Say "January" to chess players, and they say: "Wijk aan Zee." In this fourth episode of Masters and Matches, Peter Doggers and Arne Moll dive into the long history of the Tata Steel Chess Tournament, which will have its 88th edition starting in a week from now.

The "Wimbledon of Chess" has a special place in the heart of both amateur chess fans and top players. Bent Larsen famously said: "Normal people have to see Naples before they die... but a chess grandmaster has to win Wijk aan Zee first."

The event was first held in 1938 and was called Hoogovens Tournament until 1999. Following a merger with British Steel, the company and its tournament was renamed 'Corus' in 2000 and since 2011 it is called Tata Steel Chess. The record winner is Magnus Carlsen (8 times), followed by Viswanathan Anand (5 times). Since the 1950s, when the tournament became truly international, all world champions participated except for Bobby Fischer.

In this episode, we tell how the tournament started in that pre-WWII year 1938 and  about the sponsor that has remained faithful to chess for nine decades. We bring many stories, such as Emil Josef Diemer falling off the stage, IM Manuel Bosboom beating Garry Kasparov in a blitz game, or a 13-year-old Magnus Carlsen making his debut in Grandmaster Group C.

In short, this is your ideal preview to get you in the mood for the upcoming Tata Steel Chess Tournament!

Hope you enjoyed the show! Please subscribe and spread the word about this podcast.

About the hosts:

Peter Doggers has played chess for over 30 years and written about it for almost 20. He regularly writes for Chess.com and New in Chess. He is the author of The Chess Revolution and also hosts The Chess News Podcast.

https://peterdoggers.com/

Arne Moll has played chess even longer than Peter and also loves to write about it. He contributed many thought-provoking articles to the website ChessVibes.com between 2007 and 2013 and recently published his first book as well, called The Center Game.

https://www.newinchess.com/the-center-game

In this third episode of Masters and Matches, Peter Doggers and Arne Moll discuss the infamous Toiletgate scandal, when Vladimir Kramnik was accused of cheating during his world championship match with Veselin Topalov in Elista in 2006.

The episode is not only a complete overview of how the match unfolded, what accusations were made and how the players reacted at the time, but also features all the events that happened both before this match and afterward.

For starters, it was Topalov himself who was suspected by grandmasters of having cheated during the San Luis World Championship tournament in 2005. And then, half a year after the Elista match, suddenly Topalov and his manager Silvio Danailov were once again accused in Wijk aan Zee 2007 when seemingly suspicious videos appeared of Danailov spending a lot of time at Topalov's board, making strange gestures, walking back and forth and using his phone. In the end, no clear evidence was surfaced related to whether Kramnik or Topalov cheated during that period in time. 

Most remarkable are the similarities between the discussed period of 2005-2007 and more recent times, when we see Kramnik on the other side of the allegations, and using very similar methods and language as the Bulgarians were doing two decades ago. These parallels formed the inspiration for choosing this topic in the first place and ended up being even more striking than suspected.

Hope you enjoyed the show! Please subscribe and spread the word about this podcast.

About the hosts:

Peter Doggers has played chess for over 30 years and written about it for almost 20. He regularly writes for Chess.com and New in Chess. He is the author of The Chess Revolution and also hosts The Chess News Podcast.

https://peterdoggers.com/

Arne Moll has played chess even longer than Peter and also loves to write about it. He contributed many thought-provoking articles to the website ChessVibes.com between 2007 and 2013 and recently published his first book as well, called The Center Game.

https://www.newinchess.com/the-center-game

In this second episode of Masters and Matches, Peter Doggers and Arne Moll dive into the Moscow 1925 tournament which took place exactly a hundred years ago. Apart from discussing what was Efim Bogoljubov's biggest success, the podcast explains why chess was so popular in the Soviet Union and where it all started.

1925 turns out to be a fascinating year in both chess history and history in general. Aron Nimzowitsch's My System started to get published alongside Emanuel Lasker's Manual of Chess. In the same year, Benito Mussolini came into power in Italy, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf came out and in art, we saw the first exhibitions in Art Deco and Surrealism and Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

Another reason that Moscow 1925 was special was that it was likely the first-ever chess event where a camera was present that filmed the players. This was because scenes from the movie Chess Fever were shot there, which has cameos of different participants, most notably Jose Capablanca.  You can find it on YouTube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdXmtc56rsM

Speaking of Capablanca, after the tournament, the reigning world champion talked about a topic that is still relevant to this day: whether too many draws might be happening at the top level. A full century before Magnus Carlsen got fed up with classical chess, Capablanca wrote:

Consider the fact that the great masters of truly superior class, like Alekhine and Bogoljubow, young men, know every opening variation that has been frequently used by other masters; that Alekhine, for instance, who is only 33, knows every game played in any tournament or match in the past 25 years; that the similarity of the technical development of the majority of openings is such that even when one transposes the order of moves or plays something new or unknown, it is relatively easy to find the correct reply. Consider all this, even without taking into account other aspects more related to style, which would be difficult to explain and would make the present piece too long, and you will reach the conclusion that it is necessary to think very seriously about the question of draws if one does not wish to reach the point where there are several players who are completely invincible.

Hope you enjoyed the show! Please subscribe and spread the word about this podcast.

About the hosts:

Peter Doggers has played chess for over 30 years and written about it for almost 20. He regularly writes for Chess.com and New in Chess. He is the author of The Chess Revolution and also hosts The Chess News Podcast.

https://peterdoggers.com/

Arne Moll has played chess even longer than Peter and also loves to write about it. He contributed many thought-provoking articles to the website ChessVibes.com between 2007 and 2013 and recently published his first book as well, called The Center Game.

https://www.newinchess.com/the-center-game

In this first episode of Masters and Matches, Peter Doggers and Arne Moll tell about the very last of the many matches that Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov played against each other: their rapid and blitz match in 2009 in Valencia, Spain. The event was part of a festival called 'Birthday of Modern' chess and included several lectures about the city of Valencia's importance to the way we play chess today. Arne and Peter travelled together to Valencia to attend the festival, and witnessed the legendary "two Ks" Kasparov and Karpov playing a fierce match, full of fighting chess. The episode includes fragments from their press conferences, so you can hear some comments from the players at the time.

Hope you enjoyed the show! Please subscribe and spread the word about this podcast.

About the hosts:

Peter Doggers has played chess for over 30 years and written about it for almost 20. He regularly writes for Chess.com and New in Chess. He is the author of The Chess Revolution and also hosts The Chess News Podcast.

https://peterdoggers.com/

Arne Moll has played chess even longer than Peter and also loves to write about it. He contributed many thought-provoking articles to the website ChessVibes.com between 2007 and 2013 and recently published his first book as well, called The Center Game.

https://www.newinchess.com/the-center-game