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Thursday, April 26, 2012

IPON Engine Rating List

Please visit the site for complete details and the top 100 list.  Note: testing at 5 minutes plus 3 seconds per move.  The commercial Houdini hardly seems better than the free version.

Name                              Elo   

   1 Houdini 2.0 STD      3018  
   2 Houdini 1.5a             3010  
   3 Komodo 4                 2975    
     Critter 1.4a                 2975  
   5 Komodo 3                 2966  
   6 Deep Rybka 4          2955   
   7 Deep Rybka 4.1        2953   
     Critter 1.2                   2953  
   9 Houdini 1.03a          2952 
     Komodo 2.03 DC      2952  
  11 Stockfish 2.2.2 JA   2951  
  12 Stockfish 2.1.1 JA    2941  
  13 Critter 1.01               2923  
  14 Stockfish 2.01 JA    2922  
  15 Rybka 3 mp              2904  
  16 Stockfish 1.9.1 JA    2902  
  17 Critter 0.90              2896  
  18 Stockfish 1.7.1 JA    2889  
  19 Rybka 3 32b             2852  
  20 Stockfish 1.6.x JA   2836  

Monday, April 23, 2012

Tips from the Experts on Analyzing with an Engine


Chess Engine’s Evaluations by WGM Natalia Pogonina
“…it’s very easy to lose one’s own tactical skill if one starts following the computer lines without thinking for oneself. Secondly, quite a few players, even very strong ones, start “worshipping” engines and religiously trusting them. However, there are still blank spots in the evaluation mechanisms of the programs, so even at a large depth the first line of a program is not necessarily the best move.”  Read more…
Chess Game Analysis Using ChessBase Engines by Steve Lopez
“After I purchased a PC and some chess software, and began using them to analyze my games, I learned a lot about my own deficiencies as a player. I set out to correct these problems and my results at the board improved dramatically.” Read the whole 3-part series.
Using Multiple Chess Programs to Analyze a Game by Steve Lopez
“Why would you want to have more than one chess engine analyze a game? Chess engines evaluate positions mathematically using an algorithm, a "number crunching" formula, and different programmers will use different values in their engines' algorithms. For example, one programmer might value space more highly than will another programmer while, conversely, that second programmer might assign a higher value to a good pawn structure. Different chess engines will thus approach the game in different ways. All will offer high quality analysis, but it might very well be different analysis from engine to engine for a given position. Different analysis means different ideas; this gives you, the player, more information to consider.”  Read more…


Thursday, April 19, 2012

Humphrey Bogart, Chessmaster

Bogart was born on January 23, 1899 (Warner Brothers publicity changed it to December 25, 1899) in New York City. He was the son of a noted Manhattan surgeon. His mother was an illustrator. Bogart attended Phillips Academy in preparation for medical school by ended up getting expelled for unknown reasons.

He probably learned chess in 1912 when he was taught by his father during their stay at their summer home in Canandaigua Lake, New York.  He was known to have visited the chess clubs in New York City the following year. 

His strength is generally placed at high expert or low master and he was also a USCF tournament director and an active member of the California State Chess Association. He once drew a simul game against Samuel Reshevsky and was friends with several of the top US players of the day.

In his biography 'Bogart and Bacall', Joe Hyams wrote, “After the Crash of 1929 Bogart was reduced to making eating money playing chess at the numerous ‘sportlands’ on Sixth Avenue. For a bet of fifty cents a game he played all comers. Bogart was both a good chess player and hungry, and he won more than he lost. He soon landed a job at an arcade , where he sat in the window playing chess for a dollar a game. Most often he had only a doughnut and coffee for lunch.”   He was known to have played chess in Times Square in 1933. As an act of support for US soldiers stationed overseas during WWII.   In 1943 he was visited by the FBI who prevented him from playing any more correspondence chess. The FBI was reading his mail and thought that the chess notation he was sending to Europe were secret codes…typical of retarded government bureaucrats, I guess.


Unlike many so called celebrities of today, in 1918 Bogart enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve and was called to active service when World War I was nearly over. After his discharge from the Navy in 1919 he returned to New York City and continued to play chess and eventually got a job as an office boy at a theater and the rest is history.

In 1942 he starred in Casablanca which had several chess playing scenes. All the chessplaying scenes were Bogart's idea because he wanted a character that was a chess player that drank too much.

In May, 1945 Bogart divorced his wife and married a chessplayer…20 year old Lauren Bacall.  Bogart and Bacall, appeared on the cover of the June-July, 1945 issue of Chess Review magazine. Bogart was playing another actor, Charles Boyer, and Lauren Bacall was looking on. Bogart helped sponsor the 1945 Pan American Chess Congress in Los Angeles and was selected as the Master of Ceremonies.

In June 1945, Bogart was interviewed by Silver Screen magazine and when asked what things mattered most to him, he replied that chess was one of those things that mattered most to him. He said he played chess every day between takes when he made movies.

In 1946 Bogart lost a match for $100 (about $1200 today) to restaurateur Mike Romanoff and later that evening went home then phoned Romanoff to play one more game ovre the phone for another $100. Romanoff agreed and lost in 20 moves. Former US Champion Herman Steiner just happened to be at Bogart’s home and it was Steiner Romanoff was actually playing.  Romanoff lost.

Romanoff's restaurant on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills was Bogart's hangout. Bogart owned the second booth from the left corner as you entered the restaurant. No one else could sit there. If Mike Romanoff was there, he and Bogart would always play chess at that table. Bogart claimed to be the strongest player among the Hollywood stars.

In March, 1952 Bogart was in San Francisco and played the following game against a blindfolded George Koltanowski.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Study or Play?

       There was an interesting post on Chessdotcom where somebody asked the question, “Would you rather study or play.”  One person posted: “Study is classwork and homework. Play is the test. I hate tests.”
       The question got me to thinking about which I prefer.  Years ago when I played in tournaments somebody expressed my sentiments on OTB tournaments when he said, “It’s no fun playing, but it’s fun having played.”  Eventually I gave up tournament play because it got to the point the no fun part outweighed the having had fun part.  Then there is the old saying, “Those that can...do, those that can’t…teach.”  For chess purposes I guess you could say, “Those that can, play OTB, those that can’t just study…or do puzzles, or play over master games…or play correspondence chess.”
       As one player so aptly put it, “A chessplayer is easy to spot. Whenever there is a chessboard out with a position on it, whether it is in a coffehouse, a library, a bookstore, a chessclub, etc., the chessplayer is drawn to studying that position. Most people just walk by, but not the chessplayer. She/he is mesmerized. Like a moth to a flame. It is an obsession that is fun whether you are studying chess or playing chess, because in either case you are engaged in your obsession.”
       He went on to say, “It may be that chess is more of an art to (non-tournament players). And learning technique is not art. Poets don't concern themselves iambic pentameter, rhyme or anything else. They just write poetry. Authors don't concern themselves with the techniques to craft metaphors…Authors just write and rewrite until it feels right.
       In other words, artists don't concern themselves with technique. They just create art. It is the critics and art theorists that concern themselves with analyzing art, because many of them cannot create art themselves.”
       I think that is exactly how I feel.  There came a time when I was no longer concerned with improving; I was content to just play and enjoy reading about chess and chessplayers and playing over their games.  I suppose it would be comparable to saying I’m not a painter, but I like viewing great paintings or I am not a musician, but I like listening to music.
       When it comes to what has always been my favorite form of chess, correspondence play, there are a lot of viewpoints on it.  Some like to use it to try out different opening lines for their tournament games, and for some, like me, it’s just their preferred way to play.
       As for online play some are content to play hundreds of blitz games where sometimes it seems like thinking about their moves isn’t even a consideration and for others online play regardless of the time limit is just their preferred method.  That’s the great thing about chess…we can enjoy it in many forms.  So, while some people may criticize by saying things like, “Correspondence isn’t real chess” or “Problem solving isn’t real chess” or “Online play isn’t real chess” it doesn’t matter as long as one is enjoying what they are doing.





Miscellaneous Engine Stuff

Kvetka is a convenient little program for viewing chess games from web pages like Chessgames, Chessville, Chessbase, etc. Works with all UCI engines for analyzing the game. It is intended for analyzing games only; you can’t play against it.  The program supports different fonts and encodings that are used by chess sites. It is free!

PRODUCT REMOVED...POSSIBLY INFECTED WITH MALWARE


Chess War offers a small Polyglot book that was just updated earlier this month.  Also available is the author’s pgn collection containing games from 2001 to 2012 (49284 games).  The nice things about this are the standards he used to make the collection:
Minimum Elo = 2530
Only long time control games
No annotations
No computer games
No games under 20 moves


Computerschach 0ffers an opening book based on Super GM games (average 2650 Elo) formatted for Fritz/Shedder/Arena/Aquarium GUIs.  Features:
* Hand tuned and carefully optimized the strongest lines (improved for the playing styles of TOP 20 chess engines.

* The winning percentage of all inferior openings are disabled (below 50 % for White and below 40% for Black)
Unfortunately the depth is mostly only up to 8 moves with the exception of a few lines which run to 10-12 moves.  Formats for  Winboasrd, ChessPartner, ChessGUI and ChessMaster GUIs are not currently available.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Chess T-shirts…make your own

I found an interesting site where a lady tells you how to make your own chess T-shirts. I suppose the same technique would work for sweatshirts also. If you’re not handy with this kind of stuff it would be a good project for the wife. Aerosol spray paint for fabric is available at craft stores, Walmart and even auto parts stores.  Link to the Blog

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Herman Steiner


Herman Steiner (April 15, 1905 – November 25, 1955) won the U.S. Championship in 1948 and became International Master in 1950. Today he is mostly remembered for his efforts in promoting chess in the U.S., particularly in California.
 Steiner could be classed as a ‘Romantic’ and his games are rife with tactics, sound and unsound.  Arnold Denker pointed out that Steiner could play solid positional chess when he had to as attested to by the fact that when playing for the US team in the Olympiads he was very careful not to lose and complied a very impressive score. Steiner was a member of the Olympiad team in The Hague 1928, Hamburg 1930, Prague 1931 and Dubrovnik 1950. As reigning U.S. champion he captained the 1950 team.

Steiner was born in Austria-Hungary and came to New York City at a young age. For a time, he was a boxer. At age 16 he was a member of the Hungarian Chess Club and the Stuyvesant Chess Club. With the experience he gained in the active New York City chess scene, Steiner rapidly developed his chess skill and in 1929 he tied for first place in the New York State championship.  The same year he was first in the Premier Reserves at Hastings.

Steiner moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1932 and became chess editor of the Los Angeles Times that year, writing a chess column until his death. He formed the Steiner Chess Club, later called the Hollywood Chess Group, headquartered in a clubhouse next to his home. The Hollywood Chess Group was visited by many movie stars including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Charles Boyer, and José Ferrer ans other Hollywood greats.  According to Denker Steiner was known as a lady’s man and they nicknamed him ‘Handsome Herman of Hollywood.’  Steiner organized the Pan-American International Tournament in 1945 and the Second Pan-American Chess Congress in 1954.

Steiner played three challenge matches against Reuben Fine but was unsuccessful; Fine won all three matches: by 5.5–4.5 at New York 1932, by 3.5–0.5 at Washington, D.C. 1944, and by 5–1 at Los Angeles 1947. The total score was 14 – 6 in Fine’s favor.

One of Steiner’s major international wins was the 1946 London Victory Invitational, the first significant European tournament held after the end of World War II. After that Steiner challenged Arnold Denker to a match for the US Championship.  The match was played in Los Angeles and Denker won by a score of 6–4. In 1948 Steiner won the US Championship ahead of Isaac Kashdan.  In the 1945 USA–USSR radio match Steiner was the only U.S. player to achieve a plus score when he scored 1.5 – 0.5 against Igor Bondarevsky.

Steiner was very active as a player in West Coast tournaments, winning the only two California Open tournaments he entered in 1954 and 1955, and winning the California State Championship in 1953 and 1954. He was defending his State Championship in Los Angeles in 1955, when after finishing his fifth round game he felt ill and his afternoon game was postponed. About 2 hours later around 9:30 pm, Steiner died instantaneously of a massive heart attack while being attended by a physician. By agreement of the players, the 1955 California State Championship tournament was canceled.

1929
N.Y. State Championship
1st–2nd
1929
Hastings Premier Reserves
1st
1931
Berlin
1st
1931
Brun
2nd
1932
Pasadena International Tournament
4th–6th
1935
Mexico City
1st–3rd
1942
U.S. Open
1st–2nd
1945
California State Championship
1st–2nd
1946
U.S. Open
1st
1946
London
1st
1948
U.S. Championship
1st
1952
Hollywood International Tournament
3rd
1952
Stockholm Interzonal
11-13th
1953
California State Championship
1st
1954
California State Championship
1st
1954
California Open
1st
1955
California Open
1st
1955
California State Championship
tournament cancelled

THE CALIFORNIA CHESS REPORTER (Vol. 5 No. 4) December, 1955: HERMAN STEINER
It is with deepest regret that we record the death on November 25, 1955, of international master Herman Steiner. Mr. Steiner had played his fifth-round game in the California State Championship in the afternoon and had postponed his evening game because he felt unwell. At about nine-thirty, while being examined by his physician, he was stricken by a massive coronary occlusion. Death was practically instantaneous.

Out of respect to Mr. Steiner's memory, and by unanimous agreement of the contestants, the State Championship was cancelled. Mr. Steiner was 50.

It the following pages the editors of THE REPORTER have attempted to pay tribute to Mr. Steiner's memory and convey the sense of loss which we all feel.

Herman Steiner was born on April 15, 1905 in Dunajaska Freda, Czechoslavakia (then a part of Hungary). He came to New York at an early age and at 16 acquired knowledge of chess as a member of the Hungarian Chess Club and the Stuyvesant Chess Club. For a time, too, he was active as a boxer and became proficient in the manly art of self defense.

Thanks to the opportunities offered in the Metropolitan area of New York City, his skill at chess developed rapidly and he was soon among those out front. During 1929 he tied for first place (with J. Bernstein) in the New York State championship tournament at Buffalo. The same year he was first in the Premier Reserves at Hastings, England. A year later, after serving with the American team at Hamburg and revisiting his native Hungary, he was runner-up to Isaac I. Kashdan at Gjor. In 1931, following the international congress at Prague, he finished second to Salo Flohr at Brun.

Leaving New York for the West, Steiner settled in Los Angeles in 1932, became chess editor of the Los Angeles Times that year and ever since has espoused the cause of chess in southern California. From that point of vantage he was in a good position to father two Pan-American tournaments - in 1945 and 1954 - both under the auspices of the Hollywood Chess Group, the clubhouse of which adjoined the Steiner residence. He carried his enthusiasm for the game to such and extent that, in spite of his many promotional duties, entered himself in the arena which drew contestants of the highest grade from far places.

Meanwhile Steiner had been a member of American teams sent abroad by the United States Chess Federation to compete for the international Hamilton-Russell trophy at The Hague, 1928, Hamburg, 1930, Prague, 1931; and later, as United States Champion, was captain of the American team of 1950 at Dubrovnic, Yugoslavia. He had achieved the goal of his ambition at South Fallsburg, N.Y., in 1948, when he won the United States championship, ahead of Isaac I. Kashdan.

Other highlights of achievement for Steiner included a triple tie for first with Reuben Fine and Arthur W. Dake in Mexico City, second to Fine, U.S. Open, Dallas, 1940; second (again to Fine), U.S. Open, St. Louis, 1941; tie for first (with A. Yanofsky), U.S. Open, Dallas, 1942; third (with I.A. Horowitz), U.S. Championship, New York, 1944.

Memorable in the chess career of Herman Steiner was the prominent part he played in the 1945 match between American and Russian teams by radio (New York and Moscow). The Americans were badly beaten, at the top boards in particular. Steiner alone turned in a plus score of 1.5-.5 against Salo Flohr. The following year, in Moscow, over the board, it was Flohr's turn to win by 1.5-.5. Against the winning Soviet team in Moscow, 1955, he failed in both games.

Completely enamored of chess, an optimist never so content as when engaged in play, fearing no one as an opponent, and a never-say-die fighter, Herman Steiner was a picturesque and friendly personality in the realm of international chess. He will be missed in many circles, but mostly in California, where his unrelenting efforts over the years left a permanent mark.

(The biographical sketch above was written by Hermann Helms, "dean of American chess" immediately upon receipt of the news of Steiner's death. Mr. Helms, one of Steiner's oldest and closest friends, was modest about his literary effort and asked that it merely be credited to The THE CALIFORNIA CHESS REPORTER. In order to round out the biography, Herman's California record follows.)

Herman Steiner's first California State tournament was in the Pasadena, 1932, international tournament. The California player having the highest score was the champion for the year. Harry Borochow won the title, 5.5-5.5, while Steiner, 6-5, was not yet considered a Californian (Alekhine won the tournament 8.5-2.5, followed by Kashdan, 7.5-3.5; Dake, Reshevsky and Steiner were tied at 6.5).   The next California championship was at Hollywood, 1939; the winner was P. Woliston, 7-1, with Steiner and Borochow next, 6-2. After a wartime gap, the San Francisco, 1945, tournament saw a tie between Steiner and A.J. Fink, 8-1. There was no play-off. Missing the 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951 and 1952 state championships, chiefly because of his travels, Steiner took the 1953 championship, played at Hollywood, and the 1954 title, played at San Francisco, by identical 7.5-1.5 scores. He had a 4-1 score in 1955 when the tournament was cancelled.

 In addition to numerous successes in local and regional tournaments, Steiner took third place, behind Gligoric and Pomar, in the Hollywood, 1952, international tournament. He also won the only two California Opens he participated in (Santa Barbara, 1954, and Fresno, 1955).

One of the most important things Herman did for chess in California was his support of and his playing in the North-South team match. Playing against such players as Dake, Koltanowski, Konig and Tippin, Steiner scored 9 wins and 5 draws out of 14 games played.

 HERMAN IS GONE - by Irving Rivise

The sudden passing of our beloved Herman has created a void in the chess world which will be impossible to fill.   Herman Steiner, the chessmaster whose career spanned more than three decades, has bequeathed to us a legacy of wondrous brilliancies. Ever disdainful of taking the dull safe course, Herman was a worthy successor to the American tradition of Morphy, Pillsbury and Marshall. Indeed, had he wished to "play to the score" he would easily have achieved a higher statistical rating, but his creative genius demanded that he give to each and every game the best that was in him.

An extraordinary talent coupled with an intense devotion to the game he loved so well enabled him to ascend to remarkable heights. To cite but some of his more outstanding successes - N.Y. State Championship 1929 - 1st; Hastings Premier Reserves 1929 -1st; Gjor 1930 -2nd (behind Kashdan); Brunn 1931 - 2nd (behind Flohr); Berlin 1931 - 1st; Mexico City 1935 - 1st (equal with Fine and Dake); U.S. Open 1942 - 1st (equal with Yanofsky); London 1946 - 1st (ahead of O.S. Bernstein and Tartakower); U.S. Open 1946 - 1st. His crowning achievement was winning the coveted U.S. Championship in 1948. In the historic 1945 U.S.A.-U.S.S.R. radio match, Herman was the only American player on a team that included Fine, Reshevsky, Denker, and Kashdan (among others) to achieve a plus score against the Russians.

On the local scene, Herman won virtually every tournament he elected to enter. His most recent successes were the winning of the California State Championship in 1953 and 1954; the California Open Championship in 1954 and 1955. He played in the annual North-South Match 14 times on either first or second board without ever having lost a game - a remarkable average of 82%.

He died while busily engaged in defending his state championship title. We feel sure he would not have wanted it to happen any other way.

Unlike many other chess masters, his interests were not confined to his over-the board play but expanded into many other phases of chess activities.  He was one of this country's leading chess organizers, and it was mainly through his untiring efforts that the United States entered into international team competition. Herman played on the American team at The Hague 1928, Hamburg 1930, Prague 1931, and more recently at Dubrovnik in 1950. In the United States he alone was instrumental in organizing the 1945 Pan-American International Tournament and the Second Pan-American Chess Congress of 1954.

Herman believed the future of American chess was in the development of chess interest in the youth of this country. True to his beliefs, he spent countless hours at tournaments for junior players, instructing, encouraging, and in no small measure some of his bubbling enthusiasm for chess is reflected in the spirit and style of play of many of our young masters throughout the nation.

As a teacher he was extremely successful in imparting his accumulative knowledge to others. Over the years he had developed a system of instruction that was most effective. So much so that leading chess periodicals had eagerly availed themselves of the opportunity to publish portions of this text. Herman was busily engaged in arranging for publication of a book incorporating his teaching methods at the time of his death.

His contagious laughter and infectious good humor will be sorely missed.  Yes, Herman is gone, but wherever chess is played he will long be remembered. He will forever be in the hearts and minds of those who were privileged to know him.

THE MAN AND THE PLAYER - by Imre Konig

My memories of Herman Steiner go back as far as 1931 when I first met him in Prague when our teams met in the Chess Olympics. A young, attractive man, full of life and full of fight! I watched him playing Pirc (Yugoslavia), who, in top form, defeated him. I was free that evening and when I walked around I saw him in the adjoining room reserved for analysis playing rapid chess. He was in buoyant spirits and if I had not seen him losing an hour ago I would not have known it. Another member of the U.S. team whispered to me: "This is the way he overcomes the effect of a loss."

My next meeting occurred 15 years later when he was playing in the 1946 London tournament. This he won ahead of grandmasters Dr. Bernstein and Dr. Tartakower, defeating the latter. It was quite a feat, for which he could have claim the title of grandmaster. I was surprised to find him rather placid, and only much later was I given an explanation of his failure to act more elated, when I heard him telling someone how sorry he had been feeling to have defeated Dr. Tartakower, who was such a nice man. Indeed, in our 25 years of friendship I have only seen him once to be angry with me - when in the U.S. Open, 1955, he was paired against his pupil Larry Remlinger in one of the last rounds and he had to defeat him. He thought that I, as referee, should not have allowed local players to be paired together.

Herman called himself a professional chess player, although everybody knew that he was losing money on chess. Perhaps he meant that chess was his vocation. It is very seldom that chessmasters admit this, and I know of only two chessmasters who were proud of their profession besides Herman: William Steinitz, who in his International Chess Magazine claimed that a chessmaster can be as proud of his profession as any other professional man; and Alexander Alekhine, who when middle-aged became a doctor at law at the Paris Sorbonne, yet remained true to himself as a chess player. Even Dr. Lasker, the greatest figure in chess, was proud of his achievements in philosophy and other fields, rather than of his prowess as a chess player.

In style Herman Steiner belonged to the romantic school, of which in this century only Spielman and Mieses were left. He recognized no laws over the chess board except those of the imagination. With a wealth of ideas, full of fight, he achieved comparatively great successes even when he was near 50 at Saltsjobaden, 1952; after a bad start he held his own against the Russian grandmasters and still scored 50%. Imagine the odds of a Robin Hood fighting with arrows against modern scientific weapons!

In the last years of his life he took part in every California tournament. Some think it "easy meat" for a master to play against amateurs; just think that when six or seven games are to be played one draw more or less can decide the issue. Herman had everything to lose and nothing to win. And he won.  So the last romantic player and personality disappears from the chess arena. But through his games his memory will be kept alive and fresh in the history of chess.


Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Changing Offline Storage

I have been storing my pdf booklets for download on 4Shareddotcom but have now transferred them to ADrive.  I really liked 4Shared but it seems that lately the site is not letting you download anything unless you are a member (free).  I was told by one person that  for some reason the site would not let him sign up for his free membership.  Also, I noticed that searches haven't been working as well as they used to on 4Shared so I made the switch to make it easier to download the booklets.

Bogoljubow and the Nazis

      The image of Bogo is often an over-optimistic beer-drinking buffoon but in reality he was a very strong player. Historically he has always been obscured in the shadow of the Alekhine, Capablanca and Lasker. There appears to be several reasons for his relative obscurity.

      He was a ‘non-person’ in the Soviet Union. One biographer, Charushin, says: 'In the Soviet press even the mention of Bogoljubow's name was strictly forbidden.' Bogo’s later Nazi associations didn’t help either. Politics played an important part in his life, even though he seems to have been fundamentally apolitical. Early in his career, at the beginning of World War 1, he was taken prisoner while playing in a German tournament along with other strong Russian players, including Alekhine.
      The players' treatment was initially harsh, and Alekhine managed to escape. For the remainder their status as chess players eventually earned them good treatment and they were able to choose their own place of confinement. Some chose the resort town of Triberg. While there Bogoljubow married a local girl and they lived there for 38 years in this same German town. In passing, it should be noted that while in ‘confinement’ Bogoljubow and the other Russians played eight 'Tournaments of Prisoners'. After the First World War, Bogoljubow became one of world's elite.
      After his victory in Moscow 1925 the Soviet chess ‘politicians’ rose to power and began distributing their favors. Bogoljubow was not counted among their favorites and they restricted his access to a couple of tournaments. Because this meant loss of income and his debts began to rise, Bogo renounced his Russian citizenship in 1926 and as result he was condemned by the Soviets and became a 'non-person.’ As was common, his name was erased from all records, including his tournaments results.
      It has been claimed that in 1938 he became a Nazi so as to keep his home in Germany, and to assure that his daughters could go the University. Also, he supposedly made this decision because his wife wanted to remain in Germany.
      Some have said Bogoljubow did not seem to have been ideologically inclined and was said to have disliked the Nazis intensely but even in 1950 FIDE didn't make him a Grandmaster allegedly because of his alleged 'Fascism'. He finally got the title the next year,not long before his death in 1952.
      Edward Winter's Chess Note No. 5515 (Bogoljubow and Immortality) contained this: After Bogoljubow’s death a tribute by E.J. Diemer was published on page 221 of the August 1952 CHESS. Below is an extract:
      ‘The last time I saw him was in Freiburg, ten days before his death. On 6 June he won a lightning-chess tournament organized among the members of the Freiburg team, for whom he had played at top board since 1950. The next day, he helped Freiburg beat another local team by 8:0 and the same evening he beat the well-known Berlin master Mross (in the last tournament game of his life) to help Freiburg register a 4½-3½ win against a team (Berlin-Eckbauer) which had successfully defeated Luxembourg, Cologne, Basle and Lucerne.
      I had a conversation with him then of rare seriousness. As if conscious of the nearness of his end, he spoke, on this last occasion, about – Chess Immortality. I discovered at this late hour in his life, and I pass it on as his closing thought, that Bogoljubow wanted his chess to be regarded as an art and himself as an artist. He feared, he said, that not one of his games, even from the great tournament at Moscow in 1925, the zenith of his career, would be deemed worthy of inscription in the scrolls of immortality. So high did he set his ideals. And so sceptically did he look back over his 40 years of masterly endeavor. Luckily the chess world will not share his pessimism. Countless masterpieces of play remain to assure him the immortality he sought.’
      In the book Bogoljubow-The Fate of a Chess Player by Sergei Soloviov he discusses in some detail how Bogoljubow's career was affected by political developments in the USSR and Germany. Soloviov claims that Bogoljubow was never a Nazi, that he himself was a victim.
      Reuben Fine made an unsubstantiated claim that Bogo had some of his rivals put in concentration camps by the Nazis. In Lessons from My Games: A Passion for Chess, Fine claims that 'Bogoljubow had some of his rivals put in concentration camps by the Nazis when they arrived on the scene in Germany.' The question remains, are there any other sources to support this claim, and who were these rivals? Edward Winter wrote that he had written to Fine to try to find his source for this, and also had Sidney Bernstein (an acquaintance of Fine's) inquire about it, but that Fine never responded to either inquiry.
      According to Hans Kmoch, Bogoljubow was sympathetic to the Nazis (e.g. insisting on the use of swastika to identify his nationality even before it was a universally accepted emblem of Germany) and was insensitive towards the plight of his Jewish colleagues whom he openly taunted.
      In his memoirs Dr. Fedir Bohatyrchuk, a Ukrainian-Canadian International Master and an International Master of correspondence chess, doctor of medicine (radiologist), political activist, and a chess writer, claims that Bogo stopped wearing his Nazi Party badge after a wounded soldier tore it from him during a simul display and that Bogo owned a radio that he secretly used to listen to Allied broadcasts. Bohatyrchuk wrote, “It was not a secret that Bogo did not like the Bolsheviks, but I think only a few people knew that he was treating Hitler's wild ideas with at least equal revulsion and contempt.” Can Bohatyrchuk’s testimony be taken at face value or was he simply trying to rehabilitate a countryman’s image?