At the age of 17 I started to play competitive chess. Before I spent my free time exclusively at music. In 1985 as a 9 year old boy I assigned for elementary music classes. A year later I started practicing an instrument the trombone. Another 2 years later I joined a harmony orchestra: the Gildemuziek of Roeselare. There I first got to learn to play music together with other children on Sunday-mornings. A couple of years later I was permitted to play music in the main-orchestra in which even some professionals were playing. We rehearsed weekly on Friday-evenings. It was an interesting and lovely time with many performances in Belgium and abroad. I remember once that I participated at a notorious procession in France. Before we got a free lunched offered from the organization which included martini as much as you wanted. I don't have to explain this heavily impacted our music afterwards.
The members got many privileges. The orchestra got a lot of revenues thanks to the performances and the members were allowed to enjoy this. Clothes, memberships, drinks, food, instruments, music scores, transport, camps... was often completely for free. Also the most loyal members got celebrated every time they achieve a 10 year jubilee. I experienced 1 such jubilee myself. The complete orchestra came to my (elderly) house for a serenade. As commemoration you got a golden star on the hat of your music-costume which from then onward stayed on it.
That episode of my life came to an end when I moved at the age of 22 to Antwerp. It became too difficult to still attend the Friday-evening rehearsals. Besides at that time I already got in love with the game of chess which meant I preferred to play chess in Deurne than playing music. I did however have a look for an orchestra or fanfare in the neighborhood but my chess-ambitions interfered. Today I still possess my instrument. When my children were very small, I did play music on it a couple of times but in the meanwhile things again got quiet.
It is again a special introduction but I do believe something which can be interesting for chess. Many clubs in Belgium are having difficulties to survive. Last year the chessclub of Schoten was even liquidated. If there are no members then it stops. So it is very important as club to keep your members happy and seek new ones. The Gildemuziek has today more than 90 members. They are still very successful after 95 years. Of course chess has much less financial resources but a jubilee for our most loyal members shouldn't cost much. This can be done easily at a yearly club-party by giving them a small present. Maybe we can also think at a sweater/ t-shirt of the club (something already done by kmsk). Each time a jubilee is reached an extra piece is added next to the emblem of the club.
The club KSK Deurne for which I play today, is also experiencing difficulties. If you check the homepage then you notice 6 candles. Each candle represents somebody important for the club and whom recently died. Also we don't see any youngsters breaking-through to competitive chess despite a decade of youth-trainings. This year the club celebrates their 60th anniversary with a quiz. I don't like to quiz but this jubilee is a very good opportunity to make changes and prepare for the future.
So jubilees for chess players don't exist which doesn't mean I can't consider this year as a jubilee. It was in 1993 that I participated at my first big open international tournament at that time still as unrated player. Big can be considered literally as in that year there was a record of participants in Open Gent, 539 see palmares. I scored a modest 3,5/9 in that tournament. I guess that I still can find the score sheets in an old box (at that time I didn't have a computer and I never digitized it) but I won't publish anything here of it as nobody wants to be reminded about how bad my play then was.
25 years later so now in 2018 I again participated at the Open of Gent. I assume the organizers didn't notice. Some tournaments do pay attention to such details. In the last Open Brasschaat the organizers offered a present to the most loyal participants by inviting them for a simul. This wouldn't be interesting for me of course but it is the gesture which is important. In the end I probably gave myself the most beautiful present for this jubilee by competing against some very interesting opponents. In round 5 I played against the congenial American grandmaster from Iranian origin Eshan Moradiabadi, later winning also the tournament. However in round 7 I got an even more fascinating opponent: the Russian grandmaster Vladimir Epishin.
Once Vladimir was the 10th highest rated player in the world, helper of Karpov in his world-championship-matches and achieved a peakrating of 2670. Any real chessplayer loves to get a chance to play a standard game against such famous grandmaster. So I was eager to bring my best game. However in the morning I discovered very soon how difficult the task would be. He has 3441 games in my database (I only have 287) of which already 781 with black against 1.e4 (compared to 63 of mine). Besides I was also very surprised by the sheer amount of openings he dared to play. Even when I just stick to my fixed repertoire (so I don't change my openings) then I should still consider 72 different positions conform the database (I am sure that this doesn't include everything Vladimir knows as many games never get in the database). For this article I summarized it (so I prepared this a month after I played the game) as you can't fully understand this without viewing the details. I have never seen such large arsenal of openings from any player but I do suspect that the Ukrainian grandmaster Vassily Ivanchuk would easily beat this record.
To understand the magnitude of it, I made the same exercise upon myself. It sounds weird but how many openings would I look at to prepare for a game against myself by using the same kind of database.
 |
| Vladmir Epishin's arsenal of openings which I had to take into account |
So that are only 3 or 24 times less than Vladimir. Most amateurs are wondering what it takes to become a top-player. Well you see there is still an enormous difference between what a FM knows and what an (ex-) worldtop-player knows. By the way don't assume Vladimir just plays something randomly as most if not all chosen systems he knows very well which he also proves in our game.
It is pretty futile to prepare for such amount of openings during an open tournament. I got up at 6 o'clock in the morning to start. Anyway I don't need much sleep during a tournament due to the excitement of the games at the condition I don't drink any alcohol. I stopped at 11 o'clock out of necessity to leave timely from Kontich to Gent and to pick up along the way 2 players having troubles to find transport. It is like you go to an exam but you only learned a part of the complete course as many systems Vladimir played were completely new for me. In orange I indicated at which openings I had looked briefly of the 72 possibilities. It are 24 of them so 1/3.
In the game I was lucky as Vladimir chose number 68. On the other hand my luck didn't last long. I hadn't found any games of Vladimir beyond move 5 so there was still a lot to guess. Eventually I couldn't remember properly all my preparations. Looking at a maximum amount of lines comes at a certain price. It is necessary to repeat to remember things well. Anyway it was a great fight. In below hyper-sharp game both players were pushed at and over their limits.Brabo
I remember Epishin playing at Open Leuven. Watching him play made me realise just how much GMs really understand and how much study they have put in to master the openins. His recent performances in Gent were impressive. I hope your club keeps on going. Several English clubs have folded and there does not appear to be much interest by youth.
ReplyDeleteGood column by the way.
One of the reasons why I wrote this article, is the declining respect for grandmasters. Many players look at the engines and get the impression that grandmasters play horribly. Besides today we have already +1600 grandmasters so how hard can it be to get such title. Well I think this article gives a glimpse about what amount of knowledge is needed to become a grandmaster which is definitely something extraordinary.
Delete"I hope your club keeps on going. "
DeleteI wrote in my article https://chess-brabo.blogspot.com/2018/05/queen-endgames-part-2.html that our club had the worst result last interclub-season in the 20 years that I've participated. Well yesterday I received the news that 3 of our base-players of the first team have announced to step down and put themselves as reserves. That means players of the second team have to fill the gaps. This doesn't need to be a disaster but for sure today a lot of doubts exist. A relegation to 3rd division while 5 years ago we were still playing in 1st, could be very painful for the future of the club.
Another thing which I forgot to mention, is the heavy negative impact which the raise of the pension age has on most clubs (not only chess related).
DeleteRecently the pension age has been increased from 65 to 67 in Belgium. However an even much bigger impact has the abolishment of pre-retiring. 20 years ago I've seen people going for pre-retiring at the age already of 51. That is very young so many of them took up important voluntary tasks in the clubs. This group of young retired people is completely disappearing while people above 67 can't replace them. In my club several people of the board are around 70 years old which clearly is another big concern for the future.
I have to agree re age of your committee. Our committee has an average age of 65. We don't like to ask the younger members to devote a lot of time to the club as most of them are in jobs which are very time consuming and the ability to leave on time or early is now very limited. Work appears to be all consuming for many people in England. Several of our top players find it difficult to commit to club chess because of work commitments, both in the private and public sectors. A great shame.
DeleteIn my Dutch article http://schaken-brabo.blogspot.com/2013/09/inactiviteit.html I wrote about (top) players playing about 10% less games than 7 years earlier.
DeleteIn my Dutch article http://schaken-brabo.blogspot.com/2016/08/vakantie-deel-2.html I wrote about 20% decrease of Belgian chess players between the age of 30-50 in the last 7 years.
I agree that the changed employment-conditions in which much more is demanded, has made it hard to combine a job with chess. However maybe an even more important impact had the emancipation of the women. Before all house-hold tasks + children related stuff was almost exclusively for the wife. This is definitely not the case anymore. Women work also today and expect that the husband helps. Finally there is today also a much wider variety of interesting things we can do. If you add up everything then it is just natural that chess-clubs in our Western world are struggling to survive.
My personal opinion is that clubs should much more adapt themselves to those changes. Unfortunately as we already noticed, most commitees consist of 'old' people and that are exactly the sort of people which are the last to like changes. We just had our annual member-meeting of the club and again we just continue as we did for the last decades.
Still there are a few clubs with potential in Belgium. It is an open question if those can counter the current trend.