Chess grandmaster to take on local players

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/08/2011 (5405 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Alex Yermolinsky will be taking on 25 challengers by himself on Friday afternoon, and he doesn’t like the odds — theirs, not his.

The Soviet-born chess grandmaster will take part in an exhibition at noon at Portage Place mall, moving clockwise from one chessboard to another, watching his opponents make their moves and usually responding in a nanosecond.

It’s something the 53-year-old, two-time winner of the U.S. Chess Championship has done “hundreds” of times. And although he doesn’t keep track of his record in such events, it’s safe to say losses are extremely rare.

“There could be the occasional slip-up,” he said. “It’s not a formal chess competition, it’s to promote chess. The average game goes 40 moves, so I have to make 40 circles. The players use that time for the grandmaster to come around to think about their board. They’re asked not to move the piece until the grandmaster comes back to the board, then the grandmaster replies pretty much instantaneously.”

He said his strategy is the same whether he’s playing in an international tournament against another grandmaster or against a junior high school kid in a mall.

“I play the way I would play against my usual competition. The game could take a different course. It’s always two people who play the game. There is no way to tell what’s going to happen,” he said.

On the weekend, Yermolinsky will play in the ninth annual Abe Yanofsky Memorial Chess Tournament at the University of Winnipeg, along with about 60 other competitors. Yanofsky, Canada’s first grandmaster and a prominent Winnipeg lawyer and city councillor, died in 2000. An annual memorial tournament has been held every year since 2003.

Blair Rutter, president of the Manitoba Chess Association, said a small handful of Manitobans, including current provincial champion Trevor Vincent and former champ Sam Lipnowski, have a shot at beating Yermolinsky.

“Any time a grandmaster comes to town, it’s something a lot of us gear up for. Competitive players will go over (the grandmaster’s) favourite openings and try to figure out a winning plan of attack,” he said.

Rutter said attaining the grandmaster title from the International Chess Federation comes after a player defeats a certain number of current grandmasters at particular tournaments.

He said it’s possibly Yermolinsky could lose one or two games at Friday’s exhibition — which has a $10 entry fee — simply because he’s playing so many games at once.

“Strong players stand a good chance of beating him. In the tournament this weekend, it’s possible somebody can beat him, but there’s a good chance he’ll run the table as well,” he said.

The only chance most people have against Yermolinsky or any other grandmaster is by using a computer. (IBM took that route in 1997 by building Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer that beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game series.)

“The strongest players (in Winnipeg) will lose four out of five games to Yermolinsky, and they might get a draw in the fifth. Grandmasters are well above the rest of us in terms of their abilities,” he said.

The Manitoba Chess Association, which has been around for more than a century, has about 80 members and meets once a week. Rutter said there are likely thousands of people in the province who know how to play the game but only about 300 or so who are competitive and another 100 who he considers “super-competitive” players.

“We usually have about 20 to 25 people at each meeting,” Rutter said. “They’re from all walks of life. It’s a very strong club.”

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca