David Howell neglects British title defence to seek tougher challenges

David Howell neglects British title defence to seek tougher challenges
Leonard Barden
The Guardian, Saturday 28 August 2010

England’s youngest grandmaster David Howell, 19, made an ambitious and bold decision last month, when he opted to miss defending the British title he won in 2009. Instead Howell decided to test himself at higher levels, at three strong European events in two of which he was seeded near the bottom.

The policy looked dubious in the early rounds of the young grandmasters invitation at Biel, Switzerland where Howell began with 1.5/6. But the Sussex teenager, who sometimes used to fade under pressure, fought back to a solid 3½/9. Then he made a strong 8½/11 total in the highly rated world rapids (30-minute games) in Mainz, Germany, losing only to Russia’s elite GM Sergey Karjakin.

This week Howell was the second-lowest-ranked player in the Youth v Experience match in Amsterdam, where five mainly teenage talents met a quintet of mostly elite GMs. Again he began with a defeat, against Israel’s No1 and World Cup winner Boris Gelfand, but again he recovered with excellent wins against No1s from Holland and Denmark to finish with 4½/10.

The upshot is that Howell will have kept his precious 2600+ international rating and will start next month’s world team Olympiad in Russia, where he plays No4 for England, in good form and with a big gain in confidence.

The lurking question, though, is whether these achievements are enough to sustain him as a long-term professional player at a time when major chess events are under growing pressure from the recession. Despite setting age records for British chess and being close with his 2600+ rating to the world top 100, he ranks only world No15 among under-20s. The year of his birth, 1990, has turned out the supreme vintage year in chess history, producing the world No1 Magnus Carlsen, Karjakin, and others who have already reached or are close to the elite 2700 level.

Howell stated at Amsterdam that he was still unsure whether to continue as a chess pro or to join his friends at university. There is also a third way, taken by England’s 1990s star Matthew Sadler, who reached the world top 30 by his mid-twenties then gave up chess for a career in technology.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk