Chess With Mother Goose
Submitted by
Dozy on Mon, 06/30/2008 at 3:30pm.
Chess has had its share of prodigies who astounded (and confounded) their seniors. Capablanca whupping his father at age four and Sammy Reshevsky going on tour as a young boy are two who went on to claim their place among the all time greats of the game.
And who could forget the young Fischer, dragging himself up by his bootstraps on ability and sheer determination?
More recently there has been a surge of young players strutting their stuff with the world's best—Polgar x3, Leko, Ponomariov, Karjakin and, of course, the amazing Magnus Carlsen are among them.
Some authorities equate this surge of young talent to the development of chess on the Internet which permits unprecedented learning opportunities and gives young players the opportunity to match themselves against strong opponents from an early age.
This is simply not so! We need go no further than the nursery rhymes of Mother Goose to realise that chess lessons were always available from the cradle, had we only the perception to realise it.
Mother Goose has been around for a long time now but she was sadly absent from the St. Petersburg tournament in 1909. Eugene Znosko-Borovsky caught Oldrich Duras in this position and forced white's rook at e1 to combat two threats at the same time.
Here is the rook that knows no fear
Its life would cost the enemy dear
Whether captured or not white can't stop mate
He sees the problem
But much too late
For he lives in the house that Jack built.
Mother Goose must have been forgotten at the Dubai Olympiad in 1986, too, because an analogous situation cropped up there. In the diagrammed position Murray Chandler's rook at e5 is sheltering his king from Rubens Filguth's bishop. Filguth's threatened discovered check looked dangerous but would be one move too late to help. Meanwhile his poor old overworked rook (keeping one eye on the back rank and the other on the g-file) was totally unable to cope with Chandler's 30 ...g3. If 31 fxg3, f2 wins immediately, and if 31 Rxg3 Re1, 32 Rg1 Qg2#
Here is the bishop shaven and shorn,
That stands by the queen, now so forlorn,
As the cocky pawn walks up to fight
Able to challenge the castle's might
That sits in the house that Jack built.
Here's a famous position in which Rudolf Spielmann caught the great David Janowski off guard. Janowski's queen seemed to have everything covered until Spielmann shifted the position for exchanging rooks. If Janowski interposes his rook, Spielmann will capture it immediately forcing the queen to recapture, thus allowing mate on g7; and if the King tries to shelter on g8 the knight fork wins the queen.
This is the pawn that sheltered the king,
And the queen and the rook both waited to spring
To defend the pawn in the coming fight—
But everything fell to a check by white
For they lived in a house that Jack built.
It takes only one careless move for a game to be lost and black's queen found herself severely discombobulated when Saviely Tartakower checked Gabriel Wood's king at Hastings, 1946. Black was forced to exchange queens, but white wasn't forced to recapture—at least, not before cheekily pinching black's rook.
This is the queen
Who found it hard.
To save herself
And the rook she must guard,
When the white queen checked
And drew her away
So a zwischenzug could win the day
For she lived in the house that Jack built
Herman Steiner's knight seemed to be well defended by both rook and bishop until Sammy Reshevsky popped the question in this game from the 1942 U.S. Championship in New York.
This is the rook that stood on his own
To guard both the bishop and knight alone
But the white horse leapt and the bishop fell
And then black's knight was lost as well
For they lived in the house that Jack built.
Our nursery rhyme must take us all the way back to 1902 for this game in which Harry Nelson Pillsbury caught Siegbert Tarrasch napping. In this case Tarrasch's king chose to guard a pawn on f7 as well as the vacant h7 square.. It all proved to be a little overpowering and the His Majesty succumbed to a fit of the vapours.
Here is the pawn with a king nearby
And a rook with mischief in his eye
Who checked the king
Who left the pawn
That was gobbled with glee
By the powerful queen
Who smashed the house that Jack built.
So that's the road to improvement in a nutshell. Forget about the latest opening variations, forget about endgame software and data bases: if you want to improve your chess try spending some time curled up in bed with a copy of Mother Goose—or maybe there are some secrets in the fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson. They have more wisdom between the lines than the whole of the Da Vinci Code.