Reports by Eric van Reem
Black is OK! Stellwagen wins first game.
The first game of the Complete Chess Match between Dutch grandmasters Loek van Wely (32) and Daniel Stellwagen (18) ended in a surpisingly easy win with the black pieces for the younger player. This result puts some pressure on the Dutch Champion, who has to play with the black pieces on Wednesday.
Professional players use computers during their preparation, but not very often they are allowed to use the machines during the games. Last year, Daniel Stellwagen won the first Complete Chess Match against the German talent David Baramidze, Loek van Wely however, has never played a match like this. It is therefore interesting to see if Stellwagen compensate the Elo difference between the two players (150 points) with his experience from last year.
The players are allowed to use computers during the match. In the first two games they start with the classical opening position, but in the games on Thursday and Friday, the players have to deal with this position: N-R-N-B-Q-R-B-K. The players face this position once with the white and black pieces, so no more shuffling will be done this week! The players preferred to start the match with the well-known position 518 to get used to the computers and the software. The organisers installed well-known ChessBase programs like Fritz, Shredder, Hiarcs and Junior on the computers from sponsor Paradigit Computers: brand new Pentium 4-630 3,0 Ghz machines with 512 MB RAM. The players are also allowed to use the gigantic Megabase 2005 and endgame tablebases.
Just before the first game was about to begin, the window cleaner came by on the fourth floor of the Centre Ceramique in Maastricht to polish the windows, and he saw an interesting sharp opening (Kings Indian). As the game developed both players often analysed with Fritz, van Wely often consulted his favourite silicon buddy Junior 7. According to analyst Jan van Reek, the Dutch Champion missed a very good chance in the early middlegame on move 17. Stellwagen also thought that his opponent missed a few good alternatives to get an early advantage: “h4 looked very good and he should have played e6 somewhere in the middlegame”. Later on in the game van Wely blundered: 26.Bg5? was an strange move and led to the highly surprising mistake 27.Rxc5? he lost the exchange and faced a hopeless position with the white pieces after just 30 moves: “I just miscalculated my position and thought that I would become two pieces for the rook, but when I looked on the board I noticed that I had only one piece”, van Wely said after the game. “I should jump in the river Maas now. It is very strange that it is still possible to make a blunder in a game without time trouble and when you have strong engines at your disposal”, van Wely concluded.
Draw in game two: Stellwagen leads 1,5-0,5
The second game between the tow Dutch top players ended in a draw after 36 moves. Van Wely used the engines Shredder 9 and Junior 7 and Stellwagen mainly consulted Fritz 7 in this game. Both players used a lot of time analyzing with their silicon partners between move 15 and 17. Obviously, it was not easy to find the right plan in the early middlegame. For their last 15 moves both players had about 15 minutes on the clock. Quick decisions had to be made and in this stage of the game human intellect and intuition was needed. Although the engines thougth that black had a slight plus due to the bishop pair, Stellwagen never really had problems in the game and scored an easy draw with the white pieces. On Thursday and Friday two random chess games will be played. Let´s see if the Dutch Champion can come back in the match! “It is difficult to play Complete Chess”, van Wely said after the second game. You keep on anyalsing with the machine all the time and you hardly have time to get up and to walk around. I am very tired now”.
Some information about Complete/Advanced chess
Advanced chess was conceived and introduced in the international tournament circuit by Gary Kasparov, who played the first public match in June 1998 against Veselin Topalov. The match was organised in the city of Léon, Spain. Since then, Léon has hosted more Advanced Chess matches, in 1999 Anand won against Karpov and in 2000 and 2001 the Indian grandmaster won Advanced Chess matches against Alexei Shirov. In 2002 Vladimir Kramnik won a match against Anand. But not only in Léon Advanced Chess has been played. During the Chess Classic Mainz in August 2002 Peter Svidler played two Advanced Chess handicap games against professor Eckhardt Freise. The Russian champion was allowed to use Fritz on a slow laptop and the strong amateur Freise played with the same program on a very fast Pentium PC. At the same time Vishy Anand played a handicap match against the Mayor of Mainz, Jens Beutel. The amateurs, however, had no chance against the pros, even with fast computers. Several Advancec Chess games on the Internet have been played already. On the ChessBase server you can play as a “Centaur” , a man-computer combination, in the engine room.
In Maastricht we play Advanced chess with the time limits from classical chess and the result is Complete Chess. However, as we could see in the first game yesterday, it is still possible to lose track in the hybrid of possibilities, even with computers. Daniel Stellwagen blundered in his first game against Baramidze last year, this year Loek van Wely made some dramatic mistakes in his first Complete Chess game.
The Maastricht Shuffle!
The first moves in the third match game were: 1. f4 f5. Have you ever seen a game between grandmasters with these opening moves? However, Loek van Wely and Daniel Stellwagen, who played their third match game today, did not face the classical position, but on the last two match days they have to deal with this position: (see picture), which might go into history as the Maastricht shuffle.
With their random chess games, the players follow in the footsteps of Maarten van ´t Kruijs. He won Amsterdam 1851, the first Dutch chess tournament and Amsterdam 1852, the first random chess event ever played. In 1878 he won the sixth Dutch Championship. Count van Zuylen van Nyevelt had suggested random chess way back in 1792. His nephew Baron van der Hoeven reworked the idea for Amsterdam 1852. More information about Van ´t Kruijs van be found on www.endgame.nl/Kruijs.htm. By the way, 1.e3 is called the “Van´t Kruijs opening!”
Randomized Chess was designed to discount knowledge of the openings. The pawns are placed as in the array and behind them the pieces are placed in unorthodox fashion. Commonly a symmetrical arrangement is made as follows: white places any piece on a1, black places a similar piece on a8, Black selects a piece for b8, which White matches on b1, and so on. Each player must have a light and a dark bishop. Thus, 2880 arrays are possible. In Fischer Random Chess or Chess960, only 960 positions are possible, because the King has to stand between the rooks to make the most dynamic move in chess possible: castling. Not many chess programs know the castling rules Fischer invented, but that will change in August: the first Chess960 Computer Chess World Championship will be played in Mainz. More than 20 programs will play there. On www.chesstigers.de you can find more information about that event. If you are interested in other chess variants, you should check the www.chessvariants.com site.
Nowaday, computer programs do the shuffling of the positions and Harrie Smeets, the director of the Centre Ceramique started the shuffling program with the above mentioned result. Van Wely used about 20 minutes for his 4th move Qg3 and directed his pieces towards the King of his young opponent. With the move 16.Bf3 the Dutch champion offered a piece, but Stellwagen kept his cool and did not accept the knight after thorough analyses with his chess program Fritz. “Although Fritz showed a plus score for black, I did not feel well in this position and decided not to take the piece”, Stellwagen said after the game.” He won a pawn in the endgame but that was not sufficient to win the game. Van Wely was not to pleased with the opening. “It is difficult to find a plan for white, because the pieces do not seem to work together”. Both players analyses for more than an hour after the game, they tried various opening moves and enjoyed their first shuffle chess game. “Well, I am really curious what you will do with white tomorrow, Daniel”, Van Wely said to his opponent. So are we! It will be the last possibility for the Dutch champion to win a game and level the score.
On Friday the 13th (!) of May, 11.00 CET the last game will be played. Two world champions will be present in the Centre Ceramique in sunny Maastricht to follow the game: the correspondence chess grandmasters Umansky and Timmerman.
Stellwagen wins last game and match: 3-1
After the third game, Van Wely and Stellwagen analysed the shuffled opening position and experimented with different set-ups and possibilities. Their conclusion was that it was difficult to find an advantage for white. However, Stellwagen had to be careful not to show too much in the post-mortem, because on Friday the players had to play with the same starting position with reversed colours. At dinner, in one of the great restaurants in Maastricht, Daniel told your reporter that he would probably play his favourite move 1.e4. And so he did! A kind of “Scoth Game” developed if you look at the first moves, which was completely different than the day before. Loek van Wely´s set-up was not very succesfull on Thursday, and the computer could not help him.” I even think that the computer blocked my creativity in shuffle chess, maybe I should have played this position without the help of chess engines”. Stellwagen found a way to get a small plus out of the position. Maybe it was an advantage for Daniel that the players had the same position on the board on Friday?!
The Dutch champion used of lot of time for his first moves, and he invested more than 25 minutes for his 9th move. White had a small advantage all the time, according to the engines, but after about 20 moves the position was roughly equal. However, van Wely had some problems with the clock, e.g. he used more than 20 minutes for his move 22....Rge8. For the last 18 moves, there were only 19 minutes left on the clock for black. Stellwagen kept an eye on the DGT clock, played fast and decided to play for a win. He played natural, good moves and his engine Fritz like the position. The evaluation score gradually moved up from 0.50 to about 1.00. Since the Dutch champion had not much time anymore to check the various lines with his computer (about 2 minutes for 8 moves) he was happy to make it to move 40, only to discover that he lost a piece somewhere in the time scramble. A few moves later Van Wely resigned.
Next year another match will be played in Maastricht. Keep watching this site for the announcement. In the next few monts, a match will be played on this site between two ex-world correspondence chess champions Mikhail Umansky (RUS) and Gert-Jan Timmerman (NED).