Russian Grandmaster Sergey Karjakin played a game ofchess against cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner on Tuesday 9th Juneto celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1st ever Space-Earth game. Thecosmonauts were 400 km above the Earth on the International Space Station, which recently welcomed NASAastronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley and their SpaceX spacecraft, whileSergey played from the Moscow Museum of Cosmonautics, exactly 50 years afterthe first game was played in 1970.
The game was organised by the Moscow Museum ofCosmonautics, the Russian space agency Roscosmos and the Russian ChessFederation and broadcast live from 11:00 CEST, in English.
And in Russian:
The game ended in a fast and sharp draw, where almost all of the moves were perfectly played:
1. e4 e5 2. f3 c6 3. b5 a6 4. xc6 dxc6 5. O-O e6 6. b3 c5 7. xe5 d4 8. c4 xc4 9. bxc4 xa1 10. c3 b5 11. h5 f6 12. f3 b4 13. e5 O-O-O 14. a3 xf1+ 15. xf1 bxc3 16. exf6 cxd2 17. a8+ d7 18. d5+ c8 19. a8+ d7 20. d5+ e8 21. e4+ d7
1/2-1/2
2016 World Championship Challenger Sergey Karjakin needs nointroduction on a chess website. Cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagnerhave been on the International Space Station since April 9th, when they arrivedtogether with NASA astronaut Christopher Cassidy.
They were recently joined by astronauts Douglas Hurley andRobert Behnken, whose SpaceX vehicle was the first to be launched from US soilsince the last flight of the Space Shuttle in 2011 and the first ever crewed commercial orbiting spacecraft. NASA estimated 10 million people watched the launch, with their arrival on the ISS also streamed across the world:
There are few details about the game to be played againstSergey Karjakin, except that Space plays White, but its value is symbolic, marking 50 years since thefirst such game.
Cosmonauts Andrian Nikolayev (1929-2004) and VitalySevastyanov (1935-2010) were the first humans to spend two weeks in space (NeilArmstrongs Apollo 11 flight to the moon and back a year earlier took just over8 days), with their Soyuz 9 flight ultimately lasting almost 18 days, orexactly 424 hours of weightlessness, as recorded on commemorative stamps.
The mission was in preparation for the Soviet Unions earlyspace station, with Vitaly Sevastyanov in 1986 telling the Russianchess journal 64:
When Nikolaev and I were preparing for our flight they toldus: Youre going to be flying for a long time. You need to think of how to meaningfullyspend your rest time during the hard work of the flight. What do you want totake onto the spaceship? Andrian and I were great chess enthusiasts and answered together: Chess! Unexpectedly the psychologists were wary. There are two ofyou on the flight. Itll turn out that one of you always beats the other and therecan be unnecessary negative emotions for the loser. Thats no good. Come on,we objected with one voice. On earth we play at the same level. Why should one of us always win in Space?
The psychologists gave in and chess went into space, thoughit was a special chess set designed for zero gravity by a young engineer calledMikhail Klevtsov. Magnets werent allowed (and still arent today on the ISS)due to their potential to interfere with instruments, and the pieces wereinstead kept in place but movable by a series of grooves, so they didntaccidentally fly into the mouth of a sleeping cosmonaut (Sevastyanov).
The players on the ground were General Nikolai Kamanin(1908-1982), the head of the cosmonaut training program, and cosmonaut ViktorGorbatko (1934-2017), with another cosmonaut, Valery Bykovsky (1934-2019) hostingthe broadcast:
The game lasted 6 hours, or 4 orbits of the Earth, with theplayers only able to transmit their moves while the spaceship was above theSoviet Union. You can catch some glimpses of the game in this video focussed onVitaly Sevastyanov:
The game ended in a draw, which you can replay below:
1. d4 d5 2. c4 dxc4 3. e3 e5 4. xc4 exd4 5. exd4 c6 6. e3 d6 7. c3 f6 8. f3 O-O 9. O-O g4 10. h3 f5 11. h4 d7 12. f3 e7 13. g4 g6 14. ae1 h8 15. g5 eg8 16. g2 ae8 17. e3 b4 18. a3 xc3 19. bxc3 e4 20. g3 c6 21. f3 d5 22. d3 b5 23. h4 g6 24. f4 c4 25. xc4 bxc4 26. d2 xe1 27. xe1 d5 28. g5 d6 29. xd5 cxd5 30. f4 d8 31. e5+ f6 32. gxf6 xf6 33. xf6+ xf6 34. e8+ xe8 35. xf6+ g81/2-1/2
Space missed the best chance to conquer the Earth on move23:
23.g5! wins a piece, since the only move for the knight is23Nh5, but then 24.Qg4! forces 24Qxg4 25.hxg4 and after the again forced 25Ng326.Rf2 there are various ways for White to pick up the trapped knight.
One of the most interesting things about the game is that itwas commentated on widely by the best Soviet chess players. David Bronsteinwrote in the Izvestia newspaper:
That game will undoubtedly go down in the annals of the 1000year long history of chess as the game that spread the sphere of influence ofthis wise game beyond our planet. Everyone can understand the emotion withwhich I look over the moves sent from space. The first Space Earth game isvery interesting to play over on a board. From the moves its easy to see thatboth sides love sharp, puzzling situations and show no lack of courage andinvention in creating them. And the fact that neither side managed to win bearswitness to the skill of the players not only in attack but also in defence.
Later that year on the 24th November 1970 the cosmonautsvisited Moscows Central Chess Club for an evening featuring World ChampionBoris Spassky, former World Champions Mikhail Botvinnik and Tigran Petrosian aswell as other top players.
It was right in the middle of the Palma deMallorca Interzonal that would mark a sea change in chess, with Bobby Fischer going on to win by a huge 3.5 point margin. Of the six players who qualified for WorldChampionship Candidates Matches only Efim Geller and Mark Taimanov representedthe USSR, with Fischer, Bent Larsen, Robert Huebner and Wolfgang Uhlmann taking the remaining places. Alexander Kotov, best known now for his Think Like a Grandmaster book,referred to that as he tried to look 40 years ahead, i.e. to 2010, that evening:
Im sure that then well have not an Interzonal but an InterplanetaryTournament. And the grey-haired, now ex-World Champion, Boris Spassky, will comeout with a big article where as a journalist hell criticise the organisers thatfor some reason they allocated two places to weak players from Jupiter,reducing by two the representation of the lunar base And chess fans, gatheringin an even more luxurious club to assess the outcome of the Interplanetary Tournamentwill of course recall the first game played in space that opened a new era forthe ancient game.
Back then it was hard to imagine that the last men to travelto the Moon would have done so just two years later in 1972, with no Sovietcosmonaut ever standing on the Moon.
3-time World Chess Champion MikhailBotvinnik also referred to the Interzonal Tournament while talking about thehead of the cosmonaut training program:
36 years ago I saw Nikolai Petrovich Kamanin for the firsttime, if Im not mistaken, in the Grand Peterhof Palace not far from Leningrad,when the ChelyuskinHeroes were being honoured there. Back then we were both very young andboth could have become cosmonauts. Now, of course, Im no longer fit for that.
I look on General Kamanin with great envy. Although werethe same age hes taken great care of himself and is in charge of ourcosmonauts. Besides that, Ive already stopped playing chess myself, whileKamanin, as we just got to see, still continues to perform well in events.
From the stories of Andrian Nikolaev and Vitaly Sevastyanovit became clear to us what difficulties a man faces in space. The first isphysical weightlessness, which can be compared to what the participants in theInterzonal Tournament in Palma de Mallorca feel, when theres only a rest dayonce in every 9 days. The second difficulty is, if we can put it like this,intellectual weightlessness.
When a man finds himself on the Earth in everyday life hesconstantly confronted by the solution of complex problems or, to put it anotherway, inexact problems. Its not so simple to cross a street, to decide how tospend an evening to go to the cinema, theatre or find a more frivolousactivity. But on a spaceship a man has none of that and he can forget how tosolve complex, inexact problems. And here chess comes to the rescue becausechess is a typical complex, inexact problem. After all, its long been knownthat people playing chess drift and find the correct decisions withdifficulty.
I by no means want to suggest that cosmonauts should bepicked from among chess players. On the contrary, I think that if ourgrandmasters will play the way theyve played at the start of the InterzonalTournament in Palma de Mallorca (not counting, of course, Geller), then wellneed to find chess reserves from among the cosmonauts
Of course since 1970 chess has been played in space, with someastronauts having had plenty of time as they spent hundreds of days on Mir and now the International SpaceStation. The US Chess Federation in particular organised anEarthvs. Space matchgiving the chance for kids to take on astronauts. Chess always makes for good photo opportunities!
Tuesday's game will be a memorablecelebration of some of the early pioneers of space flight.
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Karjakin vs. Cosmonauts | Earth vs. Space 50th anniversary chess game - chess24