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1994-01-05
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EVANS ON CHESS. September 24, 1993. Copyright by GM Larry Evans.
(A revised past column while GM Evans is in London covering the
Kasparov-Short world championship match.)
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White to play and win
(White: Kd8, Rb8, Na6, Pb5; Black: ka7, nc7, nd5, pb6)
CHESS FOR FUN
Believe it or not, the undisputed Ripley of chess is Andy Soltis, a reporter
for the New York Post. His CHESS TO ENJOY is the funniest book about the
vagaries of the royal game ever to brighten a rainy Sunday.
Grandmaster Soltis regularly mines chess lore for anecdotal nuggets and
facetious facts. He is the rightful heir to the mantle of Irving Chernev and
Fred Reinfeld, who were walking chess encylopedias. Reinfeld, who realized
that being a chess pro was a ticket to starvation in the 1930s, withdrew from
competition to pen over 100 books on chess, coins and stamps.
Nothing is so trivial or bizarre as to escape Soltis' attention, and he
always seems to find a twist. When Anatoly Karpov took a two point lead
against Viktor Korchnoi in their 1974 match, Korchnoi noticed Karpov always
wore a certain chess tie they both were given while in America. So before the
8th game Korchnoi sprang an innovation: He wore the same tie and stopped
losing. But he lost game 17 when he left it home! This victory enabled Karpov
to wrest the title from Bobby Fischer by default in 1975.
Soltis also unearths an editorial from a New York paper after American champ
Harry Nelson Pillsbury's attempted suicide in 1906: "But is any professional
chess player really sane? It has been said that every great man has been a
great chess player, but was there ever a chess player who was a great man? Of
course not, and never will be. It is impossible. Great skill at chess is not
a mark of greatness of intellect but of great intellect gone wrong."
THE BOOK OF LISTS gives the death of Paul Morphy in 1884 as one of the 15
most famous events that took place in bathtubs. This inspires Soltis to dig
up his own list of other players who died in strange ways. Julian Perlis
froze to death in the styrian Alps at age 33 in 1913. Vera Menchuk was killed
by a buzz bomb during an air raid on London in 1944; her husband's first
wife, also a chess star, perished in 1935 when she got sucked into the
propeller of a plane ready to take her to a women's tourney in Warsaw.
World champion Alexander Alekhine died in Lisbon in 1946 by choking on a
piece of steak. The last five years of his life were spent by (a) getting out
of Nazi-dominated Europe; (b) getting drunk. He supported himself by giving
simultaneous exhibitions all over Iberia, often crocked, yet won most of his
games by virtue of sheer innate skill. According to Soltis, in Salamanca he
suffered one of the worst defeats ever inflicted on a champion by an unknown.
White: ALEKHINE Black: DIESEL French Defense 1944 1 e4 e6 2 d4 d5 3 Nd2 c5 4
Ngf3 Nc6 5 Bb5 Bd7 6 exd5 exd5 7 0-0 Nf6 8 Re1 Be7 9 dxc5 0-0 10 Nb3 a6 11
Bf1 Bg4 12 h3 Bxf3 13 Qxf3 Ne4 14 Be3 f5 15 Rad1 Ne5 16 Qe2? f4 17 Bd4 f3 18
Qe3 Bg5 19 Bxe5 Bxe3 20 Rxe3 Qg5 21 Rxd5 Nxf2! White Resigns
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SOLUTION: 1 Nxc7 Nxc7 2 Ra8! Nxa8 3 Kc8 Nc7 4 Kxc7 Ka8 5 Kxb6 wins. Soltis
notes that this position, composed by Capablanca, is on a Cuban postage stamp
in his honor!