Wanna be world champ? Play in Newcastle!

(Chronicle Chess 1 December 2023)

If you want to be world champion, you could do worse than prep for the big match by playing chess in Newcastle. It’s a curiosity that three successive future world champions played here shortly before winning the title.

In 1892, Germany’s Emanuel Lasker played a match against British veteran Henry Bird at Newcastle Chess Club. Lasker won the match 5-0, and two years later defeated Wilhelm Steinitz in New York to claim the world title. (In another Newcastle game, Bird checkmated Lasker in 12 moves. But that was probably a friendly.)

Twenty-seven years later, Lasker’s successor, Cuban Jose Capablanca, came to Newcastle in 1919 and took on 40 opponents in a simultaneous display. Two years later, Capablanca beat Lasker for the World title in Havana.

Not to be outdone, Capablanca’s successor, Russian Alexander Alekhine, played a simul against 19 opponents in Newcastle in 1926, winning 18 games and losing one, to a certain Mr. E. Carmichael. A year later, Alekhine defeated Capablanca in an epic 34-game match in Buenos Aires.

Whether it was the chess or the beer, we don’t know, but Alekhine clearly enjoyed his time on Tyneside, coming back to give another simultaneous display in 1938.

One further connection between the Toon and World Champions exists. In 1972, Ron Markham, a Newcastle hypnotist who once claimed to have cured 2,000 people of smoking by mass hypnosis, challenged Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky to a consultation chess match for £125,000 after
their ‘Match of the Century’ in Reykjavik. The Markham v. Fischer and Spassky match never took place, but it would have been quite the spectacle.

The original Newcastle Chess Club is said to date back to the 1840s, and has had many incarnations and venues since then. It now meets at Tyneside Irish Centre, Gallowgate, playing on Monday evenings from 6:30pm to 9:15pm. In addition, the club runs a junior section at Jesmond Library on Sundays from 2:30-4:30pm.

The club is also holding a FIDE-rated Christmas Blitz on 18 December at 7:15pm.

Anyone interested in playing in the Blitz or for the new Newcastle club in league and/or junior games can sign up by contacting: timpeterwall@gmail.com or calling: 0750 372 2366.

Players of all strengths and ages are welcome, particularly future world champions.