Cumnor Chess Club

Every chess player grows up learning combinations that work. As a kid, you learn to ’spot the combo’ quickly and you’re told that you will profit from this knowledge ever after. There’s hundreds of books that are written according to this method. But in real life, sadly, combinations often do not work at all. Where are the books written about this phenomenon? Now, we have one. Read more

Sometimes the best books get the worst treatment. It took more than 25 years before an edition of Mikhail Bulgakov’s great novel The Master and Margarita was first published. But this is nothing compared to the 52(!) years it took before Questions of Modern Chess Theory by Isaac Lipnitsky was translated into English. It is now published in a modern edition by Quality Chess. Without exaggeration it’s fair to say that Western chess would have looked totally different, had this book been available earlier. Read more

John Watson is one of the best chess authors around. Currently, he’s writing a series of high-quality opening books, focussing (as always) on understanding and framing the opening in its proper context. I will take a look at the latest volume in his ‘Mastering the Chess Openings’ series, published by Gambit Books, which is about the English Opening. I was especially interested in this part, because I have almost no experience with this opening, yet have always found it extremely fascinating. So what’s in it for people like me? Read more

Kasparov vs Karpov

Contrary to what many people will tell you, the “chess match of the 20th century” was not Fischer-Spassky, Reykjavik 1972. It was Karpov-Kasparov, Moscow 1984. No wait, make that Karpov-Kasparov, Moscow 1984 and 1985. Of course, Fischer’s brilliancy and eccentricity, as well as the political situation between America and the Soviet Union made the Reykjavik match extremely sensational, but from a ”classical drama” point of view, the fight in ‘72 was really too much of a one-man-show. Read more

FIDE is failing terribly in dealing with the Topalov-Kamsky match in a correct and transparent way. It’s also clear to virtually everyone that the FIDE President and his staff have generally ruined the whole system in the past ten years or more, despite their efforts to organize a lot of events. Things have gone horribly wrong – it reminded me of the the war in Iraq. In FIDE, too, we need change. But how can we make it a change we can believe in? Read more

It’s well-known that chess is not only a game, not only art, but also science. I myself became fascinated by chess not because you could beat your granddad with it, or because you could play beautiful attacking games, but because you could look things up afterwards. Read more

I was selling books in the windy hallway of De Moriaan in Wijk aan Zee for Chess and Go Shop Het Paard. It was quiet, a regular week day. Read more

Chess and math have always slept side by side. But are they a happy couple? I think every chess player has had the experience of someone asking you, in high school, if your math grades were as good as your chess results. Sadly, for me the answer was often ‘no’. Read more

One of the strangest books I’ve ever read is Bach en het Getal (Bach and the Number) by the Dutch authors Kees van Houten en Marinus Kasbergen. The main thesis of the book is that within the music of the great composer J.S. Bach, various messages, numerological clues and strange links hide just behind the surface. A recent article on the chess problem of Lewis Carroll that appeared on Susan Polgar’s weblog reminded me of this curious book on Bach. Read more

Yesterday, Peter wrote an interesting article about the Turkish club competition. I was especially fascinated by the team-setup. Read more