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Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
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---- Nous avons besoin d'un traduction français!
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Susan Polgar: In four Olympiads from 1988 to 2004, I played on board one in all 56 games, never rested, never lost a single game, while winning a total of 5 gold, 4 silver, and 1 bronze medals.
A wonderful record! I just can’t figure out where those 10 medals came from. Presumably four for board one and 3 with her team, which won 3 medals for placing in the top three. That’s 7…
Susan Polgar: In four Olympiads from 1988 to 2004, I played on board one in all 56 games, never rested, never lost a single game, while winning a total of 5 gold, 4 silver, and 1 bronze medals.
A wonderful record! I just can’t figure out where those 10 medals came from. Presumably four for board one and 3 with her team, which won 3 medals for placing in the top three. That’s 7…
Nope, I’m still 3 short.
In addition to team medals and board prizes recent olympiads have also awarded additional medals for the three highest rating performances, irrespective of board; Susan has won three of these. Try looking round OlimpBase, e.g. http://www.olimpbase.org/playersw/nrbrrx7d.html
Tom Davidoff slowly executed a move with a trembling hand against veteran club member Alex Kevitz (I will wait for confirmation from Davidoff that this was, in fact, the Marshall CC – there is a chance it may have been at the Manhattan CC which does not lessen the humor) and Kevitz barked out “Just move the piece, ya trembly-handed schmuck!”
BVS: I recall that when I was having my first chess sessions with Zak, I wanted very much to steal a white queen so as to caress it in my pocket! It was just a childish passion. In retrospect, I think that if I had stolen it I should have never become World Champion!
"In other words, you mean to say that stealing a chess piece would have been a bad omen… "
BVS: Not so much a bad omen, but simply that one must be honest; that is why when I became Champion I said that chess is a game of Justice. Supreme justice, may be… I would say that chess for me has always been a model of life. But as to justice, at the top level chess is a devilish game – just look at the faces of chess players! But the laws are the same as in real life, and once you violate them, sooner or later you will be punished.
That highlighted part is much like Lasker's famous quote. OH, by the way, BVS is Boris Vassilievich Spassky.
Here is another Spassky quote. This time, it is in regard to Fischer's view of chess.
Originally posted by Spassky
He thinks that in chess it is necessary to advance a bit all the time. But chess is like life: one must know how to retreat. Just to retreat a bit, to accumulate something and to advance again…
All quotes can be found in the following (2007) interview:
When chess greats compare chess to life, then you know they're looking to convey universal aspects of the game. And, by virtue of that, it no longer is a game.
Supplemental: I rather think that, since Spassky was born in 1937 and would have been 60 in 1997, the interview may have been in 1997 and not 2007.
Last edited by Nigel Hanrahan; Sunday, 27th April, 2014, 01:04 AM.
Reason: dates
Dogs will bark, but the caravan of chess moves on.
The game of chess is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions.
from ‘On the Morals of Chess’, 1786
Dogs will bark, but the caravan of chess moves on.
My favourite chess quote is when Paul Janicki was playing Walter Browne around 1971 in Toronto. Browne leaned across the board and said 'If you resign now, I will give you a free analysis', to which Mr. Janicki repled 'If you resign now, I will give you a free psychoanalysis!"
An entire book could easily be written on the subject of trash-talking in chess. If it included psychological warfare, then it might go to 2 volumes. (Three volumes if you include abuse on chess discussion boards. But don't tell anyone I typed that.)
Last edited by Nigel Hanrahan; Wednesday, 30th April, 2014, 10:40 AM.
Reason: foolishness
Dogs will bark, but the caravan of chess moves on.
I’m also from an artistic family. My father is a painter and my mother a musician. When I started playing in what was still the Soviet Union chess was very popular — one of the most elite artistic professions, even maybe more so than classical music or painting. Chess was really at that time a top and very respectable thing to do. That was maybe one of the reasons why I started to play chess and why I continued, because otherwise I would probably be in art anyway, but another kind of art, like painting or music — although I’m quite ungifted in both of those areas, so I’m not sure I would have been good! ....
Every top player has his own style of play, like a painter. You see a painting and say, this is Modigliani, because you can’t confuse him with anyone else. It’s the same with chess players, which means it’s also an art.
There's a good chess quote that I can't remember exactly, which I think was first (?) said by GM Ljubomir Ljubojevic, and goes something like: "Chess is not something you can learn; chess is something you must understand." It's counter-intuitive, but rather profound, and strikes to the heart of pedagogy. You can try to teach someone any number of things but until they sit down and puzzle it out for themselves, they really haven't understood it. I reminds me somewhat of another old saying: "Everything I learned I have forgotten; everything I know I guessed!"
If a chess player is wearing the same clothes every day there are several likely explanations: he may have lost his suitcase on the way to the tournament, he may have brought no other clothes anyway, or he keeps putting on the same clothes out of superstition, as they had served him well in the games he played so far. A famous example of a player being attached to a piece of clothing is Vasily Ivanchuk.
The Ukrainian’s fondness for his favourite Real Madrid training jacket even drove the organizers in Linares to despair when he started to wear it on stage (and he was quickly asked never to do that again). Therefore, we tried to imagine his sadness when he lost this jacket during the robbery in Brazil at the end of the first leg of the Sao Paulo/Bilbao Grand Slam Final last year (2011), and were surprised when he explained to us in Bilbao that it was no big deal.
But apparently it still is his lucky jacket. When much to our surprise we saw him wear it in the players’ hotel in Wijk aan Zee, he confirmed that almost by a miracle, it had not been in the suitcase that had been stolen in Brazil. What’s more, unknown to the organizers or the arbiters he was wearing it in the playing hall during the Tata Steel tournament almost every day, carefully hidden underneath another more formal jacket! We were not sure of this, but when we expressed our suspicions on the final day, Ivanchuk shrugged, unbuttoned the upper jacket and lo and behold!
There was a now-defunct chess magazine called American Chess Journal. It ran three issues.
In Number 3, 1995, p. 115, Alex Dunne wrote a review of Stephan Gerzadowicz’s “Journal of a Chess Master”.
The Rat Opening is G’s favorite defense. Discussing it, Dunne gives this sketch of Duncan Suttles:
Many years ago a heretic named Duncan Suttles drifted out of the northern tundra and won a lot of games by ignoring the center, fianchettoing the dark-squared bishop, and playing his knights to h6 and a6. He won so often that he became a grandmaster of both OTB and postal chess. His style of play seduced a lot of players who considered the Romantic style too old-fashioned and the Classical style too dry. But no one could be quite as subtle as Suttles, eventually not even Suttles, who drifted back to oblivion in the frozen North.
(Although Suttles has left the scene, his influence hasn’t. As Black, Gerzadowicz plays the Rat, the Robatsch, the Pirc, the Modern, the King’s Fianchetto, and the Irregular Opening – they are all one.)
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