A Scary Old Lady
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on Fri, 07/24/2009 at 3:09am.
In his introduction to The King's Indian Defence, (Fritz Trainer Series) Rustam Kazimdzhanov said that Russian chess players refer to the KID with some affection as “starushka” and, he said, that translates roughly as “my fair old lady”. He then went on to say that Fischer won almost every game he played with the KID and that Kasparov had been “scaring the whole planet” with it.
Kazim's DVD is good but if you were to invest in just one training program for the KID I'd recommend The ABC of the King's Indian by IM Andrew Martin. Also a Fritz Trainer production, this DVD is superb, and Martin's presentation is engaging and entertaining. He's a teacher of rare talent.
The King's Indian is certainly an exciting opening, both for black and for white, and is dangerous for both players. It is not for the faint-hearted.
I selected the Hindu goddess Kali to represent the KID. In her earliest incarnation as a figure of violence she is indeed a “scary old lady” but she has many other facets and is today identified with eternal energy—and that's not a bad parallel for one of Black's most dynamic weapons.
It's beyond the scope of this blog to cover the type of spectacular sacrifices that can occur in the KID, or the king-side vs queen-side struggles, but I've selected three short games that I hope you'll find entertaiining.
The first is a KID from Hastings 1923 in which Max Euwe defeated Hubert Price. Euwe made it look easy but Price was no pushover and among his opponents he numbered such greats as Capablanca, Maroczy, Steiner and Colle. Granted, he didn't score many points against the game's greatest, but he was no patzer either.
If we travel forward about forty years to 1962 the next game looks as though White was a beginner. In fact Georges Philippe was representing Luxembourg at the Varna Olympiad but gave India's Suresh Sakhalkar no opposition at all.
The last game is one in which Kasparov demolished no less a player than Anatoly Karpov in 27 moves. I've included it partly because of the following quote from Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess. I've got this third hand so it's not an exact quote.
At move 24, I promoted a pawn, saying "Queen" and looked to the arbiter to hand me the Queen that should already have been on the table. Before I received an answer, Karpov made his move, an illegal move. He alleged that, since I did not put another Queen on the board, he could choose any piece, and he chose the bishop. This comic act was soon resolved. I got my new Queen and Karpov resigned three moves later, although he demanded and received some more minutes on his clock, to compensate for the alleged confusion.
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