u/Pawn_Made_Flesh

Two of my favorite games occurred many years apart against an opponent who had downed me in 15 moves in our first encounter.

NM Edward Frumkin is best known as the victim in a famous 1987 brilliancy by the then 10-year-old prodigy Josh Waitzkin, the protagonist of the best-selling book and hit movie Searching for Bobby Fischer.

In June of 1968, still 13 years old and barely a month after my tournament debut, I lost a 15-move brevity to Ed. In the preceding round I had suffered a similarly quick loss to the infamous Vincent Livermore (1950? – 1991?). That was probably the time when Livermore told me: “When they were giving out the brains, you must have been the last in line!”

Frumkin made no nasty remark and I have no recollection of feeling angry or humiliated by losing to him. But in the 50 years that followed, revenge was mine again and again. He was among my most frequent opponents… and I think I won every encounter.

I got one of our games into Chess Informant: https://www.share.chessbase.com/SharedGames/share/?p=2gYlo+mwt2GUrA2zzeXh/mDgW8JAHYi8Y4tkkWZ0TisSuvJ5sFPm7YeyBu3YdK1b ; it includes what I consider the best single shot in my chess career. Another of our encounters was a slugfest with dueling queen-sacs that I nicknamed “Army of Munchkins” because later in the game Ed quipped: “I feel like I’m being overrun by an army of munchkins!” https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1920794

American GM Andrew Hong was in the news last week for standout results in Spain. When I faced him with White in a World Open 5 years ago I played my only decent game in that tournament -- but still got squashed like a bug. Details in link in comment.

(This was more timely when posted a week ago; a technical glitch made by this sub’s bot-moderators unaccountably removed it when it was starting to gain traction. I’ve given it a new title so it won’t look repetitive.)

Starting to read Peter Doggers’ 2024 book, The Chess Revolution, I was immediately struck by the correspondence between his formative exposures to chess and my own decades earlier. I even noticed an important commonality with the childhood chess experiences of Bill Goichberg (November 1942-August 2026), the tournament-directing pioneer who is the subject of my upcoming Chess Life cover story and future biography book. Which sets me to wondering how many of you followed a similar path into the chess world.

Doggers says his father taught him chess when he was 8; my dad taught me when I was 10. Then his interest was spurred by games against an elementary school teacher during breaks. Mine was spurred by playing with my junior high school teacher, Miss Tierney, along with frequent evening games at home against my father. 

When Doggers was 14 a friend invited him to join a chess session with an uncle who had both a nice chess set and a chess book collection. The teenage friends began playing each other regularly. I was around 12 when I began playing regularly with my best friend’s older brother who lived around the corner. In time he brought me with him to watch a scholastic tournament he was playing in; I entered my first tournament about 18 months later. 

What was your chess origin story like? Did your introduction to the game proceed along lines similar to both Peter Doggers and myself as relayed above? Or did you come to chess through an entirely different route?

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American GM Andrew Hong is in the news this week for standout results in Spain. When I faced him with White in a World Open 5 years ago I played my only decent game in that tournament -- but still got squashed like a bug.

Interesting difference I’m noticing between chess group commenters on Reddit vs Facebook.

For the endless stream of puzzle positions I see on Facebook, almost every commenter (98%+ by my guess) posts moves they worked out on their own. Most of their solutions may be wrong, even stupidly lazy (i.e., giving a correct first move that conveys no meaningful information about the puzzle’s solution)… but at least everyone looks at the puzzle for themselves at the outset.

On Reddit, about half the comments to the last puzzle position I posted (which was also probably my first — I’m still pretty new here) came from people who admitted they got the answer from an engine.

Is that experience typical of how Redditors in chess groups respond to challenging position diagrams? (Note that I did NOT share my position in r/beginners, because it is about as far from a beginner’s puzzle as you could possibly imagine. I posted it in r/chess, in this group, and in 2 or 3 groups whose names contain “chess” plus “puzzle” or “quiz.”)

This glossary explains a handful of new words and redefinitions of established words widely used in context of chess and/or technology. Regular viewers of social media chess pages should find it helpful. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1GkCiBQhno/

Links in this post and in the comment below it bring up memorable games from my chess career. All 7 share an unusual feature for such a collection.

On another social media platform I offered incentives to people who correctly guessed the common feature. My effort backfired when I used the p-word (p**ze) and the c-word (c**t**t) -- social media no-no's that I think led the other platform's algos to suppress my post's visibility.

Here is the first game link: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1333538

And the second: https://view.chessbase.com/cbreader/2017/12/10/Game446707953.html

The third: https://share.chessbase.com/SharedGames/share/?p=QsA0WKoaZwBALocAXd4DPkFToBVKI+mKQ4CFRZbDWpIvN6YHSjanD32UYHAzuFGA

Care to take a go at identifying the theme? See comment for further examples.

https://preview.redd.it/zi7263phhbeh1.png?width=480&format=png&auto=webp&s=c812dcee6794c7f2b998b6db88aab75b4e93e3f6

Played it like a 2700? I don't think so!

Link in comment

Famed author Ben Mezrich, Hachette’s Grand Central Publishing imprint, and Vanity Fair magazine (which published excerpts in April) extended an ugly spittle-drenched thumb in the eye to the worldwide chess community by publishing “Checkmate”: Mezrich’s partly fictionalized account of “chess’s biggest scandal” that got hyped up by Elon Musk.

Friends in the business tell me Mezrich views himself as a screenwriter rather than a journalist. Still, even Magnus Carlsen fans took insult from the firehose of falsehoods that author spewed within just the first few pages of “Checkmate.” Those early pages feel like the text equivalent of seeing a chessboard with 3 kings and a dark square in its right-hand corner.

1. Carlsen “didn’t just see a dozen moves ahead, he saw to the end of the game, and often through the next game and the game after that.”

Fact: Neither Magnus nor any other top player sees a dozen moves ahead in most positions, or even in most entire games. While the author’s wording might be framed as a metaphor to spotlight a star’s extraordinary skill, what fraction of his readers do you think might interpret it in that abstract way, instead of literally? 1%? 5%? Everyone else will see it as affirming the popular delusion (among non-chessplayers) that Magnus or any top player regularly sees “a dozen moves ahead” … and the related delusion that chess skill consists entirely of how many moves ahead one can calculate all possibilities.

2. “He had begun his career as the youngest Grandmaster ever at the age of thirteen.”

Fact: Magnus Carlsen never held the record as “the youngest Grandmaster ever.” And when Karjakin achieved that record in 2003, he was at an age (12 years 7 months) at which Magnus had not attained even his IM title – let alone GM!

3. “Coming into the Sinquefield Cup, he’d won a staggering fifty-three consecutive in-person games."

Fact: Carlsen’s winning streak coming into the Sinquefield Cup stood at ZERO games! His last event before the September 2022 Sinquefield Cup was the Chennai Olympiad that concluded in the preceding month… and his final game in that competition was a draw with an international master from Moldova, Ivan Schitco, who was rated just 2490.

If Mezrich and his editors at Vanity Fair and his book publisher don’t know what a draw is, then why are they even permitted to publish anything at all about chess? (Serious question.)

Even more than film, chess is an activity that lends itself to degrees-of-separation numbers -- also known as “Kevin Bacon numbers,” or for mathematicians, “Paul Erdos numbers.” Here is how to calculate yours.

If you were in a movie with Kevin Bacon, your number is 1; if you appeared with a different actor who once acted alongside Bacon, your number is 2, etc. The chess equivalent is, if you ever beat or drew with Magnus Carlsen, you have a Carlsen number of 1; if you beat or drew with someone else who beat or drew Magnus, your number is 2, etc. Your “Z-Number” versus any chess champion past or present (“Z”) is 1 plus the smallest number of opponents standing between you and that champion, counting wins or draws only.

Try to scope out and compute your personal chess Kevin Bacon numbers versus:

• Javokhir Sindarov….
• Magnus Carlsen ….
• Garry Kasparov ….
• and even Emanuel Lasker, if you’re game!

 I have written about this topic in detail elsewhere. But in deference to Reddit’s bot-moderator warnings against promoting one's own contributions to chess literature, I won’t be linking that content here. You can look it up by Googling my handle plus a relevant phrase like “Kevin Bacon number.”

Here is a list of noted chessplayers who either died or were fatally stricken during or immediately after competing in a rated chess game. For details about each player's chess career and circumstances of their death, keyword search the 'net for my handle and some relevant phrase such as "death and chess".

Incidentally: did you know that when a player dies during a game, official chess federation rules generally penalize the deceased with loss of the game and award a win to their opponent?

1.      GM Vladimir Simagin

2.      GM Vladimir Bagirov

3.      GM Aivars Gipslis

4.      IM / Correspondence GM C.J.S. Purdy

5.      GM Ziaur Rahman

6.      GM Vitaly Tseshkovsky

7.  GM Victor Ciocaltea
   

8.  GM Bosko Abramovic
   

9.  Johannes Zukertort
   

10. P. S. Leonhardt

11. IM Emory Tate

12. IM Herman Steiner

13. Harold Dondis (longtime Boston Globe chess columnist and philanthropist)

14. E. Forry Laucks (sponsor of Bobby Fischer’s early chess travels)

15. (EDGE CASE) GM Walter Browne

16. FM Nikolaos Karapanos

17. CM Kurt Meier

18.    Alisher Anarkulov