Adele Rivero Belcher

    Adele Rivero Belcher (1908 - 1992) is somewhat of a mysterious woman. Born in Belgium, Rivero was the name of her first husband and little is known of her life before she came to the United States.
     She was born to Flemish parents in Antwerp and went to school in Belgium and France. She said that as a child because of illness and the war the family had to keep moving. As a result she had little time for normal childhood play; she had no use for dolls and she didn't particularly like the other kids. 
     She described herself as introspective and curious about everything and always analytical and believed life held a lot of adventure and she was always looking for it. She described the time when she was little that she decided to try and fly. “I remember that once, when I was quite small, I decided to fly by means of will power alone. I took the jump as the take-off. Which turned out quite disastrously.'' 
     A sober and mature little girl, she had absolutely no sense of fear. At the age seven years old when Antwerp was being bombed she absolutely refused to go down in the cellar. "I said to them, with a child's determination. 'If I die, I'm going to die in bed."  It wasn't until 1937 that she claimed to have acquired the rudiments of fear and that was when she witnessed a burglar entering an apartment. 
     After arriving in New York she worked as a stenographer (a job that involved taking shorthand) and first began attracting attention in 1934 when she tied for second place in the first women’s tournament that was organized by Caroline Marshall at the Marshall Chess Club. After the tournament she joined the Marshall Chess Club and began playing against male players. 
     In the Marshall Club Women’s tournament held in 1936, she scored a perfect 5-0 finishing ahead of Mary Bain and Mrs. B.W. McCready. Owing to the success of those two events the Marshall announced a tournament that was to determine the American woman's champion. 
     In 1936, Rivero stated, “More American women would take up chess if there was anything in it for them...The game needs a whale of a lot of publicity just as bridge had. At the present time there are very few American women who even play a passable game.” She also complained of the lack of funding for women's chess. 
     The first Women’s Chess Championship held by the American Chess Federation was won by Rivero in 1937 and the first National Chess Federation’s Women’s Championship was won by Mona May Karff in 1938. Following the merger of the two organizations, the United States Chess Federation held its first women’s chess championship in 1940, which was won by Rivero. 
     She agreed to defend her title in 1941 in a match against Mona May Karff who won the match. The day before the match against Karff she married Donald Belcher which may explain why she lost the match so badly. 
     Prior to the match with Karff, Chess Review described Rivero: “Slim, petite Adele Rivero...plays strong, conservative chess. Inclined to be nervous, she exercises remarkable control in important games, displays great powers of stamina and concentration, nurses small advantages into the end-game.” 
     Karff scored a decisive 5-1 win and Belcher's play was weak and contained a lot of outright blunders. After the match Horowitz wrote, "Mrs. Belcher...was nervous and self-conscious, made some incredible blunders, showed every sign of being badly out of practice. After losing four straight, she came to life in the fifth game, smartly out-played her opponent, put on a real show for her many admirers, only to lapse into defeat in the sixth and final game." They split the $197 prize money, which would amount to about $3,400 these days. 

     At some point she ended up in Vermont where she went down in the Vermont chess history books when she become the first woman to win the state championship. That was in 1954. She appears to have remained active in Vermont chess up until the early 1960s. She passed away at the age of 84 in Williston, Vermont and is buried in Barre, Vermont.
     I did a post on Belcher's opponent in this game HERE. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle has some columns mentioning Donald Belcher HERE and HERE. There is mention of the Belcher - Karff match HERE.

Prague 1946 – Ruined by the Soviets

Margarita Carmen Cansino

     Things were humming in Prague in 1946. After the War the Czechs looked favorably on the Russians who had liberated them. As a matter of fact, the Communist Party had a solid following dating back to the 1920s when Czechoslovakia was a democratic nation. 
     A “necktie party” was held for Karl Hermann Frank on May 22 when he was hanged before 5,000 spectators in the courtyard of the Pankrac Prison in Prague after being convicted of war crimes and the destruction of Lidice and Lezaky. WARNING: The link to Frank contains graphic content. 
     Eduard Benes, the postwar president, had signed a friendship treaty with the Soviets while working with the government-in-exile during 1943. By the beginning of 1946, there was no USSR military presence in the country, but the Communists were well-represented in the government. After a lot of political intrigue over the next couple of years Benes, by that time frail and sick, resigned in June, 1948 and passed away on September 3, 1948. 
     After the Communist took over, Czechoslovakia which until then had been the last democracy in Eastern Europe, was doomed to more than 40 long years of totalitarian rule which lasted until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. 
     Besides the political intrigue going on, in 1946, a lady who was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1918 as Margarita Carmen Cansino, the oldest child of two dancers, visited Prague and created a stir. By then she had become a popular Hollywood actress known as Rita Hayworth. 
     She had just starred in her first major dramatic role in the 1946 film, Gilda, which also starred Glenn Ford. 1946 was also the year of the first Karlovy Vary International Film Festival where she made an appearance at the world renowned spa town, and upon seeing the beauty of the Czech Republic, she decided to take in the sights of Prague. 
     The international chess scene was severely disrupted by World War II beginning with the 1939 Olympiad at Buenos Aires. Some teams and players withdrew and others remained in South America for the duration of the war. Also, Alekhine had died in the spring of 1946. 
     After the war ended, the FIDE conference in the summer of 1946 had to reestablish itself and had proposed a world championship tournament including five participants from the AVRO 1938 tournament: Mikhail Botvinnik, Paul Keres, Max Euwe, Samuel Reshevsky and Reuben Fine. 
     Along with those players would be Smyslov plus the winner of either Groningen (the first major postwar tournament. It was held in August and September) or Prague which was played in October of 1946. Prague was a memorial to Karel Treybal and Vera Menchik who both died during the war. 
     The possibility of advancing a player to a world championship tournament was only part of what the Prague organizers envisioned for the tournament. They had invited Botvinnik, Smyslov, Keres, Flohr, Bronstein, Euwe, Reshevsky, and Fine, but none of them played. Tartakower had accepted, but never arrived due to travel difficulties. Karel Opocensky was chosen to replace him. 
     Then on October 2, Moscow notified the organizers that the four-player Soviet players promised wouldn't be coming due to a conflict with the semifinals of their national championship. This unexpected last-minute cancellation threw the Prague tournament into chaos. It also weakened the prospects of the eventual winner, the Polish Miguel Najdorf who had remained in South America during the war, to be included in the FIDE World Championship Tournament scheduled for 1948. 
     Botvinnik won at Groningen and since he was already a candidate, the winner of Prague was presumed to get the open place, but chess politics interfered. In the end, when the Soviets pulled out of Prague, its strength was greatly reduced and so Najdorf's chances to participate in a world championship tournament went with it. 
     As for the tournament itself, Jan Foltys got off to a great start by scoring 4-0, but then after two draws, he suffered two defeats. Three draws in the final five rounds resulted in his only tying for fourth place with Svetozar Gligoric.
     Gligoric also got off to a blazing start, scoring 5.5-0.5 in six rounds, which included a win over Najdorf.  Then he too faded when he scored +1 -2 =4 in the remaining rounds. 
     Trifunovic started with two losses, to Stoltz and Foltys, but then went on a scoring binge, finishing with a +7 -0 =4. Stoltz scored +2 -2 =3, but finished up well by scoring +5 -0 =1. 
     Like Gligoric, Najdorf got off to a blazing start. He scored +6 -0 =1; his loss was to Gigoric. He continued his solid play and coasted to first with a draw against Stoltz with one round to go. 

1) Najdorf 10.5-1.5 
2-3) Stoltz and Trifunovic 9.0-3.0 
4-5) Gligoric and Foltys 8.5-3.5 
6) Golombek 6.5-5.5 
7-8) Pachman and Sajtar 6.0-6.0 
9-10) Katetov and Kottnauer 5.5-6.5 
11-12) Zita and Guimard 4.5-7.5 
13-14) Opocensky and Rohacek 3.5-8.5 

Note that this event is not to be confused with the Prague vs. Moscow match which was also played in 1946. The Moscow team consisted of Bronstein, Kotov, Smyslov, Alatortsev, Simagin, Lilienthal and Bondarevsky. The Prague team was made up of Zita, Opocensky, Katetov, Kottnauer, Sajtar and Pachman. 

     The Czech player Cenek Kottnauer (February 24, 1910 - February 14, 1996) emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1953. Frantisek Zita (November 29, 1909 – October 1, 1977) was born in Prague, then Austria-Hungary and was Czech (Bohemia and Moravia) champion in 1943. 
     The game is interesting because Zita launches an ill advised attack where in the end he wasn't attacking at all; he was just giving away pieces. It reminds me of some of my “attacks.” 

Walter Muir

     Walter Muir (1905 – December 29, 1999) was awarded the Correspondence International Master title in 1971. Muir, who began playing postal chess in 1925, was probably the most influential person in the development of correspondence chess and was a dominant figure in postal play on the national and international level for almost fifty years and he was recognized as the Dean of American Correspondence Chess. 
    It was Muir who lead the way for American players to get involved in international play with the ICCF and he served as the secretary of the ICCF for the US. Muir was the founder of the United States Postal Chess Union, the organization that provided access for international postal play for members of CCLA, United States Chess Federation, American Postal Chess Tournaments, Knights Of the Square Table and The Chess Connection. 
     The APCT was one of the leading US postal clubs for about 35 years and when the organizers of the club, Helen and Jim Warren, announced their retirement in 2005 the club went out of existence after the last tournaments were completed. 
     NOST (Knights of the Square Table) was founded in 1960 by Robert Lauzon and Jim France as a postal organization with aim was to play in a less competitive atmosphere, in which friendship and conversation were more emphasized than winning. Over time, members also began playing Chess variants as well as Shogi. The club also included Checkers and Go. NOST lasted 43 years, closing down its website in 2003. This was because its members had aged or died and because the internet had begun to supplant postal chess. 
     The Chess Connection was a significant group with many strong players and that featured high prize fund tournaments and they published an outstanding magazine. 
    Muir won the Canadian Correspondence Chess Association Champion nine times: 1928, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1939, 1942, was the British Overseas CC Champion twice and, champion of the Illinois CCA 16 times. He also won nine ICCF Master Tournaments, qualified seven times for ICCF World Championship second-round play, and played on four Olympiad teams for the United States. 
     Muir was the first US player to defeat a USSR player (Atjashev) in ICCF competition The Walter Muir Memorial Invitational Correspondence Chess Tournament is named in his honor, and is supported by both the ICCF USA. and the Canadian Correspondence Chess Association. 
     Both of his parents were Canadian citizens. His father was a meat company executive whose job moved him to many cities around the world and Walter was born in Brooklyn, New York. 
     He surveyed the right-of-way between Albany, New York and New York City for the New York Power and Light Company between 1931-1932, but spent most of his life in Salem and Roanoke, Virginia. He was employed by General Electric for 46 years. He was married to Dorothy Saunders Muir for 65 years. 
     The Dorothy S. and Walter Muir Memorial Fund Established through Muir's estate. The fund supports the Roanoke Valley Chess Club, where was the president for some time, the Fintel Library at Roanoke College and the Western Virginia Foundation for the Arts and Sciences. The annual Walter Muir Chess Tournament is held in his honor. 
     Muir makes mincemeat of his opponent, Frank Valvo, in the following game. Valvo was the father of Michel Valvo. Frank was a prominent correspondence player of his day and in the 1950s and 1960s he played in many OTB events in New York state. 

A Brilliancy By William Spackman

     Unless you are familiar with the history of the Correspondence Chess League of America or a fan of sexist, juicy eros obsessed novels containing offbeat analysis of the delusions and perils of modern love, you've probably never heard of him. 
     As a novelist, his prose style has been described by some reviewers as contrived and a mix of cheeky wordplay, studied eloquence, slang and breezy spontaneity that melded interior monologue, conversation and external action.  Some have dismissed his works while others have called him an American master. It seems you either love his books or you hate them.
     In reviewing one book, A Little Decorum, the reviewer couldn't finish it. He described it as tedious, annoying and repelling with characters that are superficial, unreal and boring. Another of his books, Declarations of Intent, is described as the witty story of a wary woman editor wooed by a Princeton classicist. One reviewer wrote, “Studded with disarming observations and gorgeous, one-of-a-kind sentences, Spackman's writing is a sensuous delight. Like Jane Austen, he exposes savage passions lurking beneath civilized exteriors.”

     Spackman began his literary career by writing fiction on the side and his first published work appeared in 1953. At the time he was living in Colorado and later moved to Philadelphia where he was employed in public relations. 
     William Mode Spackman was born in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, the son of George Harvey Spackman and Alice Pennock Mode on May 20, 1905.  He was educated at Princeton University, Balliol College, graduating in 1927. Spackman, or “Spack” as he was known to friends, passed away at his home in Princeton after a career which made him one Princeton's most distinguished literary alumni. 
     Descended from Pennsylvania Quakers, he was described as “an irreverent wit” whose editorship of Nassau Lit, the country's second oldest college literary magazine, aroused the wrath of many of its readers. 
     Spackman called himself a "flaneur" (loafer), but was a real student who won a Rhodes scholorship. He returned to a varied American career as magazine editor, teacher of classical literature in universities. He served in media service in the Navy during WWII. 
     He was married to Mary Ann, daughter of Bishop Paul Matthews of the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey.  Matthews served in that capacity from 1915 to 1937. Born in Ohio, he was the the son of Stanley Matthews, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Matthews married the Procter and Gamble heiress Elsie Procter and their son, T. S. Matthews, was editor of Time magazine. Bishop Matthews died in Florida at the age of 87.
     For years the Spackmans spent several months of the year at a villa in Brittany, France and they eventually retired to an estate in Princeton where he renewed his literary career by writing five novels and a volume of essays which won an award from the Academy of Arts and Letters. His first wife died in 1978, and in 1979 he remarried. 
     He left his chess collection to Princeton in 1955.  The collection primarily consists of tournament books and bulletins, along with many game collections. 
     Spackman edited the CCLA's The Chess Correspondent in the 1940s and it was through his efforts that the club made it through some difficult times.  In 1948 he announced a brilliancy contest in which there was no specified dates, but only that the game had to be played in a CCLA event. The games were judged by a panel with the names removed and it turned out that Spackman won first prize. 
 

Scene of the tragedy today

    Spackman,s opponent in this game, Allen Pearsall (1877 – January 1, 1948) from Chula Vista, California, was a long time postal player with the CCLA. He was killed instantly when struck by a car at the corner of Third Avenue and I Street on New Year's day. 

1960, a BIG Year

     On February 24 the first submarine to circle the world began its journey. The nuclear submarine USS Triton circled the globe underwater; it took 84 days and was completed on May 10th. The US launched the world's first nuclear powered Aircraft Carrier the USS Enterprise. 
     September of 1960 saw the first ever televised presidential debate between Vice President Richard Nixon, Republican, and Democrat John F. Kennedy who met in Chicago to debate live. Radio listeners thought Nixon won, while television viewers chose Kennedy. 
     Nixon was not handsome like the image conscious Kennedy. Nixon was nervous, sweating like a pig, needed a shave and when answering questions, he looked at the host, not into the camera which made him look “shifty” to viewers. Nixon wasn't helped when a reporter asked President Eisenhower to name some of his vice president’s contributions. Exhausted and irritated after a long press conference, Eisenhower replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.” He intended it to be a self-deprecating reference to his own mental fatigue, but the Democrats used it in a television commercial that ended with the statement, “President Eisenhower could not remember, but the voters will remember.” In January 1961, John F. Kennedy became President. 

"Tricky Dick" as Nixon was later to become known

     In other major developments the US entered the Vietnam War, the IRA started it's fight against the British, Chubby Checker and the twist started a new dance craze, a Soviet missile shot down the United States' U2 spy plane, aluminum cans were used for the first time, Xerox introduced the first photocopier, Fidel Castro nationalized American oil, sugar and other US interests in Cuba and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was formed.
     There were major food shortages in East Germany and 160,000 refugees crossed to West Germany resulting in Nikita Khrushchev ordering the construction of the Berlin Wall. In Sharpeville, South Africa Afrikaner police opened fire with sub-machine guns on black demonstrators March 21st. Fifteen African countries gained independence and South Africa left the Commonwealth. 
     Chile suffered one of the greatest earthquakes on record that loosed a tsunami. Hurricane Donna formed on August 31st and battered the Caribbean and Eastern United States until mid-September. 
     The American Heart Association linked smoking to heart disease and death in middle-aged men. In the UK, Princess Margaret married Antony Armstrong Jones, a British photographer and film-maker. 
     The Canadian Prime Minister was John Diefenbaker and Charles de Gaulle was President of France, Jawahar Lal Nehru was Prime Minister of India and Harold Macmillan of England. 
     In Louisville, Kentucky, Cassius Clay (who later took the name Muhammad Ali) won his first professional fight after having won the Gold Medal in the Olympic games which were held in Rome. The Winter Olympics were held in Squaw Valley, California. 
     The Soviet Union beat Yugoslavia 2-1 to win the first ever European Football Championship. In pop culture Lady Chatterley's Lover went on sale in England 32 years after it was banned while Coronation Street Soap premiered on television in the UK. The Etch-A-Sketch was introduced for $2.99 manufactured by Ohio Art Company. 

     We chess players had our own news headlines. The biggest being Tal's defeat of Botvinnik for the World Championship. US Women's Champion Lisa Lane was hot. But, there was a lot of other things happening, too. 

National Championships: 
Yugoslavia - Gligoric ahead of Bertok 
Soviet Union - Korchnoi ahead of Petrosian 
United States – Fischer ahead of Lombardy 
Poland -Doda ahead of Filipowicz, Drozd and Mannke 
Argentina – Najdorf ahead of Julio Bolbochan 
Hungary – Sazbo ahead of Barcza and Portisch 
Great Britain - Jonathan Penrose 

Major Tournaments: 
Nimzo Memorial Copenhagen - Petrosian 
Marianske Lazne – Pachman 
Madrid Zonal playoff – Gligoric, Portisch, Pomar and Donner 
Varna – Padevsky and Krogius 
Sarajevo – Pachman and Puc 
Sao Paulo – Julio Bolbochan 
Santa Fe – Gligoric ahead of Szabo 
Beverwijk – Larsen and Petrosian 
Hastings – Gligoric and Bondarvesky 
Stockholm – Tal ahead of Uhlmann 
Leipzig Olympiad – Soviet Union (Tal, Botvinnik, Keres, Korchnoi, Smyslov, Petrosian) ahead of United States (Fischer, Lombardy, Byrne, Bisguier, Rossolimo, Weinstein) 
Buenos Aires - Reshevsky and Korchnoi ahead of Szabo 
Mar del Plata – Spassky and Fischer ahead of Bronstein

 

Svetozar Gligoric

     The legendary GM Svetozar Gligoric died at the age of 89 in Belgrade on August 14, 2012 after suffering a stroke. The hero of a hundred tournaments, his exploits are too numerous to mention, but among them were winning the championship of Yugoslavia a record twelve times from 1947 to 1971 and he played for Yugoslavia in the Olympiads 15 times. 
     In the 1950s and 1960s he was not only one of the top players in the world, but one of the most popular. Gligoric was born in Belgrade to a poor family and his first exposure to chess was watching customers play in a neighborhood bar. At the age of eleven a boarder taken in by his mother, who had been widowed for two years, taught him how to play.  Too poor to buy a chess set, he carved pieces out of corks from wine bottles. 
     Because he was a good student with many athletic successes he was invited to represent his school at a birthday celebration for Prince Peter, who later became King Peter II of Yugoslavia. He later described how embarrassed he was at having to attend dressed in shabby clothes because of his poverty. 
     Born February 2, 1923, at the age of 15 he won he won the Belgrade Chess Club championship. When he was 17, his mother died and Gligoric, an only child, was taken in by Niko Miljanic, a professor who knew him through chess. He seemed to be on his way as a chess player, but then along came World War II and there was no time for chess.  If you speak Bosnian there's more information on Miljanic HERE.  If you don't speak it then Google Translate does a pretty fair job.
     Military operations in Yugoslavia began on April 6, 1941, when the country was quickly conquered by Axis forces. A guerrilla liberation war was fought by Yugoslav Partisans against the Axis forces and their locally established regimes. Simultaneously, a multi-side civil war was waged between the various Yugoslav political groups. 
     Fighting as one of Tito's Partisans, on more than one occasion Gligoric managed to stay alive only by chance. As one example, he described a time when they were fighting the German Army in the mountains of Yugoslavia and as he was setting up machine gun they were fired upon by a sniper. When his companion stood up in front of Gligoric, he took a round, as we used to say in the Marine Corps, right between the running lights. i.e right between the eyes. A chance encounter with a chess playing Partisan officer led to his removal from combat. He was eventually promoted to captain in the resistance forces. 
     After the war Gligoric worked for several years as a journalist and organizer of chess tournaments and progressed as a player, being awarded the IM title in 1950 and the GM title the following year. He eventually became a full-time chess professional and continued active tournament play well into his sixties.  Fluent in several languages, he worked as a journalist and organized many tournaments. 
     Gligoric made significant contributions to the theory and practice of the K-Indian and the Ruy Lopez. He favored ambitious but risky openings, but he stuck fundamental principles and never tries psychological tactics against his opponents. Speaking of Gligoric, Tal said he had his favorite type of positions and when he managed to get them, he created textbook examples of how to handle them. 
     Besides chess, he has a passion for music and in 2011 released a CD featuring compositions that included jazz, ballads and rap. 

     He was among the finalists to challenge for the world champion three times, but came always up short. In the 1953 tournament in Switzerland to pick the challenger, he finished 13th out of 15 players. Six years later, in Yugoslavia, he tied with Bobby Fischer for fifth out of eight players. In 1968, after the format had been changed matches, he lost in the quarterfinals to Mikhail Tal. Gligoric took the early lead, but unwisely switched strategies in the sixth game and lost after reading criticism in newspapers that the games were boring. And, that strategy cost him the match. 
     In the following little known game from the Yugoslavia-Switzerland Match played in 1948, Gligoric defeats Fritz Gygli (November 12, 1896 – April 27, 1980). Gygli was Swis Champion in 1941 and represented Switzerland in Olympiads at The Hague 1928, Warsaw 1935 and Munich 1936. He also played in matches against France (1946), Yugoslavia (1949), and West Germany (1952). 
     For the whole game Gygli's position is badly cramped, but with all his pieces defending his King, what could happen? All seems well until move 28 when Gligoric unleashes a very pretty sacrificial attack. 

Chess Players' Thinking

     ...a cognitive psychological approach by Pertti Saariluoma. That's the title of a book I recently read; it was published in 1995. 
     The author investigated thinking, memory, problem solving and the differences between machine and human processes and presented a new view about experts' thinking and how it should be studied; a lot of technical psychological stuff. I was interested to see if the book had the secret to chess improvement. 
     Most lower rated players have read the chess is 99 percent tactics so the conclusion is that if they work a gazillion tactical puzzles a greatly improved rating is the logical result, but for many that's not the case.
     Simply learning rules and finding a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined doesn't work very well. GMs don't rely on these heuristic rules when deciding on a move, but rather they use intuition and calculation. And, if you've ever watched a GM analyze, you have noticed that they just seem to “know” what the best moves might be and they seem to calculate at the speed of light. I've seen GMs analyzing and moving pieces around and I swear their hands were moving faster than my eyes could follow! 
     All players, even GMs, make tactical mistakes, but it's the frequency and severity that sets us apart from them. In the book, Saariluoma had Finland's GM Yrjo Rantanen analyze 400 games at four different levels in which the focus of attention was on on when an error was made that lost a piece and the number of plies between the erroneous move and when the piece was actually captured. There were four categories: 

I – the lost piece could be captured next move 
II- the lost piece could be captured within two moves by the opponent 
III- the lost piece could be captured within four moves by the opponent 
IV- the lost piece could be captured in five or more moves by the opponent 

     Even the strongest GMs made at east one tactical error per game while the lowest rated players made six or more per game. One of the charts was quite interesting. As you might expect, most tactical errors were made three or more moves out and that was the case with Masters and Grandmasters. But, here's a surprise...most players rated under 1900 committed piece-losing blunders that were only two moves away! For those rated under 1500, they were almost twice as likely to make a Category II blunder than any other! Why, I do not know. 
    In actual games when there isn't any hint as the what's hidden in the position lower rated players spend a lot of time looking at bad ideas and consequently good moves are never examined even though they might be sitting right there waiting to be played in one or two moves, making them well within calculating ability of even the lowest rated players. 
     When deciding on a move, we map out the future consequences of each move, sometimes going ahead 5, 6, or more moves.  The problem is that most of us are far more likely to convince ourselves that bad moves will work because we focus on moves by the opponent that benefit our strategy while ignoring moves that will refute it. In other words, in out analysis we have the opponent cooperating with us. 
     GMs tended put more time into thinking about their opponent's moves and could predict when the outcome of a move would weaken their position. That's what's known as falsification and it's what separates scientific and non-scientific thinking and is the best way to test your planned move. Easier said than done! 
     Research has shown that many people find falsification difficult. We seem to instinctively spend time searching for results that prove our ideas are right. Some think that the ability to falsify is somehow linked to the vast database of knowledge that GMs have and they are more likely to look for ways that things can go wrong. 
     Can the rest of learn to falsify? In a 2004 study Michelle Cowley, a cognitive scientist from Trinity College in Dublin, and her colleague Ruth Byrne studied the problem to see if falsification skill is transferable. Ireland's IM Mark Orr doesn't think it is; he thinks chess skill is specific.  Either you're good, or you're not.

     For me, not being a psychologist and not familiar with all of the psychological jargon, I can't be sure, but I think Saariluoma wasn't able to answer the question either.
     However, one thing I gleaned from the book is that if you're rated under 1500, if you can reduce blunders per game that lose a piece by half, from six to three, you can raise your rating to between 1700-1900. If you're already rated between 1700-1900, if you can halve your piece-losing blunders by half again, from three to one or two per game, you can become a master. Unfortunately, exactly how you do that is still a mystery.

Links to Old Engine Downloads

     Among engine testing sites the most famous are CCRL (Computer Chess Rating Lists) and CEGT (Chess Engines Grand Tournament). My personal preference is the CCLRs' 40/40 list because they include commercial, open source, private and free engines and you can easily see how each engine has scored against any other engine. All engines are tested with ponder off, a general opening book of up to 12 moves and 3-4-5 piece EGTBs. And, the engines are tested on an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ (2.4 GHz) with a time control of 40 moves in 40 minutes. That makes the results a little more reliable than blitz time controls or testing that's done on monster computers using a million cores.
     Of course these days Stockfish is the engine to beat, but other engines have certain characteristics that make them useful in some positions and whether or not you are preparing for over the board play or correspondence play. 
     However, if you are looking for weaker engine that you can practice against then I recommend Cinnamon. Last year I posted on this engine (you can play against it on the left). I like to play against it because its low-2000 rating makes it challenging, but not unbeatable and it doesn't make one stupid blunder then play like a GM for the rest of the game. 
     Many older engines were similar. For example, when Chessmaster was playing about 1600 or so, I realized a few of my postal opponents were using it, but because of its low rating it wasn't really a problem. 
     Back in the old days (before computers) at Chess Review I had started out in Class C (about 1500) and worked my way up to over 2000 and had qualified for several of their Golden Knight Finals. It took a lot of effort. A large collection of opening books, careful analysis and the keeping of copious notes were the keys. Those were fun events because in those days quite a few OTB masters played postal chess and I got to play a few of them. 
     Then one day when Chessmaster crossed the master threshold and I was playing about a dozen postal games with the USCF which had taken over from Chess Review and something happened. 
     One of my opponents whom I knew personally from a few years before had never been rated more than 1500, but when I got my assignment his rating was around 2000. After 20 moves or so, I got suspicious and checked his moves with Chessmaster and discovered that's what he was using. Curious, I began checking my other games and discovered at least half of my opponent's were using Chessmaster. Disgusted, even though it cost me 300 rating points, I resigned all my postal games and abandoned correspondence play for 12-13 years. When I came back, it was on internet sites and things had only gotten worse. 
     For serious analysis you need a couple of different strong engines and they have made us all armchair Grandmasters, but if you're into over the board play and want to practice, strong engines don't play like people do. Instead they play like a GM, blunder, then go back to playing like a GM. The solution is to play against some of the older engines that aren't master strength. That's why I like Cinnamon. 
     If you're looking for some specific older engine or are just interested in fiddling around with them, here are some sites you might like to check out. 

ChessMosaic - The author says that you can search, download and explore over 1.4 million games from his collection, but I noticed that it was current only to 2012. You can view and download his collection of chess engines; there looks to be over 250 of them. The engines are listed in alphabetical order by whether they are Winboard engines or UCI engines, so finding the one you want is pretty easy. 
ChessBites - Over five million searchable games, opening novelties, mates, ending, more  
Ridderkerk is an old (up to 2013) site that has a lot of interesting downloads.
Rebel – This is a summary of REBEL products dating back to the 1980s. Download of a lot of engines is available.