Belgium in Budapest – Chess Olympiads – Round 8

Due to the many commissions I try to attend in Budapest, yesterday’s report has been delayed for a while…. My apologies.

Hungary did not just go through a period of poverty after WWI. In fact, it also had to cope with an identity shift. The Austrian empire had disintegrated and German culture became less pronounced. As a result, Jewish culture and tradition flourished again, not least in chess. Extreme newspapers (present even before there was talk of Adolf Hitler) hushed up: how could they, for instance, incite the population to field a chess team without Jews, when that team achieved one success after another for Hungary during the Olympiads (1926, 1927, 1928, 1936). But those elite chess players in 1939 became the first victims of Jew-hatred, which could then manifest itself openly. Dr Klara Farago (1905-1944), Olympiad winners Endre Steiner (1901-1944) and Kornel Havasi (1892-1945) did not survive the war. Others emigrated, such as Lajos Steiner (1903-1975) to Australia and Andor Lilienthal (1911-2010) to his second homeland, the Soviet Union. Laszlo Szabo (1917-1998) and Tibor Florian (1919-1990) went to war and came back broken. Chess had sunk to an all-time low.

Apart from Maroczy, no professional chess player remained in the country, but soon chess among workers reared its head. That movement was strong and well organised and even had its own newspaper. At the end of World War II and thanks to emerging socialism, chess in Hungary grew directly to unprecedented popularity. The chess federation was renamed the Workers’ Chess Federation and every factory, company or business in Budapest had its own chess club, so that by 1950 more than 500 teams were competing in the city’s championship. And chess was also played vigorously in the countryside where 40-50 thousand people took part in the village championships. This is how Levente Lengyel was discovered, and he would later win several medals at chess Olympiads.

In no time, the chessboard could not be missing from a folk festival any more than beer and sausage. Additional chess activities, such as simultaneous shows, appeared in various places, but chess also improved logistically. Some 750 stone chess tables were installed in public places in the city!

The two largest chess parks that more or less preserved their traditions were Varosliger in Pest and Varosmajor in Buda. In addition, there were about two dozen places where the royal game could be played outdoors and games could be borrowed. At the southern foot of Gellért Hill and at Kun-Béla Square (now Ludovika Square) in Jozsefvaros, garden chess could be played for decades with four- to five-kilo wooden pieces in front of a large crowd. A lesser-known attraction is the Dagaly lido near Angyalföld, opened in 1948, where you can still play chess on a board in a hot water pool.

Today, by the way, there was no need to seek warm water: under a summer sun, the 193 men’s teams and 181 women’s teams (192 and 180 is more correct, as there were byes) headed to the BOK sports centre. Among them, two Belgian teams.

In the open section, the Belgians pipped the second Hungarian team, still good for two players of +2600 and two +2500. Daniel’s opponent was tasked with a quick draw, although he had white. And if white wants to make a draw at that level, it’s hard to do anything about it with black without taking too many risks. Could the Hungarians make a difference on the other boards? Not on board 4 anyway: despite the 200-point difference, Lennert was never in danger. Draw. With black, Mher had a much harder time getting out from under the pressure. And that did not change when a quality was lost. A strange position appeared on Thibaut’s board. Normally you have a strong centre if you can put two pawns there, but what about Thibaut’s centre: there were three white pawns there, albeit all on the d-line. With an open c- and e-line, it looked good. ‘The power of the triplet pawn is an underexposed topic,’ Thibaut would later say, but a grandmaster remains a grandmaster. You beat him in the opening, but then you have to beat him again in the middle game and a third time in the endgame. For a while it looked like the superior position would end up in a theoretical draw, but even in the endgame Thibaut showed himself superior. Immediately a nice win against +2600 and a draw for the team.

The rest day clearly did Thibaut good.

Among the ladies, we saw Diana again. Whew, she is out of hospital, but she left in the evening (read: overnight) straight back to Belgium. We hope for a speedy recovery.

Her departure does not make things easier for our players: especially for Daria and Tyani, the last rounds will be leaden, as they have played all the games at the moment and fatigue is starting to set in. And the strong opponents from Austria, just below the level of Germany, did not make things easier for our ladies.

After an hour of play, things were not looking so good for our black players. Daria seemed to be under pressure and Sarah must have missed something tactical somewhere and she lost a piece (later she said she had missed something tactical several times). An off-day, then, for Sarah, though I admire her tenacity. She went hunting for all the white pawns and succeeded. If she could exchange the rooks, you would have an unspent position of knight and bishop against four pawns. And even if the four pawns were chewed up, Austrian would not be the first +2100 who could not mate with knight and bishop. Prick! The dream balloon busted. Knight, bishop and rook had woven a matnet. Austria in the lead.

Meanwhile, Tyani had finished her game. She had come out of the opening nicely and hoped to turn her pawn majority on the lady wing into a big advantage in an endgame, but her opponent noticed the danger, activated her rooks and seemed to shatter the beautiful pawn structure on the lady wing.To prevent that, Tyani had to tolerate move repetition.

Daria is synonymous with fighting spirit. She never considered her position worse and gradually the others too saw that her position was in fact not so bad, in fact even better and after the tactical entanglements actually won. Even in time trouble she seemed to find the best moves and when Rh8 mate was imminent, Hanne and I thought the opponent would give up, but she first played another check with her knight and to both our amazement, Daria held out her hand. Er… Daria, wasn’t that a mistake? No, alas… a move overlooked, the white queen on a7 could capture Daria’s queen on f2, the first time, the Austrian lady missed the opportunity, the second time, she didn’t miss the winning move.

Hanne herself played solidly again. The fight revolved around the isolated d5 pawn. The pressure could be increased, but capturing on d5 also meant the loss of the white pawn on b5 and then black had the furthest passed pawn… Draw. A team defeat, admittedly to be expected on the basis of elo, but the ladies have surprised us positively so many times before that, even then, we consider them capable of miracles.