Bryon Nickoloff Annotations

[Brad Thomson]

Reminiscent of Capablanca's play. The natural 24...Kf6 seems like the losing move and Nick finds the lovely Qe4 and Qxh7 tactic and the queen is boss!

Nick would have taken this as a sincere compliment, he was very fond of Capablanca and liked it when his games were said to resemble those of the great genius.

[Hans Jung]

Reminiscent of Capablanca's play. The natural 24...Kf6 seems like the losing move and Nick finds the lovely Qe4 and Qxh7 tactic and the queen is boss!

[Brad Thomson]

Nickoloff, Bryon - Lesiege, Alexandre 1994 , CAN-ch , Hamilton CAN (chesstempo.com)

The game against Alex took place in the last round and Nick was not interested in a draw. With 10.e4 it was clear than he meant business. Of all of the games that I had the pleasure of watching Nick play, this one may be the most memorable. I recall discussing the game with Denis Allen as it took place, and he too was quite taken by the bravado of Nick's gambit. Nick always seemed in total control of this game, and he seemed to know what move his opponent was going to play throughout. Despite the fact that Alex was ascending to grandmaster strength at the time, Nick essentially gave him a lesson. The move 25.Qe4 baffled the peanut gallery, then Nick soon played 28.Qxh7. We were surprised that Alex played out the pawn ending as far as he did.

[Brad Thomson]

Thanks Ian. Nick was very gracious with everyone, even with the 1400 players who were analyzing their own games. Bryon would pop his head in and explain to them what they were looking at.

[Ian Findlay]

Annotations to Nick's Annotations of game with Baragar

I shared a hotel room with Nick throughout the Closed of 1994. We had a number of guests, some regular and some not so much. This game stood out as one of Nick's best from the tournament. Nick was a perfectionist and preferred games without flaws. Nick's favourite games of those he won were always those where he had ruthlessly exploited a small error on the part of his opponent while making no slip-ups himself. Nick almost feared winning in twenty moves if there was a way to be found to do it in twelve. The rest would be a blemish, it would be a waste as far as Nick was concerned.

On 11.c5! Nick writes simply space. This is a perfect example of Nick's cold sobriety. Bryon was never one to mince words, nor to waste them. One word captures perfectly everything Nick needs to say about the position. We can see the essence of Nick's genius operating here.

On 28.Be2!! Be2 and only now does Nick explain the punctuation. I was doing demo-board work at the time and happened to be standing almost directly behind Nick watching him when he physically played this move. His opponent immediately slumped back into his seat and needed a deep breath and he also shook his head. Soon the entire playing room was aghast. Nick calmly left for a smoke and I inevitably took the opportunity of joining him. He was already talking about any money the best-game prize would offer. Nick was at his best, he was very refined. He exuded a calm and relaxed confidence bordering on something mystical. He did waste a lot of time on smoke breaks however.

Nick was a great talent and nice of you to remember him. I would argue that he would be playing variations in his head during smoke breaks so you may overestimate how much time he wasted doing that. I do not think there is a player so generous with his time as Nick to show you his analysis after his game. Of course he also loved to analyze. He is greatly missed.

[Brad Thomson]

Annotations to Nick's Annotations of game with Baragar

I shared a hotel room with Nick throughout the Closed of 1994. We had a number of guests, some regular and some not so much. This game stood out as one of Nick's best from the tournament. Nick was a perfectionist and preferred games without flaws. Nick's favourite games of those he won were always those where he had ruthlessly exploited a small error on the part of his opponent while making no slip-ups himself. Nick almost feared winning in twenty moves if there was a way to be found to do it in twelve. The rest would be a blemish, it would be a waste as far as Nick was concerned.

On 11.c5! Nick writes simply space. This is a perfect example of Nick's cold sobriety. Bryon was never one to mince words, nor to waste them. One word captures perfectly everything Nick needs to say about the position. We can see the essence of Nick's genius operating here.

On 28.Be2!! Be2 and only now does Nick explain the punctuation. I was doing demo-board work at the time and happened to be standing almost directly behind Nick watching him when he physically played this move. His opponent immediately slumped back into his seat and needed a deep breath and he also shook his head. Soon the entire playing room was aghast. Nick calmly left for a smoke and I inevitably took the opportunity of joining him. He was already talking about any money the best-game prize would offer. Nick was at his best, he was very refined. He exuded a calm and relaxed confidence bordering on something mystical. He did waste a lot of time on smoke breaks however.

[Neil Frarey]

Thomsonov. you know it's my pleasure!

So I just finished throwing together some of Nick's quotes from EP129 which resonated with me the most ...

https://www.chessmetro.com/images/IM-BN_quotes.jpg

And if you want to take the graphic into a larger format and offer it up for grabs as a poster or whatever over on Redbubble or wherever just let me know.

BTW, that display typeface I used is called TT Trailers by TypeType which stylishly supports local features of Bulgarian cyrillic.

Flava+!

[Brad Thomson]

Thanks to Grandmasterov for the following links. This is the article that I managed to squeeze out of Nick after the Canadian Closed of 1994. The first link is the En Passant cover with a tremendous picture of Nick mulling. I had the good fortune of witnessing all of these games in person. Those against Fletcher and Alex have existed in my memory as being exceptional examples of Nick. It will be good to have a discussion on the subject of Nick's annotations and comments, and upon the games. Be prepared to be immersed into the mind of a genius.

EP129_BN_1.jpg (1162×1820) (chessmetro.com)
EP129_BN_2.jpg (2320×1820) (chessmetro.com)
EP129_BN_3.jpg (2320×1820) (chessmetro.com)
EP129_BN_4.jpg (2320×1820) (chessmetro.com)
EP129_BN_5.jpg (2320×1820) (chessmetro.com)

[Brad Thomson]

Nick did not like to annotate his own games on paper, though he was quite prepared to discuss them over refreshments. No one had smart-phones with built-in movie cameras back in those days, therefore much of Bryon Nickoloff's analysis is lost to us now. But with the help of his partner, Heather, I did manage to extract a body of handwritten work from Nick and transcribe it into En Passant magazines. This thread will offer the written works of Nick. Please keep all commentary to the chess games themselves.