Beat the Masters

Hello.

This blog is an homage to Beat the Masters, a wonderful series of articles published in Chess magazine when I started playing in the late 1980s

Each month they would print nine positions. Mostly middlegames; usually from recent tournaments; rarely with a clearcut 'best' winning move available. The challenge was to decide what you’d do if it was your game.

A couple of months later they’d run the follow-up article when they gave you the game continuation and the comments of some of the leading English chess players of the day. For the competition (you could post in your answers if you wanted), the more of the Masters’ choices you matched, the more points you scored. It was as simple as that.

You would be up against a dozen or so Masters each month. A core group of regulars with one or two changes each time. GMs Flear and Plaskett were usually there along with IMs Pein, Botterill and Paul Littlewood. Soon-to-become-GMs like Kosten, Conquest, Davies, Norwood, Arkell and James Howell (remember him?) made up the bulk of the squad.

It’s hard to imagine something like that being published today. Chess magazines couldn’t afford it for one thing. Even if they could, the fact we all have engines on our phones these days would make the competition pointless.

It was great whilst it lasted though.

I say, 'great'. I didn’t really make much use of it at the time. Aside from having to wait a couple of months for feedback - which seems an absurd length of time when I think of it today - the positions were too hard for me. I’d only just started playing and Beat the Masters was mostly taken based around GM games.

More to the point, at that time in my life I was barely out of my teens and I don’t think I was ready to be wrong all the time. Shame really, as it would have been a fabulous learning experience to study these positions each month. I don’t doubt that my failure to ever reach 'decent club player/first team regular' status is down to unwillingness, the inability maybe, to get down to the hard graft right from the beginning of my chess life.

On the upside, I still have the magazines and my younger self’s laziness means I can enjoy the Beat the Masters now. Finally I’m ready for it. I’ve had a lifetime of discovering that the world doesn’t end when you don’t know everything and chess-wise over the last thirty years or so I’ve picked up a reasonable amount of positional understanding. Enough to have a reasonable go at these articles, anyway.

And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.