Petr Limonov recently spent time in Moscow, and shares some thoughts on his trip.
“1 point out of 11 would be simply awesome” – that was my main thought when I finally decided to pay a visit to a chess club in Moscow. Surprisingly, there aren’t many clubs there (maybe 3 or 4, not counting the junior ones) but the standards are rather high. The tournament I decided to play in was unofficially called “The dummies’ tourney”, which meant that no one above 2300 would be allowed to participate in it (mean rating was approx 2120). Well, I certainly “qualified” for that one.
This was a blitz event, so I hardly had any time to realise what exactly happened in the first game. All I remember was a closed Sicilian, a lot of white pieces flying around my king and my opponent muttering something like: “you see, young man, Smyslov advised me to aim for rook endings, because no one plays them well, but in this particular case it wasn’t really necessary”. How nice. Well, to be honest, I should be thankful: at least, he allowed me to castle.
That remark about rook endings must have really annoyed me, for my next opponent (who was “only” 2071) decided to take it easy and allowed me to get a strong attack for en exchange. 1 point after 2 rounds – and thank you, Cristian, for some useful tips against the Modern ;)
In the end I scored 4.5 out of 11 (TPR 1945), which certainly was higher than my expectations, yet left me somehow dissatisfied (one of the reasons being the facial expression of one of my opponents after I played 1. e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Nd4 4. Nxd4 cxd4 5.d3??). But I also noticed one very important thing: very few players here avoid opening confrontations, and most of them confidently go for main lines and play sharp, open chess.
“Opening theory? What opening theory?” (Anatoli Shvedchikov)
This time it is an open event, 10 minutes per game. Last time I was getting regularly outplayed in quiet positions, so I decided to spice things up. What inspired me to do so, was one of the blitz games I witnessed. It was played between two juniors (rated around 2150 FIDE). The dialogue went as follows:
1.e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Bg5 e6 7.f4 b5
White: is this the Polugaevsky line? Black: yeah…
8.e5 dxe5 9.fxe5 Qc7
White: Right. What on Earth do I play now? Black: well, I can’t tell you, can I? Junior A: hmm…. ok, let’s just improvise: 10.Qe2!
Now, one would imagine that a Russian junior would never ask silly questions like that, as they are supposed to know everything about the openings by the time they are 7 years old. The ugly truth is – they don’t. After talking to an IM Shvedchikov I learnt that Russian kids are taught how to play endgames, they solve a lot of tactical puzzles, yet no emphasis is put on memorizing specific opening lines – all they do is go through GM games and simply see where to put their pieces. Therefore, they bravely dive into open Sicilians without knowing much “theory”, and by doing so they seem to learn a lot.
This time I scored 3.5 out of 8, and one of my victories was in the Najdorf, 6.Be3 line!
Another thing I noticed about chess players here: most of them openly play for a win, and they don’t seem to be ashamed of this. For them chess is as tough as boxing, and they rarely show respect to their opponents. Even shaking hands after a game is not a necessity. For example, after losing one game, I asked my opponent: what did I do wrong in the opening? The answer was: “Do I look like an opening encyclopaedia to you?” That is drastically different to how they treat chess in England, and you simply have to be ready for this sort of attitude if you play there.
Weirdly enough it sort of mobilised me, and I scored 4/8 with TPR 2020 this time (10 min per game).
Summing it all up, if you happen to be in Moscow and have some time to kill, visit the “Oktyabrsky” chess club (28/1, Bolshaya Polyanka street, Wednesday and Thursday 6:30pm, Saturdays and Sundays 12:30pm) and you won’t regret it – even though in my case most of the time it felt like I’d been through a washing machine… :)