21. The craziest thing that has ever happened to me

I have been walking around in circles in my Riga hotel room for the last 60 minutes, wondering if this just happened or if I'm dreaming. I don't think I would have believed it myself, if it wasn't for the pictures on my phone.

I don't know how to describe it to a person that doesn't play chess, but I will try. Imagine that you go down to the park to play football with some friends, and all of a sudden Ronaldinho shows up and plays against you...

Alexei Shirov analyzing our game.

I took a taxi to the Riga blitz tournament today, and sat down and waited for the competition to start. The highest rated registered player was an Ukrainian International Master, and I hoped that I would get to play against him in the tournament since it would have been the strongest player I had ever met.

All of a sudden the Latvian Grandmaster Alexei "Fire on Board" Shirov walks in. The second highest rated player in the world in the 1990's. What was he doing here!?

Back then he was the challenger for the world title against Kasparov, but then Kasparov dropped out of the chess federation and the match never happened. One of the most unfair things to ever occur in chess history, robbing Shirov of the chance to become a world champion.

I immediately sprung up and approached him.

"Alexei?"

"Yes?"

"Wow! It is an honour to meet you!"

"Yes, yes... So what do you want? Do you want to take a selfie?"

"No, I just wanted to say hi."

"Yes, yes", he said and walked away to register his entry into the tournament.

I couldn't believe it, and was in a daze from meeting him as the tournament began.

I started out the tournament with three draws, and then climbed higher through the scorecards with two straight wins. At this point I had no losses, and only needed another draw to play against Shirov at top board, but unfortunately I had to face the Ukrainian in round 6, and lost.

I then had another draw, and lost my last game, and ended up at 11th place out of 38. I was the 11th highest rated player in the field, so I ended up just where I deserved to be. Alexei nuked all of his opponents, and won the tournament with a perfect score, of course.

Between most of these rounds, Alexei came over to me to speak about my games. So when the tournament was over I felt we were friendly enough to ask him for a casual game post-tournament, and he agreed. He suggested a time handicap of him playing with 3 minutes+2 seconds, and me having 5+5, to level the field. It basically means that I get almost twice as much time to think about my moves compared with what he gets.

He then held a white and black pawn behind his back, and asked me to pick a hand. I chose the right hand, which turned out to hold the white pawn. This meant that I was now about to play against him with the white pieces, and it was at this point that something extremely unlikely happened.

I am a mediocer chess player on my best day, and an awful player when it comes to openings. My plan is always to survive the opening, and then surprise the opponent with some crazy sacrifices. There is only one opening I am pretty good at, and that is the Qxd4 Sicilian.

By some crazy coincidence, out of the billions of possible chess positions, this was exactly what happened. He walked into the ONLY opening where I know a couple of tricks. And if there is one thing that the black player should avoid while defending against this opening, then it is to push e5... And Alexei, having the black pieces, pushed e5! I couldn't believe it. This is a player that has memorized more chess positions in his head than most people on earth, and for some reason he plays the only moves that would possibly give me any sort of advantage against him. 🤯

He gave me an opportunity that I didn't deserve, and so I went for it. I had to. I pushed my h- and g-pawns for an all out attack.

The fatal position.

Facing this attack against his king, he decided to move his queen to a6, asking for a queenless endgame where black has doubled a-pawns if white exchanges.

But playing an endgame against Shirov is not something I was eager to do. So I decided to sacrifice a pawn by moving my queen back to d2... Completely missing that I would have a good position after g5, Qxd3, cxd3, Nd7, Nh4!

This was a huge mistake by me, and a couple of moves later it was all over, and I had to resign. Chess is unforgiving. At one point you have a slight advantage against Alexei Shirov, and in the next you get killed.

Happy winner.

After the game he told me this:

"You really surprised me. I have some wine, do you want to help me drink it?"

We went to another room where he poured the wine and some kind of Latvian Jaegermeister and coffee, and then asked me all about my bicycle trip and the equipment that I use. This guy just returned to Riga after competing in the Chess Olympiad in India, and now he was having wine and talking about Mikhail Tal with some random Swedish guy?

I didn't want to overstay my welcome, so I left at a good moment 30 minutes later after thanking him for being this kind.

These things only happen once in a lifetime. And the thing that I liked the most, was to find out that Alexei Shirov, one of the greatest ever, is just a regular dude after all.