Alec Holden at 100
The beauty of chess – unlike lesser games such as, say, football – is that you can carry on playing to a considerable age. Look at Viktor Korchnoi. On a somewhat less exalted level, but an age that makes the great Viktor seem like a schoolboy, look too at Alec Holden, who recently celebrated his hundredth birthday. Holden caused a stir in the national press because he won £25,000 from bookmakers William Hill with a £100 bet, placed when he was 90 at odds of 250-1, that he would get his birthday card from the Queen. But the editor of BCM was less interested in the betting coup than in Holden’s recipe for a long life – porridge and a daily game of chess.
Holden has played chess since, as a teenager, he learned the moves from his brother. He played for Epsom and Surbiton, and when I visit him at his home in Ewell, Surrey, proudly shows me a copy of William Winter’s Chess for Match Players that was presented to him for winning the Surbiton Club Championship & Oakleigh Cup in 1954/55. He says he was not especially strong, and never had a grade or played in congresses – “I had other things to do,” he explains – but his cache of correspondence chess cards dating back to the 1950s, when he was pittting his wits against an opponent in Soviet-bloc Czechoslovakia, suggests he was a committed player.
The commitment continues. “I play at least one game every day – either against my computer [an ancient Amstrad with a program that shows the board in 3D] or at the local social club. It keeps your mind active. I’ve played so much that I ought to be a grandmaster by now, but it doesn’t work that way. As you get older, your faculties start to tell you they don’t want to do any more. It’s difficult, but you have to accept it. Things you could do five years ago are impossible now. I can’t see so well, can’t hear so well, can’t walk so well. I’m clumsy, I drop things, my memory’s going. Though someone I know said to me ‘I’m like that and I’m only 60.’ ”
Happily, Holden’s faculties, like his sense of humour, are still in decent shape. He is immaculately turned out in shirt and tie, with a gold tie-pin, was driving until six months ago, and makes the odds of 250-1 he was offered against getting to his century look very generous. “It’s a bet you can’t lose,” he says shrewdly. “If I hadn’t made it, I wasn’t going to worry about the £100. I’d have had other things to worry about.”
The real reason for my visit was to play a game against Holden, surely the UK’s oldest active chess player. His son had told me he didn’t use a clock, so I reckoned it would be a gentle exercise. But I had reckoned without his solid technique and my own fallibility – I quickly blundered away a piece. All I can claim in mitigation is that the room, which was being warmed by a two-bar electric fire, was soporifically hot. It also struck me that, up against a 100-year-old who claimed his memory was failing, I was clearly in a no-win situation, though his memory didn’t seem to fail him when it came to playing a Ruy Lopez.
Holden, who evidently plays a gentlemanly game (or perhaps he was infuriated by my slow play), offered me an early draw, and even repeated the offer when I was a piece down. I was too embarrassed to accept and desperately tried to keep the game alive, hoping he would tire and fall into the traps I was attempting to lay. He cleverly avoided my efforts to win the piece back, but missed my last desperate ruse – a draw by perpetual check. Phew – honours just about even. I aim to play him again when he gets to 110, and next time no mercy!
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