Showing posts with label J.R. Houghteling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label J.R. Houghteling. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Really silly Internet game
I just started playing on GameKnot.com, which has correspondence games with a minimum length of 2 days per move. That was the time control for the following game, believe it or not. GameKnot assigns one an initial rating of 1200 and initially only lets one play against very low-rated players. That probably explains why I'm 27-0 thus far. This game raised my rating to a walloping 1612, exactly 800 points below my USCF correspondence rating. This game is even sillier than most, but the final mate is kind of picturesque, albeit no Dodge-Houghteling :
Sunday, July 11, 2010
A Chicago original
J.R. Houghteling was a strong Chicago player around the turn of the 20th century. Here is his most famous game. White's play is feeble, but Houghteling concludes the game with a beautiful checkmate. Irving Chernev, in his classic The Thousand Best Short Games of Chess, noted that Bigelow called the final position "a rainbow of Bishops and Knights." Francis Wellmuth in The Golden Treasury of Chess wrote that it was "[o]ne of the most extraordinary mates ever given in actual play."
The wonderful chess writer and novelist Tim Krabbé once questioned the game's veracity (scroll down to No. 355), but later acknowledged, "A communication by Frederick Rhine makes it clear that speculations of [Dodge-Houghteling] being a hoax, are unjustified." In the same post, he gave several later examples of similar mates.
The wonderful chess writer and novelist Tim Krabbé once questioned the game's veracity (scroll down to No. 355), but later acknowledged, "A communication by Frederick Rhine makes it clear that speculations of [Dodge-Houghteling] being a hoax, are unjustified." In the same post, he gave several later examples of similar mates.
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