivated by the World Chess Championship replay match between Gary Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. Karpov had lost the title to Kasparov in the previous year but was afforded a rematch, the first 12 games of which were to be played in London.

My friend and I managed to secure tickets to Game 11 at the Park Lane Hotel adjacent to Hyde Park in London. For weeks we discussed the merits of King’s pawn versus Queen’s pawn openings. Okay that sounds ridiculous, but I offer three arguments in my defence. First, I identified very strongly with Karpov. He didn’t have Kasparov’s flair for the game but he was relentless and organised. I felt I was about to embark on a doctoral program in a subject for which I had absolutely no flair at all, but I was hoping that if I was relentless and organised enough I might triumph in the end. Second, the chess world was on fire with Kasparov’s adoption of hypermodern chess and in particular his use of the Grünfeld defence against Karpov’s favoured Queen’s pawn opening. Traditional openings try to establish mastery of the centre of the board, while the hypermodern school yields control of the centre squares, but seeks to dominate down the long diagonals of the board. Believe me, it was all very exciting at the time. Third, another friend, the  English student who was busy fighting Shelley’s Mont Blanc, offered to play me using hypermodern ideas. Alas, my domination of the centre of the board crushed his spirit and also his attempts to escape the Romantic poets through the medium of  hypermodern chess!

                                 The Queen's Gambit                          Günfeld Defence
 

Anyway, Game 11 was a complete bore. Karpov pushed his Queen pawn and as far as I can recall Kasporov played a classic variation of the Queen’s gambit declined. They called it a draw shortly after 40 moves and we trailed dejectedly back to Oxford. But the whole summer was really one to remember.

Anyway, imagine my surprise when I started obsessing about chess again about 35 years later. I even saw a chess board in the beautiful veggie bed that Cath created from her archaeological find soon after we arrived.

                                                       Before                                 After

I knew I was in trouble when I started to think that we were in fact playing chess with the wallabies and the possums by planting fresh spinach, silverbeet and parsley in the patch. What if they penetrated the wire fence which we constructed? Weren't we just indulging in a game of the possum's gambit (hopefully declined)? 

Cath, ever alert to situations in which I start to stare blankly into space, immediately decreed that we required a completely round area for a fire pit in the middle of the garden and marked out a huge area for this purpose. Thereafter I was given the instruction to dig out the area and level it off, My body aches as I pen these words having spent most of the day digging and carting soil. But, as usual, she was right. I haven't really the energy to worry too much about chess moves right now ...

                                                                

                                                                    The Fire Pit

This post is dedicated to the memory of Tim Monks (1961-1999) a great friend and a gifted mathematician but a particularly poor chooser of live chess games to attend.