Chess to Enjoy / Entertainment Column Number 420
First Time Control Reached: Chess Life readers have been devouring “Chess to Enjoy” for 35 years now. We decided to celebrate this milestone
by inviting our columnist to take a look back. By GM ANDY SOLTIS
ANY USCF MEMBER CAN WRITE A CHESS Life column. In fact, I’ll bet that anyone can write two columns. It’s when you try to write the 100th col-
umn or so that it begins to get tough. For me, this one is number 420. Column number 1 appeared in January
1979 after Burt Hochberg, the longtime Chess Life editor, asked me to try writing about offbeat aspects of the game. I had worked as a New York Post reporter for 10 years and written books and a weekly newspaper column. But I had no idea what a monthly magazine column would be like. Burt only gave me two guidelines: “Make
it interesting,” he said. “And do it in descriptive notation.” (More on that later.) My immediate problem was: What is
“interesting”? Aren’t different players inter- ested in reading about different things? Doesn’t it vary according to the reader’s rating? Or age? Personality? IQ? Shoe size? I decided to trust my instincts: What
subjects, I wondered, was I interested in? The answers I came up with were all
over the map: How much luck is there in chess? Do great players play great chess when they’re sick? How did English become the dominant language of chess? Is triangulation possible in middlegames? Or Zugzwang? Do grandmasters ever make illegal moves? Who are the greatest over- achievers and under-achievers in chess? Did world champions win or lose the last game of their lives? Each of these could—and did—become
a subject for “Chess to Enjoy.” (Why that name? I had used it as a book title, Burt liked it—and neither of us could think of anything better.) Very little, if anything, had been written
on these topics before. So research came slowly. In the meantime, I began collecting random bits of information in hopes I’d be able to fit them into an appropriate column. I ended my first Chess to Enjoy with this puzzle: What can a king, a knight, a bishop, a
pawn or a rook do but a queen cannot? (Answer on page 71.) I filed potential column material in manila
14 January 2014 | Chess Life
folders. I still do. If you look into my wooden cabinets, you’ll find folders stuffed with, among other things: U.S. Open bulletins, printouts from Russian websites, press releases about man-versus-machine match - es, clippings from German and British newspapers, and even copies of Chess Life when it was an eight-page newspaper in the 1950s. Whenever I came across a clever quote by someone, a bizarre game or a striking fact, I added it to my “interesting” files. For example, this caught my eye and appeared in an early column.
I’ll just move my piece here. Or there. GM Ulf Andersson IM Michael Basman Hastings, 1974-75
the end of the 1997 Deep Blue-Garry Kas- parov match is there, along with the minutes of chess cases brought before the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland. The same goes for newsletters of the Grand Masters Association, the text of a chess stage play, “Knights of the Id,” and all of the Belle program’s tournament games, which programming pioneer Ken Thompson gave me in the early days of computer chess. Even the declassified mil- itary analysis, signed by Reuben Fine, that he did of anti-aircraft action against Japan- ese planes during the Biak landing in May 1944. Will I ever find a use for this stuff? I have no idea. Researching my own books also pro-
vided material. For example, I was at the Marshall Chess Club one day looking for material for a biography of Frank Marshall, when I found some of his hand written notes for what became My Fifty Years of Chess. On a yellowing legal-pad page was a story that inspired an April 1993 column about how players dream.
A dreamy position Carl Schlechter Frank Marshall Prague, 1908
Black’s next 12 moves were “passes”:
12. ... Ba8 13. Rfd1 Kh7!? 14. h3 Kg8! and con- tinued 15. Kh2 Kh7 16. g4 Kg8 17. Bg3. Bear in mind that White was one of the
world’s highest rated players at the time. Yet Black treated his moves as if they didn’t matter: 17. ... Bb7 18. e3 Ba8! 19. a3 Bb7 20. f4 Ba8 21. Rd2 and now, for variety, 21. ... Qd6 22. f5 Qd8! 23. Bf4 Bb7. Black’s pieces are back where they were
in the diagram. Surely you can’t get away with playing like this against an elite grand- master. But 30 moves later ... White resigned.
I squirreled away material in my folders
without any idea of how it might be used. The transcript of the press conference at
This position was adjourned, to be
played off the next day. During the night in his hotel room Marshall couldn’t find a win after the likely 33. Qc8. He fell asleep —and dreamed of Wilhelm Steinitz.
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