"Anand-Carlsen duel fires up chess fervor in India"

Story in the Tribune.

I'm glad that parents support their chess-playing children, but stuff like this makes me slightly suspicious:

Tamilarasi and her husband, a government official, gave it a shot, even letting their children take time off school to concentrate on chess.

Although chess sets are cheap, travelling to other states for tournaments can cost anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 rupees ($160 to $800).

"We don't plan leisure trips or buy the latest clothing. Instead we direct our money towards the game," said Tamilarasi. "It is a risk but we are hopeful that our plans for our children to become chess champions will click."

Parents will do anything for their children.  Yes, for a middle-class person in India or the USA, spending $800 on the kids' chess isn't crazy.  But when parents prioritize chess over school (and to be fair, I'm not sure Ms. Tamilarasi is doing that: could be an overemphasis by the reporter), then I get suspicious.

Becoming a chess champion is a longshot. Transferring the skills learned in chess (both soft skills and cerebral firepower) happens all the time.

Oh yes, the world championship: games 1 and 2 have been non-events (I got up at 5 a.m. twice this weekend, and was back in bed by 5:30 both days).  ChessBase is one of many free sites with excellent coverage.

What, no captures?

Human chess at Lincoln Elementary in Oak Park, video and all, via the Chicago Tribune.

Lean precociously forward

More from the Trib: "I got the sense, reading this, that soccer and chess are for the ruling class of the future and dance is for the servants."  The book under discussion is Hilary Levey Friedman's Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture.

We all want our children to flourish, but sheesh, dance is cool, too.

"I ain't never heard the truth to be inconclusive"

From today's Tribune: did playing chess develop Mr. Savory's long-range planning skills, and help one execute a thirty-six-year plan to potentially clear his name?

"Deerfield High chess champ shares skills with youngsters"

Jonathan Kogen is profiled in the Highland Park / Deerfield edition of the Chicago Tribune.

"Early chess editors of the Chicago Tribune"

If you have any interest in Chicago history or chess history, go read this delightful post from the delightful blog (new to me!) A Chess Reader.

Take a bow, blogger!

Louis Uedemann Photo 1904

SDN-002332, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.

Chicago chess players: "There are many good ones, but no club"

This Chicago Tribune story is hot off the presses (belated hat-tip to Keith Ammann).

P.S. 7/5/2012: the original link didn't work, so I uploaded the image of the 1887 newspaper article, thinking that one could click on it to magnify it.  Oops!  If you're dying of curiosity, you can download the image to your desktop, open in Windows Paint, and resize to (say) 250% to read.

But it ain't *that* interesting :-)

 

"Fish Men" reviewed by Chris Jones

Claire and I saw Fish Men Sunday night.  Chris Jones reviews here.

The performers are very good, the premise is great, and the playwright, NM Cándido Tirado, captures the absurdist intensity of the blitz hustle.  Jones calls the play "thematically overstuffed," a fair complaint.  Maybe a better way of putting it is that there's one theme, man's inhumanity to man, and it's beaten into the ground.  (The e5 square has never been overprotected by a disciple of Nimzowitch to the extent this theme is overdetermined in Fish Men.)  And the dénouement (I'm trying to avoid spoilers) risks descent into the Harold-and-Maudlin.


But I think the political theme works well in Washington Square Park.  Jones is incorrect to argue that "this play is just too overloaded with weighty geo-political metaphors and personal secrets for this little section of the park to credibly hold, especially since all these traumas seem to come crashing down at once."  Talk to the immigrants you play chess with, and ask them how they came to be here in Chicago.  I don't want to give away any spoilers, but think of how much the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian War affected the Chicago chess community.   The stories of the late Osman Palos and the recently deported Aleksandar Stamnov are tragic, and both stories could easily have been worked into this play.  The persecuted of all nations flee to American cities.  And when they get here, they play chess in the park.

Adam Elmquist: WTC from Washington Square Park

Fish Men begins with the hustler Cash's discussion of a famous drawn game from the Kasparov-Anand match of 1995.  But the destruction of the site of that match on September 11, 2001, is never explicitly invoked, even though the World Trade Center was and is just a few blocks from Washington Square Park.  


Yeah, the play is overdetermined.  But yeah, people are repeatedly and needlessly cruel to other people.  I prefer the oblique critique to the direct, Dylan to Phil Ochs, Beckett to Tony Kushner.  The problem with an oblique message play is that your message can be misunderstood or lost.  Tirado doesn't have this problem.


Well worth seeing for all my complaints: if you're on the main floor, you'll be a well-placed kibitzer. At the intermission, a stagehand was setting up a Sicilian middlegame for Act II.  I left my seat to tell her that the same King's Gambit game (featuring ...Qh4+, ...Qxb2, and a decisive f5-f6 push) was used for two differenct scenes in Act I.  Mr. Memory (that's me) noticed this and found it mildly annoying.  Then Mr. Memory returned to what he thought was his seat and had to be told to move by a nice lady....

"Niles North team, Prospect’s Moskwa are state’s best in chess"

Read all about it.

The most famous study with a Chicago connection?

Emanuel Lasker & Gustavus Reichhelm

Chicago Tribune, 1901

White to play and win

This is probably the second-most famous study with a World Champion as (co-)composer (Lasker's famous 1890 rook ending gets top honors).  Solution here: block an hour out of your schedule and allow yourself to be mystified.  (But try it yourself first: if the White king makes it to b5, Black has no defense.  And if the White king makes it to g5, Black has no defense.)

HHdvIV gives the source as "Literary Digest 1901," but according to one Wikipedia editor, this version (with kings on a1 and a7) was first published in the Trib.  

Does this study have something to say about the postmodern condition?  (Two fools wandering aimlessly in a barren landscape?)  Marcel Duchamp co-authored a book with the endgame composer Halberstadt that was inspired by this study, L'Opposition et les cases conjugées sont réconciliées (not to be confused with the 1980s electronic music album of the same name by the French band Etant Donnés!).  Andrew Hugill has persuasively suggested that the theory of coordinate squares influenced Samuel Beckett's Endgame.  (Beckett, a chess player, knew Duchamp.)

And please: Vladimir Nabokov composed problems, not studies.

And have I indulged in enough pointless blather for one morning?

"Local organizer to bring in best young chess players in the world to suburbs"

Awonder Liang (photo: Jeff Vorva, Chicago Tribune)

Patzer doesn't shave, wears flannel shirt, finds photo in paper

(photo: Jeff Vorva, Chicago Tribune)

Jeff Vorva reports.

"Chess forges friendship, keeps it in check "

"As buddies, Loop lawyer, homeless man seem an unlikely match."   From today's Chicago Tribune.

Armenian Gambit

From Avet Demourian's September 15th Associated Press story in the Chicago Tribune

Tiny Armenia is a big player in world chess, and a new gambit could make it even bigger: mandatory chess in school.

The click-clack of chess pieces is being heard around the former Soviet nation's primary schools this fall, as the game becomes part of the curriculum along with such standards as math and history for children between the ages of 7 and 9 [....]

Wendi Fischer, executive director of the United States' Foundation for Chess [sic], has campaigned for the game to be taken up in U.S. classrooms and says Armenia's program has big potential.

"By incorporating chess as part of the curriculum, you are including a game, and that's how kids see it," Fischer said. "They think they're focused on fun. So I think it is a great way to cross over between a true hardcore curriculum that's mandatory and the young children being able to play and explore and have fun.":

Time capsule: 2923 N. Southport

How many years has it been since the Chicago Chess Center closed?  Since Jules Stein passed away?

I stumbled across this 1988 article from the Chicago Tribune.

"Chess center makes opening moves in Skokie"

GM Mesgen Amanov won 20 games and drew 1 in yesterday's simultaneous

  Photos Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune

Story is here!