‘The ultimate truth about chess is that it is a game of chance. All a chess player can do is react to opportunities and possibilities which are provided from outside and for which he can only hope and wait.’ J.H. Donner The King: Chess Pieces…
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‘Games are the opposite of human contact . . . During their game, chess players are “incommunicado”; they are imprisoned. What is going on in their heads is narcissistic self-gratification with a minimum of objective reality, a wordless sniffing and grabbing in a bottomless pit….
Read MoreJones-Dueball Nice 1974 Black to play ‘This games deserves a special prize for the most stunning move of the Olympiad’ Keene and Levy, Chess Olympiad Nice 1974: World Team Championship (Batsford, 1975), p.137
Read MoreWhat is your earlier memory of playing chess? I was six, and a boy two years older than me taught me the rules. In one of our first games he got king and two rooks against my bare king and forced me to the…
Read More“There could hardly be a greater contrast in temperament, style of play, even appearance, than exist between the Cuban and his challenger. Capablanca, of middle height, olive-complexioned, self-contained and dignified as a Spanish grandee, sits almost motionless at the board , with a single trick…
Read MoreThe Independent (10 April 2014) reported that ‘Forty of the nation’s leading writers have sent the Secretary of State for Justice, Chris Grayling, protest postcards with the name of the book they would most like to send to a prisoner – if they still could –…
Read MoreSarah Hurst It is very gratifying to live long enough to receive an acknowledgement that you have done something right. As some readers may recall, in 1998 I campaigned for a boycott of the chess Olympiad in Kalmykia in the wake of the murder of…
Read More‘The ultimate truth about chess is that it is a game of chance. All a chess player can do is react to opportunities and possibilities which are provided from outside and for which he can only hope and wait.’ J.H. Donner The King: Chess Pieces…
Read More“Chess is a kind of human activity which has room for manifestations of both intellect and the competitive spirit. But this is a bloodless competition. FIDE’s motto is Gens una sumus. And personally, I approve of only one kind of battles – the ones that…
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Gary Kenworthy
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S.B. Cohen
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