The Germans have an impressively lapidary way of describing historical battles. Whereas in English we would describe the disaster which overwhelmed the legions of the Roman general Varus in

15AD, as the Battle of the Teutoberger Forest, the neat German expression is  _ Die Hermannschlacht _ (“Hermann’s battle”). This formulation honours the Teutonic tribal chieftain Arminius

(aka Hermann), who caused the Emperor Augustus to lament: “Oh Varus, Varus, give me back my legions.”  Taking a leaf from the Germanic book, I have coined the phrase  _ Zwergenschlacht _  

(“battle of dwarves”) for the forthcoming world championship match between the two, relatively speaking, dwarves who are competing for the supreme chess title, in the absence of the dominant

bid to host the FIDÉ World Championship Match 2024. The Match will feature the defending champion Ding Liren from China and the challenger Dommaraju Gukeshthe missing elephant in the room, 

from India, and will take place between November 20 and December 15, 2024. D Gukesh and Ding Liren at the Tata Steel Chess Tournament.(Shutterstock) FIDÉ received three competitive

applications for hosting the World Championship Match – from New Delhi (India), Chennai (India), and Singapore. After reviewing the bids and inspecting all potential host cities for their

venues, amenities, event programs, and opportunities, the International Chess Federation has selected Singapore as the host of the World Championship Match. “We are delighted that for the

first time in the history of FIDÉ, a match for the World Championship will take place in Singapore. Not only is Singapore one of the most iconic global tourist and business hubs, but it is

also a thriving chess centre with great ambitions and talent,” the FIDÉ President Arkady Dvorkovich said. “I would also like to thank the other bidders – New Delhi and Chennai. Both cities

are renowned chess hubs with a rich history of hosting chess events, and we are confident we will see major chess events there in the future,” Dvorkovich continued. “FIDÉ is genuinely happy

to bring the FIDÉ World Championship Match to Singapore. Chess is not just a popular game and sport; it is often seen as the epitome of the human mind’s ability to think strategically, to

plan, and to foresee. Singapore embodies these same qualities. It’s a great match for the great Match!” The FIDÉ World Championship Match is one of the most important and widely watched

chess events globally. Held every two years, it features the defending World Champion and the Challenger, chosen through a qualification process culminating in the Candidates Tournament,

which includes eight of the world’s top players. The defending Champion is Ding Liren who won the title after defeating Ian Nepomniachtchi in Astana, Kazakhstan, in April 2023 on tiebreaks.

The Challenger is the 18-year-old Dommaraju Gukesh from India, who won the Candidates Tournament in April 2024 in Toronto. The World Championship Match will consist of 14 games. The player

who scores 7.5 points or more wins the Match, and no further games are played. If the score is equal after 14 games, the winner is decided by a tiebreak. The title of World Chess Champion

dates to no later than 1886, when Wilhelm Steinitz defeated Johannes Zukertort in a gladiatorial contest, specifically designed to resolve the question of who was the strongest player in the

world after Paul Morphy’s death in 1884, though Steinitz had claimed that status since 1866. Less clear is whether the great predecessors of Steinitz also merited that proud title. Part of

the difficulty of authentication is lack of evidence of important contests and gaps in the record. The story begins in the 18th century, when the French chess expert François-André Danican

Philidor won an important match in 1747 against the erudite Philip Stamma, translator of oriental languages to the court of King George II. Sadly, none of those games has survived. Following

Philidor, who died in 1795, there comes a hiatus, until the brief flourishing of LaBourdonnais during the 1830s.  After this, there is a further gap in the record until the 1840s, when the

French heir to the Philidor tradition, Saint-Amant, was overthrown in Paris, the epicentre of European chess life at that time, by the English champion Howard Staunton. Fortunately, from

Staunton onwards, there is a relatively unbroken line of succession, with each champion being dethroned by the next in line. The exceptions are the following trinity, beginning with Morphy,

who died alone, deranged and unloved. Then, of course, Fischer’s demise — not too dissimilar to Morphy’s. The Dutch grandmaster Jan Hein Donner once opined, “…it doesn’t take much insight 

into human nature to predict that Fischer will not be world champion for long. His quirks, moods and whims will turn against him at the moment when he has reached the top. He’ll hit out

hard, but at nothing but thin air.” While Morphy and Fischer withdrew from the field of honour, Alekhine died in office, and has historically been reviled for alleged antisemitic attitudes

and heavy drinking, though these views remain controversial. But these three great ensconced and reigning champions have thus permanently preserved their hallowed nimbus of invincibility.

Also worthy of mention are various champions who have won the FIDÉ title (FIDÉ is the International Chess Federation, the governing body of chess), without gaining universal recognition from

the global chess community. These include Max Euwe, Efim Bogolyubov, Vesselin Topalov and Viswanathan Anand. A common outcome is that such FIDÉ champions have gone on to contest matches

against the universally recognised laureate, and in two such cases (Euwe and Anand) have emerged victorious to become undisputed champions themselves. The first great player who could be

considered a World Champion, Philidor, dominated the chess scene of his day. The term “World Champion” was not used when describing him, with commentators preferring to employ such metaphors

as “wielding the sceptre”. There is also the problem that very few of Philidor’s games on level terms have survived, his reputation largely being constructed on his blindfold simultaneous

displays, which so electrified London chess enthusiasts. Philidor was able to conduct three games blindfold at once, a feat that led to a letter of admonishment from the French

encyclopaedist, Denis Diderot, warning Philidor that such exploits might lead to brain damage. It is interesting to note that Philidor was the first great apostle of pawn power in chess.

According to Philidor, pawns determined the structure of the game, they were in fact “the soul of chess” not mere cannon fodder, whose sole task was to make way for the power of the pieces.

In this respect his chess teachings paralleled the rise of the masses embodied in the French Revolution of 1789. France was the dominant chess nation at the turn of the 18th and 19th

centuries, and the next player after Philidor who could be considered an early world champion was the 19th-century French master Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais. La Bourdonnais’ claim

to fame rests primarily on his mammoth series of matches against Alexander McDonnell, contested in London in 1834. This represented the finest corpus of games ever created up to that time

and numerous generations of chess devotees learned their basic chess strategies and tactics from these ingenious and well contested battles. Both protagonists appear to have become mentally

exhausted by their efforts and died shortly after their epic series. In the panoply of proto-champions, Howard Staunton, Victorian polymath, Shakespearean scholar, and assiduous chronicler

of the English schools system, is the only English player who could legitimately be considered as world champion. In a series of matches between 1843 and 1846, Staunton defeated the French

master Pierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant, followed closely by victories against the German master Bernhard Horwitz and Daniel Harrwitz, originally from Poland. Staunton’s match against

Saint-Amant was the first contest at the highest level that closely resembled the template for modern World Championship competitions. The chess pieces in regular use for important

competitions, including the 2018 London contest between Carlsen and his challenger, Fabiano Caruana, are named the Staunton pattern, after Howard Staunton. The German master Adolf Anderssen

seized the sceptre from Howard Staunton when he decisively defeated the English champion in the very first international tournament in London 1851. Anderssen was one of that select group,

which includes Mikhail Botvinnik and Viswanathan Anand, who initially assumed the accolade of supreme chess master from a tournament rather than a match.  The London event was in fact put

together by Staunton, who thereby created a perfect pretext for losing out to Anderssen in their knockout match, it being notoriously difficult to compete in an event, whilst simultaneously

organising it. Anderssen can claim to be one of the supreme tacticians of all time. Three of his wins are of imperishable beauty. On their own they would justify anyone’s devotion to chess.

They are his  Immortal Game against Kieseritsky  (a casual game played at Simpsons-in-the-Strand, not in the tournament) in London, 1851; his  Evergreen game against the pseudonymous

Dufresne  (in reality the German player E. S. Freund) of Berlin 1856, and his  majestic sacrificial masterpiece against Zukertort  of Breslau 1869. Paul Morphy was the American meteor who

took the world by storm over the two momentous, whirlwind years of 1857 and 1858. His grand tour of Europe culminated in a match victory against Adolf Anderssen, after which Morphy was

universally acknowledged as the world’s greatest player. Thereafter Morphy issued a challenge to anyone in the world to take him on at odds (Morphy starting the game with a pawn handicap)

but no one accepted. At this point the meteor had burnt itself out and Morphy, tragically, retired from chess, a curious forerunner of Bobby Fischer’s behaviour following his famous 1972

World Championship victory against Boris Spassky. Morphy understood the principles of chess better than anyone who had come before him. Anderssen’s tactical brilliance sprang like Athene

from the head of Zeus, without necessarily having grown from regular organic pre-conditions. Morphy, on the other hand, constructed his positions along sound strategic and positional lines,

before unleashing his devastating arsenal of tactical weaponry.  On Morphy’s retirement, Anderssen resumed the position of world leadership which had belonged so fleetingly to the first

great genius of American chess. Anderssen lost a match in 1866 to Wilhelm Steinitz, the first player who could definitively be described as an official World Champion. The previous wielders

of the sceptre, Philidor, La Bourdonnais, Staunton, Anderssen and Morphy, were all, at the time, acknowledged as the leading chess practitioner of their day, but it is less clear that the

title “world champion” had been universally accepted.  Steinitz, on the other hand, insisted on this description and he himself dated his tenure from his 1866 match victory, also in London,

against Anderssen. Steinitz’s pre-eminence was confirmed 20 years later when he demolished Johannes Zukertort in their 1886 match in the US, which was specifically described as a World

Championship contest. Thus far I have described the early years of the World Championship and now I return to Magnus Carlsen’s recent defences of his title, which he has held since 2013. The

2018 Championship match, for example, held here in London, was fought out between the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, the highest ever rated chess grandmaster, and the previously unexpected

challenger, Fabiano Caruana, who had been considered somewhat vulnerable and fragile. Caruana originated from Italy but became an American citizen. With energy and vigour, he decimated his

rivals among the top ten grandmasters. In order to qualify, the winner had to exhibit strength, agility, power, alertness, incredible persistence, stamina, and the power of the “will to

win”. From this shark pool, Fabiano became the number one contender, and number two ranked player in the world.  Throughout all the complications of selecting the challenger to the World

Chess Champion, the pairing was ideal: a battle between the two best in the world fighting for the world title. The implication is that chess at this exalted level is a sport, both mental 

and physical – an appropriately termed Mind Sport. As the Championship was in process, a wonderful flash of confirmatory news emerged from the media: Magnus Carlsen was nominated, in Norway,

to win the Sports Personality of the Year. This Championship had emerged as a real Battle of the Titans.  Magnus had now won four world title bouts, twice versus Anand and once each against

Karjakin and Caruana. The latter two ended with the tie-breaks, at which Magnus excels. On this occasion, Magnus praised Fabiano, as being his most difficult opponent of the three. Magnus

had secured his tenure as World Champion until 2022, when he had held the title for 9 years, thus moving into an equal category of championship longevity with such greats as Capablanca,

Petrosian, Kramnik and Anand, but ahead of Euwe, Smyslov, Tal, Spassky and Fischer. Only Steinitz, Lasker, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Karpov and Kasparov held the title for significantly longer

periods. In the modern world, where everything has speeded up, could Carlsen go on to outperform all these titans? The answer was a resounding NO! Having crushed his latest challenger,

Nepomniachtchi, in 2021, Carlsen simply abdicated his title the following year, while continuing to enter and win every non-championship event he could add to his  collection. As we have

seen, the modern era of chess began with Wilhelm Steinitz, who, in 1886, became the first of sixteen (so far) universally recognised World Champions. Every subsequent World Champion has

pushed forward the boundaries of chess knowledge, science and art, each in his own way reflecting the intellectual ethos of his day. Steinitz was a contemporary of Darwin and Marx, who

proposed rigid theories to elucidate the evolution of species and the nature of society and government. Like them, Steinitz tried to impose an iron-clad theory on chess. In his case, it was

the insistence that an attack could not be successful unless a prior strategic advantage had been achieved. This contrasted strongly with previous practitioners of chess, who had not been

averse to launching haphazard attacks, whatever the situation on the board. Emanuel Lasker reigned as World Champion in the early 20th century. He was a philosopher who developed an entire 

intellectual programme based on the idea of _  Kampf  _ (struggle). He relied not on ‘theory’, but on what worked against specific opponents. Good defenders were lured into unsound attacks,

while avid attackers regularly found themselves exposed to Lasker’s own mercilessly aggressive firepower. In his foreword to Lasker’s biography, none other than Albert Einstein paid tribute

to Lasker’s independence of thought: “ _ Emanuel Lasker was undoubtedly one of the most interesting people I came to know in my later life. Few, indeed, can have combined such a unique

independence of personality with so eager an interest in all the great problems of mankind. I met Emanuel Lasker in the house of a mutual friend and I came to know him well during the many

walks we took together discussing ideas on a variety of subjects. It was a somewhat unilateral discussion in which, almost invariably, I was in the position of listener, for it seemed to be

the natural thing for this eminently creative man to generate his own ideas, rather than adjust himself to those of someone else. _ ” Jose Raoul Capablanca, the third Champion, mirrored the

rise of the transatlantic New World, while the exiled Russian aristocrat Alexander Alekhine had a turbulent style based on revolutionary tactics, parallel with that of Dada and Surrealism in

art, and reflecting the contemporary political turmoil in Europe. After World War II the USSR began to dominate world chess. The dynasty was founded with Mikhail Botvinnik’s World

Championship victory. Alekhine had died in 1946, and after a two-year interregnum, Botvinnik took the title in 1948. Why was the Soviet Union, and subsequently Russia, so overwhelmingly

successful at Chess? From 1948 to 1972 the USSR dominated the World Championship, and thereafter still provided the vast majority of the world’s elite Grandmasters. This has much to do with

the gigantic material resources that the USSR ploughed into achieving victory in virtually every international sport. In the collective mind of the Soviet regime, chess was not merely a

sport; it also conferred intellectual respectability. It should never be forgotten that the Russian Revolution had made the USSR very much a Pariah state. Hence, from the Soviet viewpoint of

craving international prestige, the game was worth substantial financial investment, in order to seize the World Championship and, by systematic nurturing of young players, to consolidate

and retain it. There is also a deeper reason. The Soviet state was notable for its lack of opportunity for free thought. Any book, article, pamphlet, idea, piece of music or even poem might

be considered ideologically unsound. The consequence for the writer, composer or thinker who offended Communist or Stalinist state orthodoxy ranged from ostracism to imprisonment in Arctic

Circle labour camps and the ultimate sanction: summary execution. In 1987, Joseph Brodsky, the dissident Soviet writer, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Earlier he had written: 

“Evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist.” For expressing such sentiments he was sentenced to five years in a prison camp in Siberia. Brodsky also argued that “the surest

defence against evil is extreme individualism and originality of thinking”. Here lies the true reason, aside from any state sponsorship, for the extraordinary popularity of chess in Soviet

Russia. Chess offers a wide field for individual thought, in which the state has no remit to interfere. The irony is that what I would describe as the ultimate right wing libertarian game,

should become the most powerful icon of the world’s most powerful communist state. Even in music, the leading Soviet composer, Dimitri Shostakovich was ridiculed by that well-known music

critic, Joseph Stalin, and lived in constant fear of arrest and deportation to a labour camp. Playing chess allowed Russians to free their minds from the shackles of state dogma. Not even a

Soviet commissar would have dared to utter the words, “Comrade, that move is ideologically unsound.” In chess the sole criterion is whether the move is good or bad, whether it wins or loses.

By playing chess, ordinary Russians reconquered for themselves a measure of personal intellectual liberty in their everyday lives, over which the state had no control. In chess they could

pursue freedom of thought and self-determination of decision. In 1988 Professor Paul Kennedy published his book  _ The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers _ , in which he argued that

over-reliance on military strength and state security creates an imbalance with economic viability and can lead to the collapse of even the seemingly most impressive nation or empire. This

was widely, but wrongly, interpreted as a dire prediction of the future of the USA. Kennedy’s book far more accurately  prophesied the imminent demise of the USSR. Indeed, within a further

four years the USSR, as it had been constituted since the Revolution of 1917, no longer existed. A critical factor in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of its communist

masters was the regime’s dependence on restricting information and ideas. This was at the precise moment when the economies of the western world, and many in the East Asia, were on the brink

of an information explosion, driven by new information based technologies and reliant to an unprecedented degree on intellectual capital, of which  _ AlphaZero _  is a proud British symbol.

This information gap became acute during the 1986 World Chess Championship between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. The match was held in two equal halves, twelve games in London

(organised by the present author), twelve in Leningrad, as St Petersburg was then still known. As a standard facility for the International Press Corps, within five minutes of the end of

each game the London logistics team printed a complete record of the moves and the times taken by each player, together with key comments by Grandmasters and printed diagrams of important

situations in the game. Not only was this blitz report instantly available: it was also faxed to interested journalists around the world within a further five minutes. Nowadays, even faxes

are ancient technology, but in 1986 they were at the cutting edge of communications. In Leningrad, meanwhile, the contrast could not have been more marked. Three elderly babushkas typed up

the moves as the games progressed. However, there was no photocopier at the Championship site in the Hotel Leningrad. The match Director, Secretary and Press Chief had to sign a document –

in triplicate – allowing the press assistant to take a cab to Communist Party Headquarters several miles away, the location of the sole official photocopier in the city. Only on the press

assistant’s return after about 45 minutes, could the assembled international press corps discover what the official moves had been. It was obvious to me that, for the USSR, the game would

soon be over. The Soviet empire is no more, but the information revolution has accelerated and the value of intellectual capital continues to appreciate. Playing chess remains one of the

most powerful methods of cultivating a free yet disciplined intellect. Chess Grandmasters are increasingly viewed as high-level mental athletes, commanding the world stage along with million

dollar purses. Since 1972, when the mercurial American genius Bobby Fischer wrested the World Championship from Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, chess and its most prominent personalities have

become international superstars. The increased prize fund for major contests reflects how much interest in chess has grown. In 1969 the World Chess Championship match was worth about 3000

roubles (less than $3000) to the winner. In Singapore the forthcoming world championship will boast a prize fund of $2.5 million USD. Chess champions are now global brain stars, and Magnus

Carlsen probably earned more from commercial endorsements than from playing the game. ‘ _ I know of no spectacle on earth that can keep thousands of spectators enthralled and in total

silence for five hours. Utterly immobile and deep in thought, the players sit facing each other like the hieratic actors in a Japanese Kabuki production.‘ _ – Fernando Arrabal, the Spanish

dramatist and chess writer, on the 1985 Moscow world championship. Arrabal, the originator of  _ The Theatre of Panic _ , was also an avid spectator at the Carlsen vs. Caruana championship

final. The correlation between success at chess and top-flight academic performance in the British school system is staggering. The same schools appear at the head of the list of top-scoring

schools at A-level (the examinations taken at age 18) and are the most successful in the British Schools Chess Championship, often supported by  _ The Times _ . In some high-achieving

independent schools in the UK chess is increasingly being seen as a core element of the curriculum designed to equip children to compete successfully in the global marketplace. By contrast,

the UK government’s National Curriculum, which all state-funded schools must follow, officially ignores chess, and indeed all mind sports. The only chance that the vast majority of the

nation’s children have to learn chess in school is if an enthusiastic teacher is prepared to give up free time to running a chess club. Yet it is increasingly acknowledged that chess and 

mind sports must become an essential aspect of training for the knowledge workers of the 21st century. You can play chess anywhere. You can play by post, by internet, by telephone. You can

play with home-made or improvised pieces. You can play an unseen opponent in jail – or you yourself can play from jail. If you are a Grandmaster you might even occasionally manage without a

board at all, playing, as I have done, against 19 simultaneous opponents, all the moves inside your head, without being able to see the boards or any of the pieces. Yet chess is not an

exclusively private, indoor game. In European cities – in squares and parks, even in swimming pools – there is a long and lively tradition of outdoor chess, with crowds gathering to offer

the protagonists the benefit of their (usually contradictory) advice. In the USA, not surprisingly, outdoor chess is rather different and is played at lightning speed – so high is the

standard that even professional Grandmasters come along to practise their blitz games.    Here is a foretaste of what we can expect in Singapore later this year: DOMMARAJU GUKESH VS. DING 

LIREN Tata Steel Masters, Wijk aan Zee, 2023, rd. 1 1.D4 NF6 2. C4 E6 3. NF3 B6 4. G3 BA6 5. B3 BB4+ 6. BD2 BE7 7. BG2 O-O 8. O-O D5 9. NC3 C6 10. BF4 NBD7 11. CXD5 EXD5 _ 11… cxd5 _ would

have been adequate for equality, but Black tries for more.  12.NE1 RE8 13. ND3 NF8 14. BG5 NE6 15. BXF6 BXF6 16. E3 NC5 17. DXC5 BXC3 18. RC1 QF6 19. QC2 D4 20. CXB6 AXB6 21. RFD1 RAD8 22.

EXD4 BXD4 23. NF4?! After his lacklustre opening White continues to drift; but a crisis has been reached and now was the time to steer for complications. Better advised is _ : 23. Bxc6 Re7 _

 (23… Rc8 24. Nf4 Red8 transposes to note)  _ 24. Nf4 Rc7 25. Qe4 g5 26. Nd5 Qxf2+ 27. Kh1 Rxc6 28. Ne7+ Kg7 29. Nxc6 Bb7 30. b4 b5 31. Rf1. _ 23… G5 24. NH5 QH6 25. BF3?! Also worth

considering was: _  25. g4 Re2 26. Qf5 Qg6 27. Bf1 Qxf5 28. gxf5 _  (but definitely not, 28. Kh1 Qxf2 29. Nf6+ Kh8 30. Bxe2 Bxe2 31. Rd3 Bf3+ 32. Rxf3 Qxf3 checkmate)  _ 28… Kh8 29. Ng3 _  

(no better is 29. Rxd4 Rxd4)  _ 29… Rxa2 30. Bxa6 Rxa6 31. Rd2 c5 32. b4 cxb4 33. Rcd1 b3 _ , when, however, Black maintains a tangible initiative. 25… C5 26. G4 F5 27. NG3 Hardly better is:

27. Qxf5. For example, 27… Bc8 28. Qc2 Rf8 29. Qc4+ Kh8 30. Rxd4 Rxd4 31. Qc3 Qg6 32. Rd1 Qd6 33. h3 Bd7 34. Rd3 Be8 35. b4 Bxh5, when White fares even worse than after the text. 27… FXG4

28. NF5?! A viable alternative is,  _ 28. Be4 Re5 29. b4 Rf8 30. Rd2 Kh8 31. Rcd1 Bc8 32. bxc5 bxc5 33. Rxd4 cxd4 34. Rxd4 _ , although Black retains his momentum and advantage. 28… QF6 29.

BE4 H5?! Marginally better was,  _ 29… Qe5 30. Nxd4 Qxe4 31. Qxe4 Rxe4 32. Nf5 Rxd1+ 33. Rxd1 h5 _ . 30.B4 KF8? Completely inexplicable. If Black wished to enhance his king security, then

surely _ 30…  Kh8 _ is the right path. Furthermore, Black actually has two excellent alternatives, if he favours aggression over consolidation: For example, more progressive for Black is, a)

  _ 30… Qe6 31. Qd2 Qf6 32. Qc2 h4 33. a4 Qe5 34. Bc6 Re6 35. b5 Bc8 36. Nxd4 cxd4 _ ; or b)  _ 30… h4 31. a4 Qe5 32. Bc6 Re6 33. Nxd4 cxd4 34. b5 Bc8 35. Qd3 Qe2 36. Qxe2 Rxe2 37. a5 bxa5

38. b6 Rb2 39. Rb1 Rxb1 40. Rxb1 Ba6 _ ; both of which bestow a healthy advantage upon Black. 31.A3? Far more telling is,  _ 31. a4! _  when after,  _ Bb2 32. Rxd8 Rxd8 33. Rb1 Bc3 34. bxc5 

bxc5 35. a5 _ , White exerts some constraint over Black’s expansion. 31… H4 32. RE1 RXE4 33. QXE4 BD3 34. QE6 QXE6 35. RXE6 BXF5 36. RXB6 G3 37. HXG3 HXG3 38. BXC5 BH3?  White resigns 0-1

Strangely, Black’s 38th is a mistake: Black would have  a crushing advantage after,  _ 38… Bxf2+! 39. Kg2 Be4+ 40. Kh3 Kf7 41. Kg4 g2 42. Rb2 Be3 43. Re1 Rd3 44. Rbb1 Rc3 _ . However, so

great is Black’s advantage that, even after the text,  _ 39. Rh6 gxf2+ 40. Kh2 f1=Q 41. Rxf1+ Bxf1 _  wins. Finally, a coda to my July 6 column juxtaposing chess and football, published here

. That very evening, when the clinching England penalty-taker in the fiercely fought but victorious quarter-final, against Switzerland, Trent Alexander-Arnold, earned his place in history,

I discovered that Magnus Carlsen himself once encountered the England hero across the board. Here is the link to a BBC report of their game. RAY’S 206TH BOOK, “  CHESS IN THE YEAR OF THE

KING  ”, WRITTEN IN COLLABORATION WITH ADAM BLACK, AND HIS 207TH, “  NAPOLEON AND GOETHE: THE TOUCHSTONE OF GENIUS  ” (WHICH DISCUSSES THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH CHESS) ARE AVAILABLE FROM

AMAZON AND BLACKWELLS.  A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more

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