The successor of the "Magician from Riga"

The retirement in 2005 from professional chess of the strongest player of all time to date, Garry Kasparov, has revived the age-old debate about nature/culture that has constituted our Western civilisation since Homer. “The Ogre of Baku" had indeed the feeling that at 40 he had reached his limit and did not feel like doing three hours of sport a day to stay at the top, in the sense that he wasn't planning to "hang on to it" or just have a token role like Armstrong, Hingis or Schumacher. As Alexander the Great or James Dean, he was wise enough to retire at the height of his fame. 

However, the problem about this biological vision of performance is that since then, Anand, Ivanchuk and Gelfand have all reached their chess peak once in their forties. Would this mean that experience in this endurance sport, as in the marathon or cycling, is more important than the intellectual fitness and that culture would therefore overcome nature? The debate rages on every time a tournament involves experienced players with younger ones.

As the eldest player in this tournament, Alexei Shirov carries in himself the defence of culture. At almost 40, he seems to have found his  balance and his best results came recently. After a meteoric rise up to  world No. 3 in 1993, thanks to a win in Biel in 1991 in particular,  the author of the chess best-seller Fire on Board has stabilised his presence in the world elite with ups and downs. His best results took him a few years: a win against Kramnik in the final of the Candidates Tournament for the World Championship in 1998 and above all wins at the MTel Masters 2009 in Sofia ahead of Carlsen, Ivanchuk and Topalov and in Shanghai in 2010 ahead of Kramnik and Aronian. 

World Championship finalist in 2000, Shirov never managed to reach his goal, but the above examples allow us to be optimistic about the future. As a player universally admired for his sacrificial dispositions that literally compel him to set the board on fire on every occasion, the Latvian-born Spaniard manages to create from nothing. In his hands, the driest positions become magical. 

From a technical point of view, if he can always surprise the audience, it's partly because he follows by the book what could be called the "Shirov rule," a rule that he explains wonderfully in his DVDs for Chessbase: "If my opponent attacks my pawns, I must attack his." In other words, defending is not in Shirov's vocabulary. If spectators wants to entertain themselves during the games, they can force themselves to find a counter-attack when one of Shirov's opponents is threatening something. It is therefore very likely that the audience will sometimes be able to predict the moves of the successor of the "Magician from Riga," the missed world champion and Alexei Shirov's spiritual father: Mikhail Tal.

A.V. 
(N.D.)