Stratford Chess Club has organised a number of simultaneous chess matches in its time, and several of our members have developed a connoisseur's taste for "the simul", although it does not very often turn out to be a winner's dinner. The simul is a particularly entertaining and informative kind of chess, having as its principal benefit that you get the chance to play against and perhaps even momentarily disconcert a Grandmaster. It is quite exciting for the headstrong club player just to be one-to-one with an exceptionally strong player and see the whites of their eyes as you line them up in the cross hairs. Anyway, that is how it feels, but of course "one to one" is not strictly true, as the GM will be taking on up to forty other players at the same time. How they manage this feat will be an early consideration in this article, which aspires, no less, to offer advice to those at the wrong end of the chess power gradient who fancy having a go at some serious opposition in a simul.

Another of our themes will be chess psychology, for there are non-trivial differences between simultaneous play and standard chess, even for those players who are numerically challenged in only having eight pawns and eight pieces under their control. Some commentators have argued that the arrival of chess-supporting software is likely to kill the simul, as you can now play a silicon opponent at Grandmaster level in the comfort of your own home and on any evening of your choice. But I do not think so. Chess is a deeply inter-personal game and the often arrogant and dismissive pseudo-Germanic banter on voice-over Fritz is no substitute for watching real egos crumble across the board.

Only a culpably churlish club member would wish to demean the task faced by the three Stratford Chess Club Fat Boys as they girded their collective ass in the traditional sumo loin cloth, adjusted the pins in their vinyl hair, sprinkled the basho arena with salt and headed out to face some serious chess muscle. And they certainly had the stomach for it. On Board 1 we had Colin Searle (savour this one!) who as his second lesson in finding his way around the intricacies of the Latvian Gambit, impudently assailed it against none other than Riga's former world champion, GM Mikhael Tal. Sweets for my sweet, and Latvians for the Latvian. On Board 2 Jonathan Rashleigh took on the then British Champion and World Candidate GM Jon Speelman, reinventing the Four Knights Variation of the English Opening as he went along, (at the time) oblivious both to the theory and to the fact that Jon was and is an expert in the line. Not content with that piece of brass, our Jonathan then went into a rook and pawn ending with the author of the chapter on rook and pawn endings in the definitive text on end game theory, the Batsford Chess Endings. So he lost then? Wait and see. Finally our Board 3 David Jenkins had been wondering how to take advantage of the common knowledge that GM Raymond Keene profoundly dislikes the Benko (Volga) Gambit and has nurtured a career-long inclination to decline it. The way David plays, a declined Benko Gambit merely triggers the further offer of the Blumenfeld Gambit, but this time he was facing the co-author with Garry Kasparov of the Batsford Chess Openings. Fat boy David reasoned that if he took the red bow-tied and aptly nicknamed Penguin "out of the book" (but not out of the Benko) early he might himself be seen as a patzer, thereby persuading Keene to concentrate his energies mercifully elsewhere. On the other hand when some time ago a famous GM tried a similar tactic against the emerging Judit Polger ("I thought I'd take the little girl out of the book") he was not only humiliated in a "brevity" but had his efforts labelled the Male Chauvinist Pig's Defence.

We will get around to the three actual matches later, following some introductory ruminations concerning the peculiar conditions under which simultaneous chess is played, the effects of these conditions, and whether it might be possible to take advantage of them. "But how did our three Fat Boys do?", I hear you ask. You will have to be patient, dear friends; although I am prepared to offer a clue. As the proverbial football manager might have put it, "The (fat) boys done well".

Before analysing the games, then, it might be interesting to say something about the social psychology of the simultaneous match against a GM, since my secondary purpose is to offer tentative advice on how to handle its unusual features. Weirdly, according to Chess and Bridge in the Euston Road, there is not a single text book in existence on how to play in a simul, so once again we are able to demonstrate Stratford Chess Club bravely breaking new ground.

In a simultaneous match the visiting GM usually claims the privilege of playing White, although interestingly Tony Miles did not do so when he took on the serried ranks of the club several years back. The "psych-ops" (the current military jargon for psychological operations) begin early. Some GMs giving simuls remain faithful to their usual opening repertoire, notably Raymond Keene who showers out a whole flurry of d4s at manic pace, many of which the opponent needs to j'adoube into the centre of the intended square. This is presumably calculated to have two effects on the startled opponents; it signals that the current repertoire of opening theory has been internalised to the extent that it can be played as if by a zombie on automatic pilot, but it also hints that during the opening phases he will be round again before you have even thought of your initial reply.

This psychological tactic exactly matches the conditions under which a simul is played, since as Hooper and Wylde's The Oxford Companion to Chess puts it, "the master walks around the inside of an area, surrounded by tables and chess sets, with the opponents on the outside. Each participant must move when the master arrives at the board, neither sooner nor later". As we shall see in the discussion of the match between the two Jonathan's, this exerts a subtle and novel kind of pressure, forcing us opponents of the GM to keep a "candidate move" in the head while continuing to muse and/or calculate, as well as "simultaneously" charting the progress of the GM around the table in our peripheral vision. Add to this mixture that the GM speeds up as opponents crumble to defeat, and it easy to see that this is chess, but not as it is usually played. This defending of the squared tables, too: does it not remind you of how a single heavily armed Cowboy with rotating barrels might see off the attacking hordes of American Indians?

A parallel psych-op has been practised by Jon Speelman in simultaneous displays. Jon, in contrast to the immaculate concierge's garb of Raymond Keene, will have turned up in a sartorial style somewhere between smart casual and professorial scruff, his luxurious and tousled hair crackling with static electricity. He will appear laid back, even languid, and have offered a courteous, rambling and often amusing account of his expectations ("Don't try moves on the board before I get around to you, in case we get confused about what the position is"). Then, as if a switch in his brain had been triggered by remote control, he will have been off like a jack rabbit, each successive board subjected to almost as many opening moves as are legally permitted (a3, a4, b3, b4, Na3, Nc3, c3, c4, d3, d4, e3, e4, f3, f4, Nf3, Nh3, g3, g4, h3, h4; they all might come tumbling out, taking the majority of the opponents instantly out of their books. Given his raw talent for positional play, Jon Rashleigh was truly lucky to have landed something as stately as the English. The semiotics of this gesture can plausibly be decoded into two dispiriting messages, that Jon Speelman is indifferent to whatever path your game with him initially takes since he does not think it will impact on his winning chances, and that he suspects that your club player's opening theory may operate as no more than emperor's clothing to keep you warm until the cold blast of thinking time arrives.

The Chess Czar from Riga played Colin Searle in the days before the health hazards of secondary smoking attracted much critical comment, and the charismatic Latvian GM's consumption of the weed could reach epic proportions over the three or four hours of a full scale simul. Although it would be a tad unfair to describe Mikhael Tal as a precursory stealth fighter coming at you suddenly out of a pall of tobacco smoke, there is an element of truth in the undoubtedly appealing image.

Colin reports that on occasion Tal himself would pause spluttering, taking momentary time out from his intense concentration to blow his own smoke away. This confirmed the general impression he gave of legendary ill health, but also of a man preoccupied with doing well what he had come to do. Coupled with his poor command of English, some read this as shyness. He won every game except a draw against his host Dr. Jack Lanz, who was known to be supplying him with medication not available in Russia, so he could not be said to have been entirely without social skills.

Tal's immediate physical presence was also famously intimidating, not least in his reported demeanour when facing the young Bobby Fischer. During Colin's simul encounter, Tal never once looked him, or indeed at any other player, in the eye, or smiled, with the exception of the moment at which our Stratford hero banged in 2....f5 and entered the Latvian in honour of his opponent. The wicked grin would not have disgraced Jack Nicholson's "Johnny".

In a simultaneous match, the GM, or whoever is playing the solo part, will usually either arrange for the sets to be supplied (e.g. as is common in a charity simultaneous match) or will specify standard Staunton pattern. Not to do so is to invite trouble as I discovered to my cost in taking on twenty tweenieboppers in a Birmingham primary school, where nearly half of them were Dungeons and Dragons-obsessed mites who turned up with quite unreadable Gothic sets, and one with a cardboard travellers' set in which the pawns were no bigger than a sparrow's nipple. I don't know about you, but I get confused trying to remember that in chess terms that the Hound of the Baskervilles is a Bishop, and the Ninja Turtle a pawn. But if as an opponent in a simul you can get away with an unusual or microscopic set it will undoubtedly increase your chances.

The first condition of simultaneous chess that the club player needs to adapt to is the physical absence of the opponent. Like Hayley's Comet, the GM's ice cold brain has taken off on some celestial orbit, but it is not possible, as it is with Haley's Comet, to estimate accurately the time of return. The subsequent withdrawal and absence (death?) of the God who initiated the big bang at which all the games were initiated cannot fail to carry disturbing theological overtones and must be a subliminal source of ontological insecurity, with your pain at your deteriorating position lacking even the intimacy of torture. Some find themselves addressing the absent and assumed-to-be-uncaring GM in a parody of prayer and supplication, or spend their time exchanging furtive asides with any gathering spectators in the language of the lyrics of Road Runner ("What do you think of that, you guys?").

At the heart of the simul dilemma is the gulf between real time and psychological time. The seventeenth century metaphysical poet John Donne wrote a beautifully complex and witty poem, (The Sonne Rising) on this theme, imagining lovers as entreating for some slowing down by the galloping "horses of the night" (a chess image if ever there was one, give or take the minor problem in the spelling), as they pull the chariot carrying the sun (seen as a "busy old fool") on its nocturnal journey. Thereby they hope for prolonged pleasure, but the more pleasurable the time the quicker it goes. When the sun refuses, they decide to make love more ardently, thereby forcing the horses to speed up ("Yet shall we make thee run"). Psychological time in simultaneous chess is equally a product of the position; the worse your chess dilemma, the faster it goes. Yet in a simul you are denied one of the standard resources of normal play, your right to give a disproportionate amount of your time to a difficult move.

Another seemingly reasonable line of inquiry that might be contemplated by club players wishing to enter the world of the simul is to ask how GMs are able to do it in the first place. What is known about the problems of playing many opponents and can this knowledge offer any prospect of payoff by using it as a basis for inferring plausible strategies? For example, should one get into tactical complexities on the grounds that the GM will be short of calculating time, or follow the advice that used to given to human beings about to take on the emerging silicon monsters of the chess board (David Levy's now discredited "do nothing but do it well")? The chess literature is hugely and depressingly silent on these matters, and what there is strikes me as somewhat misleading, proposed in the absence of empirical evidence or at least not offering any. The Oxford Companion to Chess suggests that in a simul, "the master will....play simply, seizing on errors but confident that his superior endgame technique, if needed, will see him through". This proffered model of good simul practice has some affiliation with the Speelman versus Rashleigh game (particularly with respect to endgame technique), but none at all with Tal versus Searle or Keene versus Jenkins.

Interestingly, the silence of the chess literature on precisely how in practical terms GMs are able to cope with the multiple simultaneous processing of the simul is not replicated in the literature on experimental psychology. The processes involved in playing chess have, for obvious reasons, attracted the attention of two further groups of people whose interest in chess is instrumental to other purposes. These two are the academic specialists operating in the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. I am minded to take a look at artificial intelligence and chess in a future article for this web site (after all, British chess champion Sir Stuart Milner-Barry still remains one of the unsung heroes of Bletchley Park) but for the moment the task is to look at what cognitive psychology has to say about the simul.

Fernand Gobet, the principle investigator for Studies in Chess Expertise at the University of Nottingham's ESRC Centre for Research in Development, Instruction and Teaching has been developing and testing theoretical models for chess expertise and seeking experimental and empirical support for them. The focus is on how memory, perception and attention processes meld in highly skilled performance. Although the literature on high level chess performance is divided on whether GM level is defined by superior calculating ability, the current orthodoxy is the canonical conclusion of Groningen University's Adriaan de Groot that "it is unequivocal that depth of calculation cannot be the prime distinguishing characteristic between the grandmaster and the expert player", although Gobet's attempt to replicate this result suggested that across the full spectrum, the stronger the player, the greater the depth of analysis. Towards the top of the chess food chain, it is more commonly asserted, outstanding results are more to do with what Chase and Simon in "The mind's eye in chess" in W. G. Chase (1973) Visual Information Processing call "chunking theory", in effect a form of pattern recognition. Those interested in seeing how Gobet has extended the model and how it might be related indirectly to skill at playing simuls, might take a look at Gobet and Simon 's (1996) "Templates for chess memory: a mechanism for recalling several boards" in Cognitive Psychology 31

Enough of this serious stuff. What are its implications? The first is that the GM in a simul may not be instantly calculating "candidate moves" in a speeded up parody of Alexander Kotov's Think Like a Grandmaster so much as using memory and judgement. Although chunking theory was developed to explain how strong players can recall a number of boards following a brief scan (answer: they remember chunks as in "the king side position after a bishop fianchetto and castling", but with better players perceiving more complex chunks) it probably covers how a GM in a simul will re-recall and re-invent a position on returning to it. There are two potential points of weakness in the GM's instant practical judgement in response to your hot-from-the-press move. You have a slight hope if the import of the move crosses the boundaries between two or more chunks, and another sliver of opportunity if your move has a covert secondary purpose at some distance from the current action. GMs in simuls do not often make mistakes, but if they do they are more likely to be of this kind.

Another reassuring thought, now the performance of GMs in simultaneous games can be put through the rigors of subsequent analysis by computers, is that at least it has become possible to pinpoint inaccuracies and dent their invincibility. I trawled the three games reported here though Fritz 7 and not one of the three GMs escaped the wagging finger of one of Fritz's annotated question marks. Indeed, both Mikhael Tal and Raymond Keene managed to earn themselves the dread double question mark [??], although for different reasons.

At last we turn to the three games, here annotated with some help from Fritz 7 and aided by helpful comments from other members of the Stratford Chess Club Fat Boys team. I have included diagrams at significant points in the analysis, and have also asked webmaster (and honorary Fat Boy) Carl Hibbard to allow members to be able to access a playback facility for each of the games.