Sjakkfantomet

Its always nice to see people return to Tromsø and Arctic Chess Challenge. This year GMs Bartosz  Socko, Jon Ludvig  Hammer. Vadim  Malakhatko , Amon  Simutowe  and Heikki Westerinen returns to the Arctic and alot of other players of all kind of strenghts do the same. GM Matthew J. Turner from England are among those who comes back and he even have a close friend in Norway, IM Bjørn Tiller, that participate so it's a kind of vacation too. Here is my portrait of Turner this year:

Matthew Turner (2517) is a former English chess professional. He was born on the 12th of December 1975, and is 34 years old. He became a Grandmaster in 2002, and since the year 2000 he has been stable between 2480 and 2520 with a peak-elo of 2519. Since Turner got his Grandmaster-title he has had a rather low tournament activity where the league 4NCL is his main arena. He nowadays is more a teacher of chess and he works at the Millfield School in Somerset, England. Matthews chess classes includes all levels of play, from beginners to experienced international players. To last year Arctic Chess Challenge he brought with him his 21 years old student Peter S  Poobalasingam (2224), and we remember that both of them did well - with Matthew at a strong 3rd place and Peter at an amazing 9th place - performing almost 200 points above his actual elo rating.

In 2001 at Hastings he beat the young Levon Aronian that already was quite some player. But his sweetest chess memory is probably from the Four Nations Chess League in England where the boardorder of his team one season was 1. GM Turner 2. GM Morozevich 3. GM Short...

As white Matthew opts for 1.e4 more frequently, but he plays 1.c4 or 1.d4 regularly too. As black he plays both the Sicilian and the King Pawns opening against 1.e4 and usually the Nimzo Indian or the Queens Indian vs. 1.d4. But he can play many openings and his style is more fresh and creative than technical or theoretical. This means that he don't go for long mainlines, or discusses a lot of theory, but rather opt to get out of book early and create something over the board. He likes to play for an attack, and is not really a positional lion that excel in the late stages of the game.

In Britain many Grandmasters in chess has tried their luck on different Quiz shows at TV. James Plaskett and Bill Hartston is among them, but most successful of them to my knowledge is Matthew Turner. In the TV-show "Countdown" where he participated some years ago now he came to the final! The task was to rearranging letters to make the longest word containing 9 letters. He became second at the end and was happy to get his prize in hardcore cash, instead of a ton of dictionaries as the first prize winner got!

We take a look on a combination by Matthew that did'nt quite win the game on it's own, but that turned out to be a winner in the end: