THE FIRST ENGLISH NORM

Raymond Keene

Born 1948

British Champion 1971 · Grandmaster 1976 · OBE 1985

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At a glance

Born: 29 January 1948 · London, England
Federation: England
Title: International Master (1972) · Grandmaster (1976) · International Arbiter
Honours: British Champion (1971) · World Junior Championship silver medal (1967) · OBE (1985)
Peak rating: 2510 (January 1977)
Also: Chess correspondent of The Times, 1985–2019
Books: 81

By the numbers

consecutive Olympiads for England, 1966–1980

13/17

his unbeaten score at the Lugano Olympiad, 1968

1974

the first grandmaster norm by an English player, at the Nice Olympiad

2510

highest rating, January 1977

Raymond Keene won the British Championship in 1971, became the first English player to earn a grandmaster norm, at the Nice Olympiad of 1974, and in 1976 became the second Englishman, after Tony Miles, to receive the grandmaster title. He played for England in eight consecutive Olympiads from 1966 to 1980. At eighteen he beat the former World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik at Hastings. A follower of Nimzowitsch and Réti, he favored hypermodern openings such as the Modern Defense. After he retired from competitive play in 1986 he became one of the best-known figures in British chess as an organizer, columnist and author of well over a hundred books.

Dulwich and Cambridge

Keene was born in London on 29 January 1948. He had known the moves for five years when he began to take the game seriously at about eleven, and in Becoming a Grandmaster (1977) he named Nimzowitsch's My System as the most notable of the books that shaped his style. In 1964 he won the London and British Under-18 Championships, shared with Brian Denman. He played for England at the World Junior Championships of 1965 in Barcelona, where he finished second to Duncan Suttles in the B group, and 1967 in Jerusalem, where he took the silver medal behind Julio Kaplan. He was educated at Dulwich College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read German literature, graduating in 1971, and wrote his first chess book.

The Hastings Premier of 1966/67 was his first all-play-all international tournament. At eighteen he beat Mikhail Botvinnik, who won the tournament with 6½/9 and lost no other game; Keene finished eighth with 3½. He played the game in a dinner jacket and a black elasticated bow tie, “determined to perish in style,” and photographs later showed that the elastic had snapped after Botvinnik's 26th move. In Becoming a Grandmaster he called it his “rotten win” and wrote that the applause it drew was misguided. Botvinnik dismissed him as a “calculator of variations,” and Keene gave up the Modern Benoni and the Dragon Sicilian for solid opening systems. Three months after Hastings he began work on Flank Openings (1968).

British Champion

Keene won the British Championship at Blackpool in 1971, unbeaten with 8/11, and shared second place in 1968, 1970 and 1972. At Blackpool he scored 4/5 with Black, using the analysis of the Pirc and Modern Defenses he had prepared with George Botterill. He had made his first International Master norm at the Siegen Olympiad of 1970, on first board in the C final after Jonathan Penrose fainted at the board and withdrew from the team. The British title brought an invitation to the first German International Championship in Berlin later in 1971, where he scored 8/15 and made the second norm, gaining the title “exclusively on German soil.” He was awarded the International Master title in 1972, the first English player to receive it since Penrose in 1961.

In 1968 he won Jim Slater's Young Masters tournament at Southend, which Slater sponsored to find the best young British player. Slater offered a year's financial support if Keene left Cambridge at once to become a professional player. Keene wrote that Slater's continual query, “What use is German Literature?”, “struck me as unworthy of an answer,” and he persuaded Slater to wait until he had his degree. Slater then paid towards a second, Les Blackstock, for Berlin 1971, Palma 1971 and Reykjavik 1972, but the support lasted “precisely four months rather than the hoped-for year,” and Keene called his results in 1972 “uniformly dismal.”

“One might suppose from this game that Capablanca had carefully read My System and then used all the theories contained therein against their inventor!”

— Raymond Keene, on Nimzowitsch–Capablanca (New York, 1927), quoted by Garry Kasparov with Dmitry Plisetsky, Garry Kasparov on My Great Predecessors Part I (Everyman Chess, 2003; English translation Ken Neat), Chapter Four, José Raúl the Third, Game 103, concluding comment after 46...Rf1.

“Historically the game was important, as one of the very few wins this century by an Englishman against an Ex-World Champion, but as chess it was nonsense and deserved to be hissed rather than clapped.”

— Raymond Keene, Becoming a Grandmaster (1977), p. 12

“Chess is rich and fascinating, but it is not everything, and it may just be possible that those players who are not cultural morons may eventually inherit the earth.”

— Raymond Keene, Becoming a Grandmaster (1977), p. 44

“I suspect my main weaknesses are of a psychological rather than technical nature, and I suppose I play better under the whiplash of the team captain!”

— Raymond Keene, Becoming a Grandmaster (1977), p. 52

“By a combination of ability and shrewdness, Keene has attracted considerable sponsorship and has proved himself capable of efficient and rapid organisation of chess events.”

— David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld, The Oxford Companion to Chess

The grandmaster title

Keene played for England in eight consecutive Olympiads, from Havana 1966, when he was eighteen and played bottom board, to La Valletta 1980. At Lugano in 1968 he scored 13/17 without a loss on fourth board, and he was unbeaten again at Siegen in 1970. He played top board at Skopje in 1972. At Nice in 1974 he earned the first grandmaster norm by an English player, and at Haifa in 1976 he scored 7/10, again without a loss, to earn his second. By then he had missed the norm by a single point in six international tournaments, among them Hastings 1973/74, where he scored 9/15. Tony Miles had completed his own norms a few months earlier and became the first British grandmaster; Keene was the second.

His tournament victories include the Hastings Challengers of 1965/66 (shared with Yuri Balashov), Johannesburg and Woolacombe in 1973, the masters' group of the Capablanca Memorial in 1974, Alicante 1977, Sydney 1979, Dortmund and Barcelona in 1980, the Lloyds Bank Masters of 1981, Adelaide 1983 and La Valletta 1985. At the European Team Championship at Skara in 1980 he won the individual gold medal on his board. His highest rating was 2510, in January 1977.

A hypermodern player

Keene's play was original and positional. Strongly influenced by Aron Nimzowitsch and Richard Réti, he preferred hypermodern openings: the Modern Defense, the Nimzo-Indian and the King's Indian. His Aron Nimzowitsch: A Reappraisal (1974) was later revised and translated into Russian; he wrote that his rating rose by 55 points, from 2450 to 2505, almost immediately after he finished it. In 1974 he and Bill Hartston covered Viktor Korchnoi's Candidates final against Anatoly Karpov in Moscow as accredited foreign journalists, and in their book Karpov–Korchnoi 1974 they thanked Korchnoi for analyzing his games with them. In 1978 he helped Korchnoi in the World Championship match against Karpov.

That work included negotiations away from the board. In My Great Predecessors Part V, Kasparov describes a written agreement Keene signed with the Soviet delegation's Viktor Baturinsky at Baguio. Korchnoi dropped his demand for a glass screen and his use of mirrored glasses, while Karpov agreed that Professor Zukhar would sit in the Soviet delegation's sector from the eighteenth game onward.

In My Great Predecessors Part III, Kasparov recalled that after the sixteenth game of his second match with Karpov in 1985, Keene called the powerful knight an “octopus.”

Organizer and writer

Keene retired from competitive play in 1986, at thirty-eight. He brought the 1983 Candidates semi-final matches Kasparov–Korchnoi and Smyslov–Ribli to London, organized the 1984 match between the USSR and the Rest of the World there at two weeks' notice, and was involved in organizing the World Championship matches of 1986, 1993 and 2000 in London. In 1992 he was one of the organizers of the checkers world championship between Marion Tinsley and the program Chinook, which Man versus Machine (1997), written with David Goodman, calls the first world championship in any event between a man and a machine. He wrote a chess column for The Spectator from 1977 and was chess correspondent of The Times from 1985, succeeding Harry Golombek, until 2019.

He has written well over a hundred books on chess and mind games, among them Warriors of the Mind (1989, with Nathan Divinsky). He was appointed OBE for services to chess in 1985.

Legacy

Keene and Miles led the growth of English chess in the years that followed, when Michael Stean, John Nunn, Jon Speelman and Jonathan Mestel also became grandmasters. Keene's own playing career ended in 1986, but he stayed in chess as an organizer and author, and wrote the chess column of The Times for thirty-four years.