Altogether now

In my decades of playing sub-optimal chess, I have been given several pieces of advice about how best to play simultaneous chess. I have faced several grandmasters over the board in simuls and tried to adopt these tips, but with very little success. In fact, no success. One suggestion was to tactically muddy the waters. The theory being if you play a closed positional game the GM (or whoever is giving the simul) will easily overcome you end in the end with their superior technique. On the other hand, although they are, of course, much better than you tactically if they have 20 odd other boards to focus on, effectively playing their moves at a rate akin to blitz, there is a chance they might slip up and give you some winning chances when faced with a messy position. This is fine in theory and may work well for those players stronger then myself who are adept at tactics but my record of my games shows a whopping nil points for me with this approach. In fact, I have found the opposite to be true. I am pleased to report that I have achieved a couple of draws from playing a completely blocked stagnant position. The key here has been to try to make the games last sufficiently long so that in the end then GM kindly offers you a draw in a desperate attempt to get his last bus home. Although loathsome this is when you want as many of those horrible creatures who play on when they are a rook and a bishop down with no compensation (or similar) to keep on playing against the GM. Whilst cringing as you look across at them as they seem to live in a deluded and forlorn hope of stalemate, you are secretly urging them on to keep the moves coming and battle on, as they are taking up valuable time and in some remote part of his brain the GM is worrying about when the last number 13 bus leaves. Talking of weak annoying players, another piece of advice I was given (by a GM who regularly gives simuls) was to sit next to the weakest players. He told me this is where he tends to lower his guard on his tour round the boards. I have tried this only once and it failed. The people next to me insisted upon talking to me whilst I was desperately trying to concentrate and were even suggesting all manner of moves for my game instead of thinking about their own. Inevitably, their suggestions usually involved dropping a piece or two and whilst I didnʼt take any of it, my own play was well below par. I got totally hammered and returning home I decided to put this strategy and myself despondently to bed. I once took the radical step of trying to out-prepare an English GM I was about to face in a simul. I researched his repertoire and had some success as we went down a path he often played and then hit him with a novelty I looked at in advance. It didnʼt bother him one iota and the worst of it was not that he won but that I came across him a year later for a similar event and he had remembered all the moves of our game even though he had been playing 20 other people at the time! Undoubtedly the most unusual simul I played was one I organised. On the night of Wednesday 12 April 2017, anybody wandering around the elegant Reform Club in Pall Mall would have been treated to the somewhat surreal site of a young man sitting on a chair cycling on a desk bike, blindfolded, munching at bananas, endeavouring to drink water without spillage, meanwhile uttering syllables such as “c7c5”. It was Grandmaster Timur Gareyev conducting a simultaneous blindfold chess exhibition. GM Gareyev is the Guinness world champion at blindfold chess, having taken on an extraordinary 48 players simultaneously on December 4, 2016. Timur ended up winning 9 games, drawing just one and had no losses. Almost needless to say, I was one of the losers and anybody looking at the record of the moves afterwards would have assumed that I had been the one playing blindfold.