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Seirawan-Suttles, 1981
Seirawan at the Hoogoven chess tournament, photo by Fernando Pereira, 1980

Seirawan-Suttles, 1981

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This post, written with Geoff Goodson, details the 1981 game between Canadian grandmasters Duncan Suttles and Yasser Seirawan.

Duncan Suttles was born 1945-12-21 in San Francisco, CA but moved at an early age to Vancouver where his father took a job teaching in the anthropology department at the University of British Columbia. Now retired from chess, Suttles was a major figure in the Canadian chess scene in the 1970s and 1980s. He worked towards a PhD in mathematics at UBC, finishing the needed credits and class work in 1972. However he never finished his dissertation and took a job in industry before getting his doctorate. None-the-less, in 1972 Suttles earned a sort of “chess doctorate”, namely his grandmaster title, a year before he both won the Canadian Open Chess Championship and tied for the U.S. Open Chess Championship. He was awarded grandmaster of correspondence play in 1982.


Yasser Seirawan was born 1960-03-24 in Damascus, Syria, but immigrated at an early age to Seattle, WA. He, like Suttles, learned chess at the age of 12 but very quickly became a strong player. Yasser has won the World Junior Chess Championship once and the US Chess Championship four times (1981, 1986, 1989, 2000), sometimes tied for 1st and sometimes the sole winner. He qualified for the Candidates Tournament (leading up to the world chess championship) in the 1985-1987 cycle and the 1987-1990 cycle. Seirawan is the author of many chess books and is widely known for his expert commentary in both live and pre-recorded broadcasts on the Internet. One of the authors of this blog post was fortunate enough to play against Yasser several times in the mid-1970s, when we were both teenagers.

The following game was played in Vancouver Canada in 1981. It was played in the last round of the International Open (4-14 August 1981), as part of the 1981 Vancouver International Chess Congress. According to one source (https://www.365chess.com/tournaments/Vancouver_op_1981/22046, where it is called the Vancouver Open, but the dates are the same so it’s the same tournament), Seirawan won and Suttles tied (with Anthony Miles) for second place. According to another source (http://www.chessbc.ca/games3.html) Suttles tied with Miles for 1st place and Seirawan came in 2nd.

Players: Seirawan-Suttles
Opening: English
Date: 1981

  1. c4 e5 2. Nc3 d6 3. g3 Nc6 4. Bg2 Be6 5. d3 Qd7 6. Rb1 g6 7. b4 Bg7 8. b5 Nd8

As odd as this looks, this is a “book” move!

  1. e3 Nh6 10. a4 O-O 11. Qc2 Re8 12. Bd2 Kh8 13. h4 f6 14. Nge2 Nhf7 15. a5 a6 

This may not be the best move, as it weakens the b6 square, so doesn’t allow for replying to Nd5 with c6. Either 15 … Rc8 or an immediate 15 … c6 are better.

16.Nd5 Rg8 

Here, exchanging the knight by 16 … Bxd5 is better. Black’s white-squared bishop is good but the knight on d5 is going to create serious problems for Black soon.

17.Qa4 Bf5 18.Qa3 g5 19.e4 Bg4 20.f3 Be6 21.b6 c6 

Now we see the problem with 15 … a6 played earlier.

22.Nc7 Rb8 23.Qc1 Qe7 24.d4 exd4 25.Nxd4 Ne5 26.O-O

Of course, Black is threatening the deadly fork … Nd3 and White must do something to defend against that move. However, castling simply puts his king on the same file as the room on g8 and this creates counterplay for Black. A simple Qc2 would be better.

26 … Bxc4 

While winning a pawn is tempting, especially as it also threatens White’s rook on f1, the move 26 … gxh4 was much better. This would open up the White king to attack.

27.Nf5 Qd7 28.Rf2 d5 29.hxg5 Nd3

This move forks a queen and a rook, but still is not as good as 29 … Ndf7 (which supports the knight on e5) or … fxg5 (which defends against gxf6).

30.Qc3 fxg5 31.Nxg7 Qxg7 

Better is to take with the rook. Now White doesn’t want to trade queens on g7 as his advantage will dissipate. Instead, White plays a good move that continues pressure on Black’s bishop and knight.

32.exd5 cxd5 

If Black tries to trade queens by 32 … Qxc3 then White wins material after 33 Bxc3+.

33.Nxd5 Ne5 34.Nc7 Ndc6 

Black had a better reply but it’s not obvious: 34 … Ndf7 with a possible continuation 35 f4 gxf4 36 Bxf4 (even better than gxf4 but that is also okay). The next move by White makes Black’s defense easier.

35.f4 gxf4 36.gxf4

This opens up the White king position. Better is to take the knight on c6: 36 Bxc6.

36 … Rbf8 37.Re1 Rf5 38.Qh3 

Better is to put pressure on the knight on e5 with : 38 Re4. A comment on this game on chessgames.com appears to be from an observer: “For the last few moves before time control, the players had less than 5-seconds per move while the position remained extraordinarily complex. It was dramatic to watch, especially as Suttles hadn't played over the board since 1975. He and Yaz got on fabulously. “

38 … Nd3! 39.Re4?

This is a blunder (in extreme time trouble, it seems) and now Black is in the driver’s seat. It’s amazing how the weather can change so quickly! Much better was 39 Re8.

39 … Rh5! 40.Qe3 Qh6 41.Bc3+ Nde5 0-1

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Mathematicians who play(ed) chess

This post is copied from my earlier post here.

 

  • Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander (1909-1974), late British chess champion. Alexander may not have had a PhD in mathematics but taught mathematics and he did mathematical work during WWII (code and cryptography), as did the famous Soviet chess player David Bronstein (see the book Kahn, Kahn on codes). He was the strongest English player after WWII, until Jonathan Penrose appeared.
  • Adolf Anderssen (1818-1879). Pre World Championships but is regarded as the strongest player in the world between 1859 and 1866. He received a degree (probably not a PhD) in mathematics from Breslau University and taught mathematics at the Friedrichs gymnasium from 1847 to 1879. He was promoted to Professor in 1865 and was given an honorary doctorate by Breslau (for his accomplishments in chess) in 1865.
  • Magdy Amin Assem (195?-1996) specialized in p-adic representation theory and harmonic analysis on p-adic reductive groups. He published several important papers before a ruptured aneurysm tragically took his life. He was IM strength (rated 2379) in 1996.
  • Gedeon Barcza (1911-1986), pronounced bartsa, was a Hungarian professor of mathematics and a chess grandmaster. The opening 1.Nf3 d5 2.g3 is called the Barcza System. The opening 1.e4 e6 2.d4 c5 is known as the Barcza-Larsen Defense.
  • Ludwig Erdmann Bledow (1795-1846) was a German professor of mathematics (PhD). He founded the first German chess association, Berliner Schachgesellschaft, in 1827. He was the first person to suggest an international chess tournament (in a letter to von der Lasa in 1843). His chess rating is not known but he did at one point win a match against Adolf Anderssen.
  • Robert Coveyou (1915 – 1996) completed an M.S. degree in Mathematics, and joined the Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a research mathematician. He became a recognized expert in pseudo-random number generators. He is known for the quotation “The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance,” which is based on a title of a paper he wrote. An excellent tournament chess player, he was Tennessee State Champion eight times.
  • Nathan Divinsky (1925-2012) earned a PhD in Mathematics in 1950 from the University of Chicago and was a mathematics professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He tied for first place in the 1959 Manitoba Open.
  • Noam Elkies (1966-), a Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University specializing in number theory, is a study composer and problem solver (ex-world champion). Prof. Elkies, at age 26, became the youngest scholar ever to have attained a tenured professorship at Harvard. One of his endgame studies is mentioned, for example, in the book Technique for the tournament player, by GM Yusupov and IM Dvoretsky, Henry Holt, 1995. He wrote 11 very interesting columns on Endgame Exporations (posted by permission).
    Some other retrograde chess constructions of his may be found at the interesting Dead Reckoning web site of Andrew Buchanan.
    See also Professor Elkies’s very interesting Chess and Mathematics Seminar pages.
  • Thomas Ernst earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Uppsala Univ. in 2002 and does research in algebraic combinatorics with applications to mathematical physics. His chess rating is about 2400 (FIDE).
  • Machgielis (Max) Euwe (1901-1981), World Chess Champion from 1935-1937, President of FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Echecs) from 1970 to 1978, and arbitrator over the turbulent Fischer – Spassky World Championship match in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1972. I don’t know as many details of his mathematical career as I’d like. One source gives: PhD (or actually its Dutch equivalent) in Mathematics from Amsterdam University in 1926. Another gives: Doctorate in philosophy in 1923 and taught as a career. Published a paper on the mathematics of chess “Mengentheoretische Betrachtungen uber das Schachspiel”.
  • Ed Formanek (194?-), International Master. Ph.D. Rice University 1970. Retired from the mathematics faculty at Penn State Univ. Worked primarily in matrix theory and representation theory.
  • Stephen L. Jones is an attorney in LA, but when younger, taught math in the UMass system and spent a term as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ. He is one rung below the level of International Master at over the board chess; in correspondence chess, he has earned two of the three norms needed to become a Grandmaster.
  • Charles Kalme (1939-2002), earned his master title in chess at 15, was US Junior champ in 1954, 1955, US Intercollegiate champ in 1957, and drew in his game against Bobby Fischer in the 1960 US championship. In 1960, he also was selected to be on the First Team All-Ivy Men’s Soccer team, as well as the US Student Olympiad chess team. (Incidently, it is reported that this team, which included William Lombary on board one, did so well against the Soviets in their match that Boris Spassky, board one on the Soviet team, was denied forieng travel for two years as punishment.) In 1961 graduated 1st in his class at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, The University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. He also received the Cane award (a leadership award) that year. After getting his PhD from NYU (advisor Lipman Bers) in 1967 he to UC Berkeley for 2 years then to USC for 4-5 years. He published 2 papers in mathematics in this period, “A note on the connectivity of components of Kleinian groups”, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 137 1969 301–307, and “Remarks on a paper by Lipman Bers”, Ann. of Math. (2) 91 1970 601–606. He also translated Siegel and Moser, Lectures on celestial mechanics, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1971, from the German original. He was important in the early stages of computer chess programming. In fact, his picture and annotations of a game were featured in the article “An advice-taking chess computer” which appeared in the June 1973 issue of Scientific American. He was an associate editor at Math Reviews from 1975-1977 and then worked in the computer industry. Later in his life he worked on trying to bring computers to elementary schools in his native Latvia A National Strategy for Bringing Computer Literacy to Latvian Schools. His highest chess rating was acheived later in his life during a “chess comeback”: 2458.
  • Miroslav Katetov (1918 -1995) earned his PhD from Charles Univ in 1939. Katetov was IM chess player (earned in 1951) and published about 70 research papers, mostly from topology and functional analysis.
  • Martin Kreuzer (1962-), CC Grandmaster, is rated over 2600 in correspondence chess (ICCF, as of Jan 2000). His OTB rating is over 2300. His specialty is computational commutative algebra and applications. Here is a recent game of his:
    Kreuzer, M – Stickler, A
  • Emanuel Lasker (1868-1941), World Chess Champion from 1894-1921, PhD (or more precisely its German equivalent) in Mathematics from Erlangen Univ in 1902. Author of the influential paper “Zur theorie der moduln und ideale,” Math. Ann. 60(1905)20-116, where the well-known Lasker-Noether Primary Ideal Decomposition Theorem in Commutative Algebra was proven (it can be downloaded for free here). Lasker wrote and published numerous books and papers on mathematics, chess (and other games), and philosophy.
  • Vania Mascioni, former IECG Chairperson (IECG is the Internet Email Chess Group), is rated 2326 by IECG (as of 4-99). His area is Functional Analysis and Operator Theory.
  • A. Jonathan Mestel, grandmaster in over-the-board play and in chess problem solving, is an applied mathematician specializing in fluid mechanics and is the author of numerous research papers. He is on the mathematics faculty of the Imperial College in London.
  • Walter D. Morris (196?-), International Master. Currently on the mathematics faculty at George Mason Univ in Virginia.
  • Karsten Müller earned the Grandmaster title in 1998 and a PhD in mathematics in 2002 at the University of Hamburg.
  • John Nunn (1955-), Chess Grandmaster, D. Phil. (from Oxford Univ.) in 1978 at the age of 23. His PhD thesis is in algebraic topology. Nunn is also a GM chess problem solver.
  • Hans-Peter Rehm (1942-), earned his PhD in Mathematics from Karlsruhe Univ. (1970) then taught there for many years. He is a grandmaster of chess composition. He has written several papers in mathematics, such as “Prime factorization of integral Cayley octaves”, Ann. Fac. Sci. Toulouse Math (1993), but most in differential algebra, his specialty. A collection of his problems has been published as: Hans+Peter+Rehm=Schach Ausgewählte Schachkompositionen & Aufsätze (= selected chess problems and articles), Aachen 1994.
  • Kenneth W. Regan, Professor of Computer Science at the State Univ. of New York Buffalo, is currently rated 2453. His research is in computational complexity, a field of computer science which has a significant mathematical component.
  • Jakob Rosanes obtained his mathematics doctorate from the Univ. of Breslau in 1865 where he taught for the rest of his life. In the 1860s he played a match against A. Anderssen which ended with 3 wins, 3 losses, and 1 draw.
  • Jan Rusinek (1950-) obtained his mathematics PhD in 1978 and earned a Grandmaster of Chess Composition in 1992.
  • Jon Speelman (1956-) is an English Grandmaster chess player and chess writer. He earned his PhD in mathematics from Oxford.