Raymond Keene

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Raymond Keene
OBE
Keene in 1985
Full nameRaymond Dennis Keene
CountryEngland
Born (1948-01-29) 29 January 1948 (age 76)
TitleGrandmaster (1976)
Peak rating2510 (January 1977)

Raymond Dennis Keene

Grandmaster norm, in 1974. In 1976, he became the second Englishman (following Tony Miles) to be awarded the Grandmaster title, and he was the second British chess player to beat an incumbent World Chess Champion (following Jonathan Penrose's defeat of Mikhail Tal in 1961). He represented England in eight Chess Olympiads
.

Keene retired from competitive play in 1986 at the age of thirty-eight and is now better known as a chess organiser, columnist and author. He was involved in organising the

Chess career

Keene won the London and British Under 18 Championships (shared with Brian Denman) in 1964,

David S. Goodman
. They have one son, Alexander, born in 1991.

Keene was the second British player to meet the necessary requirements to become a Grandmaster. He was pipped to the post by a few months by Tony Miles, the first British Grandmaster in 1976. Both he and Miles won financial prizes for this feat.

Miles and Keene were at the forefront of the English chess explosion of the next 20 years, and they were followed by other British grandmasters such as Michael Stean, John Nunn, Jon Speelman and Jonathan Mestel.

Keene represented England for nearly two decades in international team events, beginning with the 1966 Chess Olympiad in Havana at age 18. He followed with the next seven straight Olympiads: Lugano 1968, Siegen 1970, Skopje 1972, Nice 1974, Haifa 1976, Buenos Aires 1978, and La Valletta 1980. His individual performances at Lugano and Haifa merited bronze medals (although individual medals were not, in fact, awarded at Haifa[6]) and he was undefeated in three Olympiads – these two and Siegen. His later performances, though, were less impressive, with just two draws from four games at Buenos Aires and losses in both his games at La Valletta.[7]

He represented England four times at the Students' Olympiad (Örebro 1966, Harrachov 1967, Ybbs 1968 and Dresden 1969) and four times at the European Team Championships (Bath 1973, Moscow 1977, Skara 1980 and Plovdiv 1983). At Skara he won both a bronze medal with the team and the individual gold medal for the best score on his board.

Keene won the 1971 British championship and shared second place on three occasions, in 1968, 1970 and 1972. His tournament victories include

La Valletta
1985.

Playing style

Keene's playing style tended toward the strategically original and positional. Strongly influenced by

Chess-related work

Organiser

Keene worked as a chess event organiser. He was the originator and organiser of the annual

sponsorship and has proved himself capable of efficient and rapid organisation of chess events".[1]
p196

Keene brought

Russia (USSR) vs Rest of the World match in London within two weeks, enabling the event to go ahead on time after the previous plans had fallen through, described by John Nunn as "a magnificent organisational achievement at such short notice."[1]

Keene has also been involved in organising several World Championship finals matches. He arranged for the first half of the

Daniel King. He was the instrumental force behind 'Brain Games', which organized the World Championship match in 2000 between Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik. Following the match, however, he retained the trophy in lieu of money he believed he was owed by the collapse of Brain Games: Kramnik did not receive it until 2008.[10]
Brain Games later collapsed in controversial circumstances.

Columnist

Keene became the chess columnist of

Sunday Times. In August 2017 he was replaced by David Howell
.

Television personality

Keene has appeared on television. He covered the world championships of 1981, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1993, and 1995 for BBC 2, CHANNEL 4, and Thames TV. In the Duels of the Mind series which aired on the UK ITV network, Keene, along with South African author and civil rights campaigner Donald Woods, discussed and analysed what Keene regarded as the twelve best chess games ever played.

Magazine editor

From 1978 to 1982, Keene was the editor of Modern Chess Theory, a magazine on openings which included contributions from the Soviet world champions Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov, and Mikhail Tal.

Author

Keene has written over 200 books on chess and mind games. He was for many years the Chess Advisor to Batsford. His early books such as Howard Staunton (1975, with R. N. Coles) often dealt with players with styles similar to his own.[1] Aron Nimzowitsch: a Reappraisal (1974) is much admired and was revised and translated into Russian in 1986,[1] with an algebraic edition published in English in 1999.[12] In 1989, he and Nathan Divinsky wrote Warriors of the Mind, an attempt to determine the 64 best chess players of all time. The statistical methods used have not met with wide approval, but the player biographies and games were regarded by one book as providing a good overview.[1]

Working for Korchnoi

In 1978, along with

1978 World Chess Championship Karpov–Korchnoi match.[13]

Working for Karpov

In 1981, Keene came to the

1981 World Chess Championship Karpov–Korchnoi match.[13]

Controversies

Allegations of plagiarism

Keene has on several occasions been accused of plagiarism. In 1993 John Donaldson accused Keene of committing plagiarism in The Complete Book of Gambits (Batsford, 1992).[14] Donaldson wrote "Just how blatant was the plagiarism? Virtually every word and variation in the four and a half pages devoted to Lisitsin's Gambit in Keene's book was stolen."

In 2013, Edward Winter reflected on plagiarism in chess:[15] "a particularly sordid corner of the chess world which will never be eradicated without maximum public exposure". He went on: "The latest instance is the discovery[16] by Justin Horton that material from the first volume of Kasparov’s My Great Predecessors series has been misappropriated by Raymond Keene in The Spectator."

Private Eye describes the plagiarism as involving "substantial amounts of text lifted from chess books, mainly Kasparov's but also other authors".[17] One case involves Keene's notes to a game between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, which he annotated for The Times on 8 December 2011 and The Spectator on 5 January 2013.[18]

These alleged plagiarisms, which Winter calls "eye-popping"[19] are catalogued at "a convenient 'plagiarism index'[20] which is being kept updated".[21]

Tony Miles

In 1985, Keene received £1,178 from the BCF for being Tony Miles' second at the Interzonal in Tunis; however, he had not actually been Miles' second but accepted the money and shared it with Miles. Miles never banked the cheque and told the BCF about the scam in 1987. Two months later, Keene resigned his posts as BCF Publicity Director and FIDE delegate. Keene said that his resignation was for different reasons, and that he was "furious" at his treatment after organising numerous events from 1983 to 1987.[22]

Brain Games Network

In 2000, Keene's former brother-in-law

The Penguin", a nickname he had first acquired in 1966.[25]
)

Levy further criticised Keene for selling three of his own companies to BGN for £220,000 despite their being "virtually worthless". The three companies had between them "a total capital and reserves of only £2,300". At much the same time, according to Levy, BGN purchased a web site and two domain names from Chess and Bridge Limited. However, they made the purchase in two stages. The first of these stages was its sale to Giloberg Finance Limited, owned by Keene's associate Alan Lubin: the second was the immediate sale of the same items, by Giloberg, to BGN. The first sale was for approximately £60,000 (in fact $100,000) and the second was for £290,000, hence making Giloberg "an instant profit of approximately £230,000" and raising the question of why BGN should have paid a sum much greater than the original vendors considered the items were worth.[26]

BGN collapsed in controversial circumstances. Shareholders were unhappy that sums amounting to at least £675,000 had been paid to directors in "fees and payments" despite the company swiftly becoming insolvent.[27] Investors were also unhappy that Keene and Lubin had acquired 88% of the company "for a song" even though the remaining 12% had been sold for around £3 million.[28]

During the course of the 2000 Braingames World Championship Keene was accused of heavy-handed behaviour in having journalist John Henderson removed from the press room with the assistance of bouncers.[29]

Korchnoi

Viktor Korchnoi alleged that when acting as his second in the 1978 World Championship match, Keene broke his contract by writing a book about the match (which appeared three days after the match finished) having specifically signed an agreement "not to write, compile or help to write or compile any book during the course of the match". Korchnoi commented: "Mr Keene betrayed me. He violated the contract. It was clear that while Mr Keene was writing one book and then another, Mr Stean was doing his work for him."[30]

Attempts to defend Keene were rebutted by Michael Stean's mother, who stated that she was in a position to know what was in Keene's contract since she herself had typed it. Keene, she claimed, had signed this despite having already negotiated a contract with Batsford to write a book about the match. She described "a premeditated and deliberate plan to deceive" and noted that Keene's conduct had come under suspicion during the match.[31][32]

References

  1. ^ .
  2. ^ William Hartston, "No rest from mental fight", The Independent, 23 August 1997 [1] retrieved 13 October 2011
  3. ^ United Kingdom list: "No. 50154". The London Gazette (Supplement). 14 June 1985. p. 10.
  4. .
  5. .
  6. ^ Individual Medals Olimpbase: 22nd Chess Olympiad, Haifa 1976.
  7. ^ [2], consulted 9 September 2009
  8. ^ Keene, Becoming a Grandmaster, pp. 73–76.
  9. ^ Howard Staunton memorial tournament [3]
  10. ^ New in Chess, 2008, number 8, Nic's Café, p. 6.
  11. ^ The Spectator's decision to dismiss Keene for plagiarism was reported in Private Eye, 18–31 October 2019, p. 9 (https://keenipedia.com/press)
  12. ^ John L. Watson (1999). "Book Reviews by IM John L Watson #19". London Chess Center. Archived from the original on 24 June 2009. Retrieved 5 September 2009.
  13. ^ a b "Матч Корчной – Карпов: как йоги, КГБ и экстрасенсы воевали за шахматную корону". business-gazeta.ru. 12 June 2016. (in Russian)
  14. ^ Inside Chess, 3 May 1993, pp. 24–5.
  15. ^ Edward Winter's Chess Explorations (99) Chessbase, 21 June 2013
  16. ^ Predecessors Streatham and Brixton Chess Blog, 19 June 2013.
  17. ^ Chequered Mate.
  18. ^ Special Ks, The Spectator, 5 January 2013
  19. ^ Edward Winter's Chess Explorations (100) Chessbase, 2 September 2013.
  20. ^ Ray Keene Plagiarism Index Streatham and Brixton Chess Blog.
  21. ^ "Edward Winter's Chess Explorations (100)". Chess News. 2 September 2013.
  22. ^ Generous to a Fault, Kingpin 15, Summer 1989, pp. 10–11, letter from Tony Miles. Also see Raymundo contra Mundum Archived 20 November 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  23. ^ How could you do this Raymond? Open letter from David Levy to Raymond Keene.
  24. ^ Chess Café 14 August 2001, The Skittles Room, Brain Games: The Full Truth by David Levy. Also see Raymundo contra Mundum Archived 20 November 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  25. ^ "Log in or Subscribe – ChessCafe.com". chesscafe.com.
  26. ^ Is Fraud a Brain Game? Archived 17 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine by David Levy, 6 January 2002.
  27. ^ Private Eye, 1084, 11 July 2003.
  28. ^ Private Eye, 1093, 14 November 2003.
  29. ^ "Pandora", The Independent, 23 October 2000, comment p. 4; Lubomir Kavalek, "Chess", The Washington Post, 23 October 2000, p. C11.
  30. ^ "Keene's Gambit" by Nick Pitt, The Sunday Times magazine, 13 January 1991, p. 20.
  31. ^ "When Keene was taxed by Petra Leeuwerik and Viktor Korchnoi as to whether he was writing a book during the match, as he was spending so much of his time in the Press Office sending telex messages, Keene emphatically denied it." Chess, February 1980, pp. 84–85, letter from Mrs Jean Stean.
  32. ^ What Jean Stean had seen Streatham and Brixton Chess Blog, 19 April 2013.

External links