Blindfold Chess - the book

[Hans Jung]

The club had 50 tables, not all of them set up. I think only once did I see them all set up and it was for a large tournament where we attracted over 100 players. The tables were folding and had pebble grain leather tops and metal clasps at the four corners to keep the legs sturdy. The chairs were metal fold out chairs. The perfect number of opponents for me for a simultaneous blindfold exhibition was four, and I happened on that number by accident. Ray Ebisuzaki was always recruiting members for his high school club and that summer he had two new young guys with him, both beginning tournament players, and he showed up with them and his brother and challenged me to hold a blindfold simul. Ray also agreed to be move messenger as well as playing a board. Why was four the perfect number? Most importantly, it was just enough for me to be able to visualise all the boards and not get into trouble. The games wouldnt last much more than an hour. I averaged about 30 seconds a move and the average game would last about 30 to 35 moves. Four was just the right number to attract spectators and future opponents and also allowed a bit of kibitzing and trash talking. Whats more fun than doing a blindfold simul? A blindfold simul with kibitzing and trash talking! (But not too much kibitzing!)

In that first blindfold simul of four Ray Ebisuzaki was the perfect addition. Not only was he move messenger, but he played his own board, and he was responsible for the kibitzing and trash talking! He was extremely witty and couldnt help sharing and, of course, I had to reply and even though I was busy with four boards my wit was in sync with his.

Sometimes the kibbitzing backfired. In one simul I got my queen trapped in the opening for pocket change.(I think I managed to get a knight and two pawns for it) That game became the focus for kibbitzers and most were barbs about my awful play. Then I started to get counterplay and pulled off a grand swindle where he couldnt avoid checkmate. The kibbitzing (by that point it was mostly trash talking) was the final trigger. My opponent swept the pieces from the table, and for added measure grabbed his chair and smashed it down on the board. As he was leaving he slapped me across the head and said I was nothing more than a swindler and a patzer with pretensions and a Krautkopf.

[Peter McKillop]

..... My opponent swept the pieces from the table, and for added measure grabbed his chair and smashed it down on the board. .......

Sounds like you dodged a bullet, Hans. It's surprising how much verbal and physical violence can be generated by our 'gentle' little game. Again, thanks for sharing all of these memories. And speaking of memories (this is off topic, but ....), I have a recollection of you meeting Ken Smith of Chess Digest fame. Here's something interesting from the web archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/200104050....com/lssn.html

[Hans Jung]

Sounds like you dodged a bullet, Hans. It's surprising how much verbal and physical violence can be generated by our 'gentle' little game. Again, thanks for sharing all of these memories. And speaking of memories (this is off topic, but ....), I have a recollection of you meeting Ken Smith of Chess Digest fame. Here's something interesting from the web archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/200104050....com/lssn.html

I dunno Peter. I'm having memory fades. I don't recall meeting Ken Smith but I loved playing the Smith-Morra gambit for a long time. Thanks for the link.

[Hans Jung]

Well I spent the month of March on a special project of culling Spassky games and posting them on chesstalk (Boris Spassky died at the end of February R.I.P.) and I thoroughly enjoyed it but sadly it came to an end. Now I'm back hopefully with more good stories and more on my own journey in blindfold chess.

[Hans Jung]

I'm bringing my memory back to 1974 and it isnt an easy thing to do. So much happened that year to me chessically and so the trip down memory lane is actually several lanes and alleys. In those days I played many blindfold simuls of four boards mostly at the club. It was called the London City Chess Club and was at 346 Richmond Street in downtown London, Ontario for three years from 1974 to 1977. In those four game simuls I could visualise all the pieces on all four boards, and it took a lot of energy, but the simuls lasted at most for a little over an hour. Going into the zone (of visualisation) was timeless (I was never aware of time passing by) and I always finished the simul pumped (from vicarious joy). I don't ever recall having a headache. I have several regrets from those simuls (knowing what I know now) What regrets? Well, why didn't I do more boards? - I obviously had the ability. and more importantly why didnt I make an effort to preserve the scoresheets? I don't have a single scoresheet left from those simuls. Even though the games were so momentous at the time they stayed in my memory for a while (and I replayed them with pleasure several times) I didn't transfer them into my long term memory and I made no effort to record them for the future. In some way it had to do with confidence and I didnt believe that the games were good enough to bother preserving them.

So how many simuls did I do in that time period? Well mostly it was two a week. My estimate is based on starting end of July 1974 through to December and the first half of 1975. I would have missed some weeks but I also did some simuls at school and at the Y.M.C.A. and at odd occasions like at the year end high school championship, the university, and various house parties. Over that year that ended up at about a hundred simuls. And over three years thats a lot of chess.

Another regret is that I didnt learn problem composition until much later when I started having regular students. Those blindfold games provided a lot of material for composition of problems and it would have been another way of preserving some of the games.

I did a project about ten years ago which I mentioned here on chesstalk where I tried to bring back my ability to visualise an entire game of chess. It took a lot of practice and repitition, it was definitely not easy, but I managed after some time to build up to two blindfold games simultaneously (completely visualised). I had such an ability back then but I took it for granted and that ease of complete visualisation basically left me after 1984 when I was still in my mid twenties.

[Hans Jung]

From My Life in Chess (my bio) I thought I would share some of the characters in the club: "I met Kelly Riley at my first tournament where I used chess clcoks at the Crouch Library on Hamilton Road in January of 1973. We were both fourteen years old. Kelly was much better than me and beat me easily in our first tournament game and had already played chess for three years at the downtown Y.M.C.A. club. Thus started a friendship that lasted a long time. We were rivals over the board but good friends when we werent playing tournament games.

Kelly was a Chippewa Indian but you couldn't really tell from his looks, he looked like a normal Canadian teenager. We used to go fairly often for Chinese food when the chess club was over. There was Kelly, myself, Jay Zendrowski, Ray Ebisuzaki, Arthur Wong, Dave Kashikjian, and Ted Durrant. We had a lot of fun analysing our tournament games at the restaurant. Ted Durrant was London's newest chess master and he would lead by asking each of us to present one of our games to be dissected (that means mentally, wittily, and verbally dissected looking for the best chess ideas, not physically dissected). We would then set up a chess set and board in the middle of the biggest table in the restaurant and order huge amounts of Chinese food (usually a dinner for eight or a party portion). The waitress would usually bring huge pots of Chinese tea, usually at least three, and we would start with one of us showing a game and the rest of us commenting. It sometimes led to positions on the board that had no evident relationship to the game.continuation and as the game continued and became more interesting the comments became louder and more wittier. Often, we would explore an idea to determine the classical truth of it, and players would take sides to defend the defensive resourcefulness of the variation, as opposed to the attacking possibilities, and sometimes hours would go by on one game, everybody filling themselves with Chinese food and laughing and carrying on. Usually the whole evening would go by, four or five hours, especially if more than one game got presented, and often I would end up walking home after they closed the restaurant at 1 am."

[Hans Jung]

"Chess is an international game. The evident proof was there when thinkling back to all the participants in those restaurant sessions. Kelly Riley was a Chippewa Indian, Jay Zendrowski was a Polack, Ted Durrant was French Canadian, Ray Ebisuzaki was Japanese, Arthur Wong was Chinese, Dave Kashikjian was Armenian, and I was Geman, at least in the eyes of the others. But we were all born Canadian. And we were all fairly strong chess players, Ted, myself, Jay and Ray all peaked at masters, Kelly, Arthur, and Dave were all experts. Those sessions were a lot of fun and friendships were started that lasted years but life has a way of getting in the way and making people move away. Ray Ebisuzaki enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and later became a professor there, Arthur Wong went to Harvard, Dave Kashikjian inherited his father's carpet business, and Ted Durrant moved to China. studied Chinese culture and married a Chinese lady before settling in Paris. But at least for the remaining years of high school (about five years) we were chess buddies. Jay and Kelly kept coming back to London and so we were friends much longer."

[Erik Malmsten]

From My Life in Chess (my bio) I thought I would share some of the characters in the club: "I met Kelly Riley at my first tournament where I used chess clcoks at the Crouch Library on Hamilton Road in January of 1973. We were both fourteen years old. Kelly was much better than me and beat me easily in our first tournament game and had already played chess for three years at the downtown Y.M.C.A. club. Thus started a friendship that lasted a long time. We were rivals over the board but good friends when we werent playing tournament games.

Kelly was a Chippewa Indian but you couldn't really tell from his looks, he looked like a normal Canadian teenager. We used to go fairly often for Chinese food when the chess club was over. There was Kelly, myself, Jay Zendrowski, Ray Ebisuzaki, Arthur Wong, Dave Kashikjian, and Ted Durrant. We had a lot of fun analysing our tournament games at the restaurant. Ted Durrant was London's newest chess master and he would lead by asking each of us to present one of our games to be dissected (that means mentally, wittily, and verbally dissected looking for the best chess ideas, not physically dissected). We would then set up a chess set and board in the middle of the biggest table in the restaurant and order huge amounts of Chinese food (usually a dinner for eight or a party portion). The waitress would usually bring huge pots of Chinese tea, usually at least three, and we would start with one of us showing a game and the rest of us commenting. It sometimes led to positions on the board that had no evident relationship to the game.continuation and as the game continued and became more interesting the comments became louder and more wittier. Often, we would explore an idea to determine the classical truth of it, and players would take sides to defend the defensive resourcefulness of the variation, as opposed to the attacking possibilities, and sometimes hours would go by on one game, everybody filling themselves with Chinese food and laughing and carrying on. Usually the whole evening would go by, four or five hours, especially if more than one game got presented, and often I would end up walking home after they closed the restaurant at 1 am."

I wonder if Kelly Riley of London was related to H. E. Riley of Hamilton who in the 1940s to '60s was a tournament director, club executive, and OCA organizer. He played in the semi-annual matches with Toronto and composed a few chess problems which appeared in the Toronto Star chess columns.

[Hans Jung]

I think he should claim relationship. I'll tell him that.

[Hans Jung]

I am currently busy writing My Father's Family about my family and the last five generations. It includes stories about my grandfather's, both natural and step grandfather, my father, myself, my son and my grand son. This week I was writing about my reminiscences of 1985 and I thought I would share with the readers here on chesstalk.

In the summer of 1985 I played in the Toronto International, Canada's first real international swiss system chess tournament with masters coming from around the world. It was organised by David Lavin, and had chess celebrities taking part from many exotic chess countries, including Victor Korchnoi, a famous defector from the Soviet Union.

To prepare for this tournament I had many analysis sessions with Hamilton's famous master Frank Pushkedra and with Lawrence Day, at that time the best player in Toronto and ranked third in Canada. Lawrence lived in a basement apartment on Huron Street, in the heart of the Annex, in downtown Toronto, not far from U. of T. (University of Toronto). Three of his walls were covered with chess books.

Lawrence prepared me in my opening variations. We had many stimulating conversations, and he continually tested me. For example, he would say: "If you are going to use the King's Gambit as a surprise opening weapon you need to know Blackburne - Schlechter, 1894, key game, and then would rattle off 15 moves to the exclamation point dxc4 (brilliant and correct positional concept - gives White a winning game) and along the way illustrating the key moves, such as 6.c3 which he felt was a surprise worthy of a win, mainly because it was considered obsolete and beyond the focus of modern players.

To my question: "Why doesn't Black play a5 to respond to the intended 7.b4" Lawrence responded: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, - it doesn't stop b4 - just delays it - but Blackburne's true genius was capturing 15.dxc4 instead of the "automatic" 15.Nxc4, recognising a major dynamic shift in the position in the pawn structure." and when he (Lawrence) realized I was losing the thread he would point at the wall (Lawrence was lounging back on an easy chair in the far corner with one foot up over the padded arm - totally relaxed and casual but also totally into the analysis of the position) and say: "Third shelf from the bottom and 14th book from the left, pg 126" and when I found the appropriate book and page and had gone over the position in my mind, he (Lawrence) would resume the discussion as though he had not been interrupted.

In this way several hours would go by (at least three or four). At the end Lawrence was still fresh but I was definitely tired and needing a break.

You (the reader) do realise that we were doing all this in our minds without sight of the board. I would get a small notebook out of my back pocket and jot rough notes whenever applicable so I could go home and come back with probing questions so as to learn much more.

And as to the abilities of Lawrence and I'm sure he knew the contents of all those two thousand and more books intimately, Frank Pushkedra had the same abilities and demonstrated them over and over. And as to those discussions and examples from classical games of the old masters, the positions discussed were all relevant and important, and Lawrence expected me to use each when the opportunity arose to play for a win.

I can't say enough about how Lawrence helped me in my preparations and it was thanks to him and Frank Pushkedra that I did so well in the upcoming Toronto International.