Hastings is the grandpa of international chess tournaments, first staged in 1895 and annually since 1920, with brief war and pandemic breaks. Its vintage years were the 1930s, 50s and 70s, when world champions were eager to compete, while England’s Sir George Thomas and Hugh Alexander scored stunning upsets.
The home contingent started slowly at the Caplin Hastings Masters 2022-23, before a surge in the second half put five English players in the mix at the start of Friday’s 10th and final round.
Final leading scores were Sarunas Sulskis (Lithuania) 8/10, Mark Hebden (England), Bence Korpa (Hungary) and Oleg Korneev (Spain) all 7.5; Martin Petrov (Bulgaria), Romain Édouard (France), Conor Murphy (Ireland), Timo Küppers (Germany), Brandon Clarke and Danny Gormally (England) all 7.
Sulskis, 50, a five-time Lithuanian champion, won his first six games, and at that stage was 1.5 points ahead of 14 players tied for second. Then the pack overtook him, and the critical moment for the entire tournament came in Thursday’s ninth round, when Hebden established a won rook endgame. White (Sulskis) Kf2, Rh5. Black (Hebden) Kb5,Rb3, Pa4. The black king is in check, and Kb4, with the idea Rh4+ Ka5 Rh5+ Rb5 would win. Instead Hebden retreated with Kb6?? when Ke2! allowed the white king to stop the a pawn. In the final round, Sulskis won smoothly.
For Hebden, 64, second prize still crowned a glorious few months during which he won team and individual golds for England at the world and European senior championships. He was joint winner at Hastings in 2009-10, and his zestful final-round attack on Friday overcame the reigning British champion Harry Grieve.
Apart from the trio who finished at the top, the main English success story was Mohammed Aayan Ismail, the 2021 British under-16 champion. Despite his lowly 1963 Fide rating, Ismail played a strong tournament, missed his first IM norm by only half a point, and won a fine strategic game against a seasoned IM.
Hastings’s venerable tradition continues, with sponsorship backing from e-trading technology firm Caplin Systems and long-standing support from Hastings Council, although its main event, the Caplin Hastings Masters, is now an open-to-all Swiss System tournament. In its heyday, it was an invitation 10-player all-play-all, in which four or five British masters fought to scavenge the occasional half point and the rare full point from the world elite.
Nowadays, that elite chases the high prize funds of the World Rapid and Blitz, followed by the “chess Wimbledon” at Tata Steel Wijk aan Zee, which starts on Saturday 14 January with Magnus Carlsen as top seed. Stockholm’s Rilton Cup clashes directly with Hastings, and two of England’s young grandmaster norm chasers, Matthew Wadsworth and Jonah Willow, preferred Sweden to Sussex.
Long ago, when Thomas, the badminton baronet, scored his finest result at Hastings 1934-35, he tied for first with Max Euwe and Salo Flohr after defeating the past and future world champions José Raúl Capablanca and Mikhail Botvinnik in successive rounds. It could have been better still, but Thomas’s West London clubmate Reginald Michell defeated his colleague in the final round. The result was greeted at the time as a fine example of British sportsmanship, whereas today many would regard it as quixotic.
3849: 1…Qc4+! 2 Kg1 (2 Ke1 Qe2 mate) Qg8+! 3 Kf1 (3 Kh1/h2 Qg2 mate) Qg2+ 4 Ke1 Qg1+ and 5…Qxb1 wins. An extra point for Nakamura would have produced a tie with Carlsen…
