Archive for Columns
Sunday, May 13, 2012 20:00
What’s the best and most unique thing about chess? Of course it’s the fact that we have long lasting world championship matches. The immense tension is not restricted to one or two hours (football, tennis), or a few days at most (cricket, snooker), but lasts several weeks or even months. This is something we should praise, not condemn.
Boris...
Monday, March 05, 2012 11:28
In Woody Allen’s recent movie Midnight in Paris (2011), a young Hollywood writer named Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson) is brought back to Paris of the 1920’s. There, to his delight, he meets his heroes Hemmingway and Fitzgerald as well as artists such as Picasso, Dali and Man Ray. For chess players, the movie has just one flaw: Marcel Duchamp...
Thursday, December 08, 2011 11:23
It's a little known fact that the playing venue of the London Chess Classic is actually not that easy to reach from the City. The office where I work is on the South bank of the Thames, close to London Bridge station, from where it took me no less than 1,5 hours to get to the Olympia Conference Centre, near the Kensington Olympia tube station....
Saturday, November 05, 2011 11:56
While reading a very serious op-ed about the developments on the Greek crisis in the Financial Times, I suddenly had the very non-serious realization that there seems to be no such thing as a ‘Greek Opening’ in chess.
Everybody knows the Spanish and the Italian, there’s a Portuguese Variation (you should try it one day!), and I also heard of the...
Saturday, October 15, 2011 21:44
Watching the 7th game of the Kasparov-Short blitz match last week made me realize once again how radical Fischer’s proposal to shuffle all the pieces on the first rank was and still is. If you want to avoid boring theoretical chess duels, all you have to do is force the players to play an unexplored variation or opening – problem solved.
The 2009...
Tuesday, October 04, 2011 12:53
After becoming a bit depressed this week by reading such chess headlines as Billboard hero Magnus Carlsen blundering and former Soviet hero Mikhail Gorbachev having a friendly meeting with Gadaffi supporter Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, I decided to turn my attention to more interesting news about chess and science. After all, the fact that male behaviour...
Thursday, July 28, 2011 1:16
The chess world is in a crisis. In tournaments like Biel and Dortmund, all the public gets is games full of mistakes. Something must be done to end this situation which is scaring away sponsors, organizers and potential young talents from becoming professional chess players. I am proposing a startling solution.
Ronald Reagan: "Mistakes were made...
Monday, April 04, 2011 5:46
When you read an open letter like the one on cheating, signed by a number of participants of the European Championship in Aix les Bains, there are basically two ways to react. The first is to join in the public outrage and bemoan the terrible state that chess has gotten itself in. Something needs to be done and it needs to be done NOW! That's the...
Sunday, February 06, 2011 18:26
Darren Aronofsky's new movie Black Swan, featuring Natalie Portman as the increasingly tormented ballet dancer Nina who has to perform the dual role of both the white and the black swan in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, left me both puzzled and fascinated. And, inevitably, it made me think of chess.
As many critics have noted, Black Swan is actually...
Friday, January 14, 2011 4:37
Humans, like all primates, often show behaviour largely dictated by social status and prestige. This applies to practically everything we do: the way we talk, the way we do business, the way we do politics, and the way we play chess.
The photo that Beckett wanted to adorn the front cover of his first published novel 'Murphy' I recently read a...
