The King Walk

By the autumn of 1991 Nigel Short was about to become the first English challenger for the world title in more than a century, and Jan Timman — "the Best of the West" — was the man he would eventually meet for it. Their game in round four of the Interpolis tournament at Tilburg began quietly enough: an Alekhine Defence, a middlegame in which Short's pieces gradually took every open line, a rook landing on d8 and then a pair of them camping on the seventh rank.

By move 29 the attack had reached a strange perfection. Short's queen sat on f6, a knight's breadth from the black king, defended and immune; his rooks gripped the only open file; Timman's pieces stood tied to the defence of g7 and the back rank, unable to move without allowing mate. And there the position froze. Every white piece was optimally placed. Nothing could be improved — except one unit that had spent the whole game doing nothing.

So the king went to war. 31.Kh2, 32.Kg3, 33.Kf4, 34.Kg5 — up the board in plain view, with the queens still on, toward h6, where he would personally support mate on g7. The audacity is the point: the march works only because not a single black piece can ever give a useful check, and Short had to see that before taking the first step. Timman, a move from the end, resigned.

The game entered the anthologies at once and has never left. There were king walks before it and there have been king walks since, but this is the one the phrase means — the clearest demonstration in chess that when every piece stands perfectly, the king is a piece too.