This is an extract from the book Chess Buccaneer - The Life and Games of Manuel Bosboom by Merijn van Delft and Peter Boel, published by New In Chess.

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Manuel Bosboom is a unique chess player.

He has clinched victories against chess legends like Garry Kasparov in a blitz game and Peter Leko in a classical game in just 26 moves.

Although he never reached the highest levels, he is an innovative and imaginative player who has produced a large number of memorable and highly entertaining games.

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Dear reader! Many times I’ve been asked to write a book about my chess career.

So here it is, the result of more than 50 years of chess experience.

Then and now, chess for me has always meant to play, play, play! As a kid, I liked all kinds of games: football, card and board games, puzzles and magic.

Later, video games could be added to the list. When I was about seven years old, my father took me and my older brother to his chess club and I became fascinated.

My first (small) tournament ended in an unexpected success for me, and so my career started...

With big spectacles, pimples and a slightly autistic lifestyle, I definitely was something of a chess nerd.

Later, my bad eyesight saved me from having to do military service. Unfortunately, there are few games left from my early period, but believe me, the level was quite awful!

I remember a game where I castled queenside after having moved my king already. Of course, I won the game...

Even so, one improves, becomes more serious, and gets a trainer.

Together with my enthusiastic clubmate Hans Plukker at Het Witte Paard, I studied Suetin and started to analyse my own games.

He also drove me to all kinds of tournaments in his old Peugeot, with Neil Young’s music in the background.

Later my buddy Mark van Schaardenburg got a driver’s license to perform this sometimes risky task.

Meanwhile, I developed an affection for players like Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Tal and Leonid Stein.

My games became wilder, often leaving the opponent wondering: was this move a blunder or a sacrifice?! I didn’t mind!

Manuel Bosboom. Photo: Lennart Ootes.

From my many blitz games I learned that you just had to keep going, regardless of the situation.

A diehard attitude, quick board view and deft movements earned me a reputation in blitz.

An unorthodox repertoire (see for instance my 1.a4 g6 2.h4 in Bosboom-Rogers) supported my success.

Still later the term ‘Bosboomian’ appeared in chess circles, meaning something like ‘interesting but suspicious’.

Quite an achievement, I think! I did have two problems: recurring time-trouble and a murky opening repertoire.

On the other hand, I also developed some special lines that were outlandish and tricky.

My early use of the g- and h-pawns became something of a trademark.

Entering the nineties, I started doing drugs – XTC to begin with. Later, mushrooms and LSD followed.

With a few friends we would stay at home, play some special music and have profound experiences.

We were vegetarians (shouldn’t we all be?!) and went through a very inspiring period.

Chess came in second place now, but otherwise things went on as usual. In general I can say it was a positive time, without any serious setbacks as might perhaps have been expected.

I kept changing teams in the Netherlands and played competition chess in Belgium, Germany and Iceland.

All these teams are totally different, but it’s always fun! I think the ‘chess family’ is a great invention, as is the game of chess itself – if only they would change the starting position every now and then.

Being an International Master with three GM results to my name, I’m a happy and dangerous player, as you will learn from this book.

I also hope you enjoy it and that we will meet at the board one day! Chess can be simple: I sacrifice my pieces and you buy me a beer...

I would like to express my thanks to my friends Peter & Merijn for producing this manuscript and to New In Chess for publishing it.

Also a big THANK YOU to my fans, who have supported me in all kinds of ways - especially my father, who is my biggest fan.

Follow your Heart and use your Mind. Play without Dogma!

Manuel Bosboom
Zaandam, September 2021

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If Manuel Bosboom didn’t exist, he would have to be invented. His unique, fascinating personality is bound to enrapture every true chess fan.

That’s why the idea to write this biography came so naturally to us.

At the New In Chess office in 2019, while talking about another project with publisher Allard Hoogland, suddenly we looked at each other and said, ‘Yes, that’s what we’re going to do!’

The two authors of this book, both born and raised in Apeldoorn, have known Manuel and been captivated by his bold chess exploits for quite a long time: Peter already played against him in the IBM Junior tournament in 1980 and in several blitz and rapid tournaments from a quite early age.

Merijn has also met him in many tournaments and became Manuel’s team captain when the latter joined the Apeldoorn chess club (then called BIS Beamer Team) in 2002.

Manuel is a chess artist of true cult status, not only in the Netherlands but also internationally.

Iossif Dorfman, the former trainer of Kasparov, Karpov and the French school, once said: ‘Bosboom is a player who sees the dynamics of the game and the pieces like no other.’

His old trainer Cor van Wijgerden called Manuel the biggest chess talent he had ever seen, as big as his contemporary, GM Friso Nijboer, and has often said it’s a pity he never got more out of it.

But besides that, so many stories about him are going around that we thought it was worthwhile to compile them and give them to the chess world.

We had already started gathering quite a lot of material – chess-wise and otherwise – when we told Manuel about our plans.

He replied that he had long been considering to write such a book himself!

But he also admitted that he simply wouldn’t be able to summon up the discipline to finish such a project.

Ever since we broke the news to him, he has been extremely cooperative and open. We had a couple of sessions at his picturesque home on the famous Zaanse Schans.

He was a welcoming and entertaining host, providing the necessary beverages and excellent vegetarian food. For another intensive session, Manuel himself travelled to Peter’s home in Arnhem.

His brother David and his father Adriaan too have been very hospitable and forthcoming.

Roughly, the distribution of the work for this book was that Peter compiled the biographical stories, while Merijn analysed the games.

For the biographical information, Manuel’s family members as well as a number of his friends were consulted.

As far as the games are concerned – there are plenty of occasions to shout out ‘Oooohh’ and ‘Aaaahh’ at many of Manuel’s moves, but Merijn has endeavoured to scrutinize all the material in a level-headed and objective manner.

With Manuel’s super-adventurous style, his games are bound to contain mistakes. Often these contribute strongly to the entertainment value of the game.

But as understandable as such mistakes may be in tense time-scrambles, in this book any move that turns a winning position into a drawn one, or a drawn position into a lost one, gets a remorseless ‘??’.

This may seem harsh at times, but we feel that objectivity is even more important with Manuel’s daredevil games than ‘normally’.

On the other hand, Manuel’s swashbuckling style has a very healthy positional foundation – a number of games have also been included in which he defeated renowned opponents (Garry Kasparov, for example!) in a quiet, strategic style, or in a technical endgame.

This book features 66 amazing games, as well as a number of other striking fragments that have been gathered and annotated by Peter in the chapters ‘Swindles’ and ‘Curiouser’.

And of course we couldn’t leave out a collection of 36 combinations that the reader can try his hand at solving, with three different levels of difficulty.

We mixed this explosive material into a heady cocktail that we hope will get you pleasantly tipsy, and no hangover! Chess is an adventure with many beautiful vistas.

The great appeal of Manuel Bosboom is that he shows us that you can do things differently – in chess as well as in life.

This is a marvellous gift for which we will never be able to thank him enough. We would like to express our gratitude to Allard Hoogland and Remmelt Otten who made this project possible.

We also thank Manuel, David and Adriaan Bosboom, Loek van Wely, Arthur van de Oudeweetering, Frenk van Harreveld, Piet Peelen, Karel van Delft, Dirk Sebastian, Harrie de Bie, Richard Vedder, Guido de Romph, René Hennipman, Mark van Schaardenburg, Gerard Welling, René Olthof, Yuri Eijk, Frank Peeters, Bas Beekhuizen and Lennart Ootes, all of whom have contributed in one way or another to this book.

Thanks are also due to our families who have been very supportive throughout the intensive process of writing it.

Peter Boel/Merijn van Delft,
Arnhem/Amsterdam
July 2021

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During the Donner Memorial tournaments in 1995 and 1996, Bosboom had taken Van Wely along to Zaandam to play football in the park on sunny summer evenings.

Loek, who was just over 20 at the time, enjoyed it, and decided to join the Zilvermeeuwen team, which played on Sunday afternoons.

He kept travelling there from the other side of the country for a couple of years. ‘I thought that was very special,’ Hennipman says.

‘Loek even skipped a simul now and then, sometimes taking a plane and a taxi to get here in time.’

Bosboom would want to play in a wing position, you would expect, but he was always a defensive midfielder.

Why? ‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘perhaps because I feel kind of heroic when defending against a superior attacking force.’

Van Wely was a defensive midfielder too, but he also had an uncontrollable itch for moving forward and trying to score goals.

‘Manuel was more defensively inclined. Especially in futsal he was very good at this – you just couldn’t get past him, he would keep coming back.’

In recent years, Van Wely is still known to organize football matches on rest days in Wijk aan Zee with that other fan, Magnus Carlsen.

There is also a quite fanatical side to Manuel, which manifests itself especially in physical sports. He made several mountain biking trips with Van Wely.

At Crete, during the Chania Open in 1993, they went up a mountain with several other Dutchmen. When they started going downhill, there were big holes in the road, large stones, and an abyss gaping on their right.

Several of the other Dutchmen decided that this was too much and proceeded to walk down, but Van Wely and Bosboom started flying down in a death-defying frenzy.

‘My bike was bouncing like crazy,’ Van Wely remembers, ‘Suddenly there was a wall before me and I had to pull the brakes instantly.

Then I heard someone muttering “you arsehole!” between his teeth. Manuel had been right behind me all the time.’ Chess-wise, 1997 was probably Manuel’s best year ever.

Throughout the year, he played an endless series of wild attacking games, even against solid grandmasters. It was one elongated outburst of creativity.

It started with 7 out of 9 in an event in the German town of Willsbach. He only lost to Igors Rausis, the Latvian-Czech GM who was caught consulting his mobile phone in a toilet in Strasbourg 22 years later, in 2019.

In 1997 there were no mobiles with chess engines yet, and Rausis was just a strong player.

Manuel narrowly missed the Dutch Championship final by losing a match to Karel van der Weide, but then went all out again and played in three summer opens.

In the Dutch Open in Dieren, things didn’t go too well after an unnecessary loss to the eventual winner, Israeli GM Alex Finkel (see the ‘Curiouser’ chapter).

He did share first prize there in the traditional blitz side-event with another specialist, Alexei Barsov from Uzbekistan.

Then, in Vlissingen, he played brilliantly in several games, only to go horribly wrong in time-trouble. But he showed no fear at all for reputed grandmasters.

In August he went to Antwerp to play in the Lost Boys tournament. He made only 5/9 there, but beat the strong Bulgarian Kiril Georgiev, a former World Junior Champion.

Manuel played the sharpest line against Georgiev’s Benko Gambit and landed in a losing position.

He decided to muddle on for a bit.

Game 38
Benoni Defence
Manuel Bosboom 2430
Kiril Georgiev 2670
Antwerp 1997 (4)

1.d4

In 1996, Manuel added 1.d4 to his repertoire, which certainly helped broaden his horizon.

1...♘f6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 b5 4.cxb5 a6

5.♘c3

The main line of the Benko Gambit starts with 5.bxa6. 5...axb5 6.e4 b4 7.♘b5

This funny variation was invented in 1975 and leads to very unclear play.

7...d6 8.♗f4 ♘xe4

The roles are reversed, as now Black is the one with a pawn up and White is playing for compensation.

9.♗d3 g5 10.♗e3

10...♘f6

Returning the pawn to get his pieces coordinated. The rare 10...♕b6 looks promising for Black.

11.♗xg5 ♗g7 12.♘e2 ♘bd7

Both sides are slowly but surely bringing their pieces into play. 13.♘g3 ♘e5 Including 13...h6 first was certainly worth considering.

14.0-0 ♕b6

15.♖e1?

A novelty at the time, with some cool tactics in mind, but it’s not correct.

White should stabilize the knight with 15.a4. 15...c4 Black accepts the challenge and goes after the knight, but this piece actually becomes the hero of the game.

16.♗xc4 ♘xc4 17.♘h5!

The point behind the piece sacrifice. 17...0-0! Castling right into it, but this is where the king is safest.

18.♘xg7

18...♔xg7?

After this logical recapture, White gets enough play for the piece. The intermediate move 18...♗g4! would have been strong.

After 19.♕c1 ♕xb5 20.♗h6 and now 20...♕xd5, Black remains a piece up.

The knight on g7 is remarkably helpless. 19.♖xe7? This move is too optimistic. 19.♕c1 was the way to keep the position dynamically balanced.

19...♘g8?

Black gets confused in the tactics. 19...♕xb5 20.♕d4 ♘e5 turns out to be winning for Black.

White can keep sacrificing all his pieces, but it won’t be enough for a perpetual: 21.♖xe5 dxe5 22.♗xf6+ ♔xf6 23.♕h4+ ♔g6 24.♕g3+ and now 24...♔h5 25.♕xe5+ f5. 20.♘c7

The frivolous knight is still alive and kicking. 20...♘xe7 21.♘xa8 ♕a7

Black will be material up, but as opposite-coloured bishops favour the attacker, White will have enough compensation.

22.♕h5

22...♘e5?

Possibly Black saw the perpetual check after 22...♘g8 23.♗h6+ ♘xh6 24.♕g5+ ♔h8 25.♕f6+ and wanted to play for more, but this backfires badly.

23.♗h6+ ♔g8 24.♗xf8 ♔xf8 25.♕h6+ ♔g8 26.♕xd6 It’s not clear what Black missed, but after losing this key pawn, his position collapses.

26...♘g4 27.♘b6 ♗f5 28.h3 122

Stabilizing the knight with 28.a4 would have decided the game immediately.

28...♘xf2!

Black finds his last fighting chance.

29.♔xf2 ♘xd5 29...♘c8 30.♕xb4 ♘xb6 31.♕d4 wins as White has too many pawns.

30.♕xd5 ♕xb6+ 31.♔f1 ♗c8!

Transferring the bishop to the a6-f1 diagonal. White still needs to be careful.

32.♕g5+ ♔f8 33.♖d1!

A good square for the rook, enabling the king to crawl around it, and heading for safety on the queenside.

33...♗a6+ 34.♔e1 ♕e6+ 34...♕g1+ 35.♔d2 ♕d4+ 36.♔c1 was very similar.

35.♔d2 ♕d6+ 36.♔c1 ♗d3!

Black keeps finding moves to keep the fight going.

37.♕e3 ♕c6+ 38.♔d2 ♗g6 39.♔e1!

Now the kingside is safest after all. White has calculated that he can force the exchange of queens if Black takes the pawn.

39...♕xg2 40.♖d8+ ♔g7 41.♕d4+! The final key move. 41...f6 41...♔h6 42.♕d2+ was the point. 42.♖d7+ 1-0

In August, at the AKN Open in Haarlem, he played a fantastic tournament, coming first with 5½/6 after a final-round draw with Mikhail Gurevich (who ended on 3½) and beating GMs Attila Groszpeter and Mikhail Ivanov in superior style.

In round 2, Manuel played one of his best games ever.

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Get the book Chess Buccaneer - The Life and Games of Manuel Bosboom on the New In Chess store.