Tribute To Eric Schiller

     Eric Schiller (March 20, 1955 – November 3, 2018) had an Elo rating of 2370 which made him a solid master. In addition, he was an International Arbiter and International Trainer, organized a few tournaments and reported on the Olympiads. He served as an arbiter at the FIDE World Championship 2000. Vladimir Kramnik and Garry Kasparov opted not to participate in the event, but they had both endorsed Schiller. As a chess developer, he wrote some of the reference manuals included in Chessmaster 5000 and he developed all the tutorials for Kasparov's Gambit. I well remember Kasparov's Gambit which was an underrated program that never sold well. In it Kasparov appeared on the screen and gave advice and comments during the game with a digitized voice.
     Schiller was born in New York City and graduated from the University of Chicago 1976, later teaching both there and at Wayne State University. In 1991, he earned his PhD in linguistics from the University of Chicago. After his undergraduate years, Schiller turned to music and founded a music group called the "Long Island Sound Ensemble" and studied conducting in Vienna, Salzburg and Hancock, Maine. 
     His PhD thesis was entitled "An autolexical account of subordinating serial verb phrase constructions". He was a published author in linguistics, specializing in Mon-Khmer languages. He was a co-founder of the Southeast Asian Linguistic Society and was an officer of the Chicago Linguistic Society. 
     He was probably best known as an author on a par with Fred Reinfeld for his output, but his books were much worse written that Reinfeld's who early in his career actually wrote some great books. Schiller's books were often criticized for thier slapdashery...they were riddled with spelling errors, typographical errors, factual errors and he was even accused of plagiarism. 
     In Kingpin magazine Anthony Miles reviewed Schiller's Unorthodox Chess Openings as "utter crap." While that may be true from a GM's perspective, it was written for average players and got 3 out of 5 stars in Amazon Reviews. I borrowed the book from the library and actually found it to be not "crap" but a reasonably good discussion of "crap" openings which can sometimes be fun to play. Carsten Hansen wrote of Schiller's book on the Frankenstein–Dracula Variation of the Vienna Game that it was "by far the worst book that I have ever seen." It also got 3 stars on the Amazon review. One reviewer gave it 4 stars and noted it "is primarily for entertainment, not so much analysis (there are only 30 or so very scant pages of opening analysis, followed by a poorly organized database dump of lightly annotated games. But for amusement purposes you won't be disappointed." 
     Highly respected International Master John L. Watson co-written three books with Schiller and considered some of Schiller's books to be well suited to its amateur audience. Of the books Watson co-authored he noted, "these books are explicitly aimed at the developing student, not the advanced player, and I think they both do a particularly good job of gently guiding an inexperienced player through a new opening...While Schiller probably deserves some of the criticism he gets, a consequence of writing too many books too quickly, he should also get credit when he does a good job." 
     International Master Jeremy Silman wrote of Watson and Schiller's The Big Book of Busts, "I am forced to swallow my bigoted view of Schiller's work (or does this just validate my opinion of Watson?) and admit that this is a great book." 
     Schiller won the Illinois Junior Championship in 1974 and played for the University of Chicago team several times at the Pan American Intercollegiate Team Championship. He was the Hawaii action and blitz champion for 1988/89. He was an organizer of the Hawaii International chess festivals 1994–98 including 1998 US Open and was California Champion in 1995.  
     Later that year, he appeared as a chess advisor for the rock band Phish on their "Chess Tour" where they played an ongoing game of two chess moves per tour stop and some band vs. audience partial games as part of their stage performance. 
     Since 2008, Schiller experienced some health setbacks including having his right hand and foot amputated due to complications from diabetes. Nonetheless, he remained active and ambulatory with the aid of a walker and taught chess at several elementary schools in and near Mountain View, California in affiliation with Bay Area Chess, where he lived in the last years of his life. He offered chess tutoring over the Internet via videoconferencing. He died on November 3, 2018 from complications of cardiovascular disease.