Alexei Shirov: life, style and the famous Bh3 against Topalov

Alexei Shirov (Riga, 1972) is a Latvian and Spanish grandmaster, World Under-16 Champion in 1988, world number two in 1994 and one of the most imaginative attacking players of recent decades. He beat Vladimir Kramnik in a match to become Garry Kasparov's challenger, reached the final of the 2000 FIDE World Championship and, at Linares 1998, played one of the most famous moves in chess history: 47...Bh3!! against Veselin Topalov.

Who is Alexei Shirov

Shirov was born on 4 July 1972 in Riga, the capital of Latvia, then part of the Soviet Union. It is the same city as Mikhail Tal, and that is no small detail: Shirov grew up in the Riga chess school, is regarded as a disciple of the eighth world champion and, of all the elite players of his generation, is the one who most resembles him at the board. If you want to meet the master before the pupil, there is our guide to Mikhail Tal.

After the break-up of the Soviet Union he played for Latvia. In the mid-1990s he settled in Spain, took Spanish citizenship and represented the Spanish federation from 1995 to 2011. He returned to Latvia between 2011 and 2018, and since 2018 he has represented Spain again. That is why he is sometimes described as Spanish and sometimes as Latvian: both are true, depending on the year.

From Riga to the elite: Under-16 champion, grandmaster and world number two

His rise was quick. In 1988 he won the World Under-16 Championship and in 1990 he earned the grandmaster title, at 18. On the January 1994 FIDE list he was already world number two, rated 2715, behind only Kasparov.

He stayed at the top for more than fifteen years. His highest rating, 2755, came in January 2008, at the age of 35, at a time when that figure placed him among the best in the world. For two decades he played the strongest events on the circuit, Linares and Wijk aan Zee among them, and he was for years one of the most feared players with White and one of the hardest to neutralise with Black.

Cazorla 1998: the challenger who never played the match

The strangest chapter of his career is also the most important. In 1998 Kasparov held the classical title outside FIDE, and a candidates' match was organised to find him a challenger. Viswanathan Anand declined to play, and his place went to Shirov, who was next on that organisation's rating list.

The match was played in Cazorla, Spain, in May and June 1998, against Vladimir Kramnik, who was the favourite. Shirov won 5.5-3.5, with two wins, seven draws and no losses. On paper, he was Kasparov's next challenger.

The title match never happened. Kasparov, Shirov and the organisers could not agree on terms, the sponsorship collapsed and in 1999 Kasparov began negotiating with other opponents. In 2000 he ended up defending his title in London against Kramnik, the very player Shirov had beaten, and lost it. Shirov always maintained that the match lacked legitimacy and that he was the rightful challenger. For many fans it remains one of the great sporting injustices in chess history.

Tehran 2000: the final against Anand

That same year he had another chance. The FIDE World Championship was then a knockout event, with dozens of players and short matches, a format that punishes a single bad day. Shirov knocked out a series of top players: Alexander Onischuk, Mikhail Gurevich, Boris Gelfand, Evgeny Bareev and Alexander Grischuk.

The final against Anand was played in Tehran in December 2000, and the Indian dominated it: he won 3.5-0.5, with three wins and a draw, and the match ended before all the games had been played. Shirov was once again one step from the title, this time without any controversy.

47...Bh3!!: the most famous move of his career

If there is one position every chess fan associates with Shirov, it is this one. Linares 1998, Topalov with White and Shirov with Black. They reach an opposite-coloured bishop ending: Black is two pawns up, but such endings are notorious for being drawn even with pawns missing, because the weaker side's bishop blocks the squares of one colour and the king defends the others.

Black's problem is the white king, which can reach the kingside pawns in time and then cross over to stop everything. Any normal move, such as repositioning the bishop or bringing the king forward slowly, gives White the time needed to build a fortress.

Shirov played 47...Bh3!!. The bishop is offered on a square where a pawn can take it, and the idea is purely about tempi: if White captures, the black king walks in via f5 and e4 before the white king can block its path, while the a and d pawns end up too far apart for a single bishop to stop them. The game went 48.gxh3 Kf5 49.Kf2 Ke4 50.Bxf6 d4 51.Be7 Kd3 52.Bc5 Kc4 53.Be7 Kb3, and Topalov resigned: either the a pawn queens or the d pawn costs White the bishop.

What makes it famous is not the difficulty of the final calculation but the idea: in a position where everyone was looking for ways to improve the pieces, Shirov saw that what he had too much of was a piece and what he lacked was a tempo. Tim Krabbé ranked it second in his list of the 110 most fantastic moves ever played, and it is still used as an exercise to show that, in endgames, the count of moves matters more than material. To train that way of thinking, our guide on how to calculate variations explains how to order candidate moves.

Shirov's style: fire on board

His books of annotated games are called Fire on Board, and the title describes his chess well. The first volume collects his best games from his youth and the second covers 1997 to 2004. They are among the most recommended collections of a player's own games for anyone who wants to learn to attack, precisely because they explain what he was thinking at the time and not only what the analysis said afterwards.

Some hallmarks of his style:

• Initiative before material. Like Tal, he gives up pawns and the exchange readily if he gets activity and squares in return.
• Sharp openings. He looks for unbalanced positions from the first moves, with both colours, even if that means taking risks.
• His own theory. His name is on the Shabalov-Shirov Gambit against the Semi-Slav, in which White throws the g pawn forward before Black has castled.

The pawn on g4 threatens to drive away the knight on f6, which guards e4 and the kingside. If Black takes it, White gains time and opens the g file against the king. It is a clear example of how Shirov thinks: a pawn is a reasonable price for an attack.

• Creativity in endgames. The Bh3 is not an exception. Shirov is a much stronger endgame player than his attacking reputation suggests, and he likes to solve endings with ideas of timing and pawn breaks rather than slow manoeuvres.

What you can learn from Shirov

Shirov is not a model to copy move by move: his style demands calculation that most club players do not have. But his games hold lessons that work at any level.

The first is to count tempi, not just material. The Bh3 is the extreme example, but the same question, will I get there before my opponent, decides pawn races, attacks on opposite wings and king endings. The second is to look for the move that breaks the structure when the position seems closed: a pawn or exchange sacrifice is often worth more than three moves of manoeuvring. The third is to annotate your own games in writing, as he did in Fire on Board: it forces you to be honest about what you were thinking at the time.

If you are interested in the tactical side of his play, our guide to chess tactics goes through the themes one by one, and the one on the Sicilian Defence explains the openings where Shirov played many of his attacks.

Shirov at AcademiaTal

In Creativity and Calculation with Alexei Shirov, Shirov himself analyses two of his best games, a French Defence in which he explains how to convert a strategic advantage and an attack in the Sicilian Dragon, plus the celebrated endgame against Topalov, with 47...Bh3 explained by the man who played it. The lessons are taught in Spanish with English subtitles.

To see him alongside other great attackers, Tactical masters: from Morphy to Shirov pays tribute to him together with Morphy, Steinitz, Tal, Fischer and Kasparov, and Master Chess: Attack, Openings and Endgames has a lesson on the creative play of Tal and Shirov. All three are included in the subscriptions that unlock the whole catalogue.