Stockfish 3 Update

The New Thoresen Chess Engines Competition reports that after 48 games Houdini defeated Stockfish by a score of 25 -23.  The complete set of games can be downloaded from the site.

The top 10 ratings are:

1-Houdini 3 - 3156

2-Stockfish 250413 - 3102

3-Rybka 4.1  -3099

4-Komodo 4534 - 3084

5-Critter 1.6a - 3073

6-Vitruvius 1.19 - 3064

7-Gull R375 - 3052

8-Equinox 1.65 - 3049

9-Hiarcs 14 - 2984

10-Chiron 1.5 - 2983

Loinjak Game

      I recently posted about Sinisa Loinjak’s winning of the LSS ‘World Championship’ and observed that because of his 51.1% wins 48.9% draws with no losses he clearly knows something about using chess engines that I and a lot of others don’t.  One poster commented, “Maybe the best correspondence chess players still clearly know something about using chess knowledge a lot of others don't ?!” and then asked the question, “Have you checked the games? Are the critical maneuvers and tactics really that easy to spot by strong chess engines?”  Actually, I had not checked any of his games, but the question made me decide to do just that to see if I could spot the critical points in the game and see where Loinjak varied from engine suggestions.

       I deliberately chose a game against a lower rated player figuring any mistakes and Loinjak’s exploitation of them would be easier to spot.  My method was to first Blundercheck the game at 10 seconds per move with a setting of 0.30 being considered a ‘blunder.’  Black's 17th move registered as a blunder and there was one later in the game, but it was already lost anyway, so we can discount that move.  The next thing was to utilize the Hot Meter function which is supposed to alert you major positional changes. Engines used were Houdini 2, Stockfish 3 and Critter 1.6a 64-bit.
      One important thing to remember is that I did not spend a great deal of time analyzing this game (maybe 1-3 minutes per move), but the purpose was not to annotate the game as such, but to find critical points where Loinjak varied from engine suggestions. 
      Even so, it is possible that if he spent hours analyzing with a powerful computer, he would have actually been playing engine suggestions that I was unable to hit on in such a brief amount of time.  And that in itself is a big difference between highly rated CC players and the rest of us.  I have a dual core laptop, an opening book and database that came with the software and am not willing to spend several evenings analyzing every move. 
      I had a game some time back where the DB showed several games by 2500+ CC players that were all wins so I steered into one of those games, but in the course of analyzing it, I  (or rather the engine) discovered an improvement for my opponent that lead to a significant advantage.  Alas, my opponent discovered it too and I lost.  This example shows how important opening analysis in CC is.  Then there are games like the one I recently posted where I chose a line none of the engines recommended and ended up drawing.  I’ve done that on more than one occasion and probably have lost more than I have won doing it!
      Anyway, it seems the critical point in this game was Loinjak’s 17.g4 which none of the engines found.  I let Houdini 2 work on it for three hours while I was out trimming hedges and Loinjak's move did not show up in the top 8 suggestions..  In fact, the evaluation after 17.g4 fell off a tiny bit, but as the game progressed you could see White’s advantage gradually creeping up. I even tried the ‘human-like’ Komodo-64 3 engine and it didn’t recommend 17.g4 either.
      So, the question is, how did Loinjak decide on 17.g4?  I don’t know, but if you think about it, a general P-advance on the K-side looks logical and I suppose that if the evaluation does not make a drastic change for the worse, then it makes sense to play it.  Maybe I'll understand it better when I get to 2500....

 

 

 

John W. Collins

      John William Collins (September 23, 1912 - December 2, 2001) was a well known author, teacher and master and in 1991 was inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame. His most famous ‘pupil’ was Bobby Fischer though Fischer never acknowledged Collins as such. Mostly what Collins seems to have done with Fischer was give him access to his vast chess library and to have analyzed some openings and played thousands of speed games with him. In fact, in his book, My Seven Chess Prodigies, Collins said he had merely "imparted knowledge" to Fischer's because his special ability could not be taught. Collins and his sister held open house two or three nights a week at his apartment in Flatbush, and Fischer had dinner there almost as often as in his own home.      Other famous pupils were Robert and Donald Byrne, William Lombardy and Raymond Weinstein, Sal Matera and Lewis Cohen although it cannot be said with certainty that Collins actually ‘taught’ them anything. Sal Matera became an IM and later gave up chess for a business career and who knows what happened to Lewis Cohen? With the possible exception of Fischer, I would hesitate to call any of them “prodigies.” I once read My Seven Chess Prodigies hoping to find the secret of his success, but there were no secrets. Mostly Collins and his sister, Ethel, provided their apartment, aka Hawthorne Chess Club, as a venue for people to play chess, analyze and generally fellowship. He and his sister also appear to have fed the kids a lot of pop, cookies and other goodies.
      Collins was born and raised in Newburgh, New York, but lived most of his life in New York City. He was injured in an accident at birth and confined to a wheelchair the rest of his life, but that did not stop him from being an active participant in many chess activities. He was assisted by his sister, a registered nurse who devoted her life to caring for her brother and accompanied him to chess events. Collins was a master in the 1930s and there were not many players in that era that could boast the title.
 

     He was a major figure in the early days of organized chess and served for many years as correspondence chess editor of Al Horowitz’ Chess Review magazine. In addition to being an OTB Master Collins was also a Correspondence Master. He was active in OTB chess up until the 1960’s and once won the U.S. Correspondence Championship. Collins also participated in the first World Correspondence Championship (won by C.J.S. Purdy) but did not do particularly well, finishing +3 -7 =3 and tying for 11-12 place out of 14. He also won the Marshall Chess Club Championship and the New York State Championship.
      Collins was co-editor of the ninth edition of Modern Chess Openings, a major organizer and leader for chess activities, especially through the Collins Kids organization. The Collins Kids were a group of young players who Collins helped to play against teams from other countries.

I Don’t Understand the Position

I recently concluded a correspondence game that has left me baffled.  After arriving at the position below I hit on the idea of a general K-side advance which I thought would leave me with reasonably good chances but after tinkering around with several different engines (mostly Houdini 2, Critter and Stockfish 3) to analyze the rest of the game I still have not been able to come up with what I consider any definitive answers about what the real evaluation of the position should be.  All the engines seem to give different outputs and evaluations and none of them indicate that a general advance on the K-side by White is in order.  Mostly what I get is what appears to me as aimless shifting of the pieces.
 

NM Dan Heisman Meets the Legendary Al Horowitz

      I came across a chessdotcom post from back in January where Heisman wrote of his one and only meeting with Horowitz. It appears Heisman met Horowitz right after Horowitz had a bad day in the US Championship and Horowitz was a little gruff.
      What I particularly found interesting was a comment by one poster who wrote…I think there is something else at play here. I've been thinking of blogging about it, but it would cause a firestorm. By my observations, chess players as a whole have a worse character than the general population. We all know some friendly chess players, no doubt: people who are kind, jovial, generous of spirit. Far more often than would be expected though, it seems, chess players are spiteful, boastful, arrogant, cold, mean. We see this when we play live internet chess: the comments that so often come through the chat box do not tend to reflect well on the character of chess players. We can ascribe much of this to the anonymity afforded by this medium, no doubt, and we certainly see similar behavior around the web. But still, when I consider my in-person experiences, there are far too many cases such as are documented here. This is especially sad if true, because it would further diminish the chances of people becoming interested in chess: no one likes to hang out with jerks.
      What do you think? Personally I have found the opposite to be true. Oh sure, I have run into plenty of real snot faces over the years, but generally I’d have to say most chess players I have met or played correspondence with from GMs on down to beginners have been pretty decent folks.
      Of the ‘famous’ GM’s I have met, Arthur Bisguier, Andy Soltis, William Lombardy, Milan Vukcevich and Edmar Mednis stand out as particularly gregarious fellows. Even Samuel Reshevsky was approachable away from the board. There were some that were less than nice, but I won’t mention any names.

Stockfish 3

      Stockfish 3 is available for download at Stockfish Chess. I don’t have any reports on its performance yet, but one person posting on a Blog claimed that in his ‘quick’ test at 10 minutes (plus increment) Houdini 3 scored +3 -1 =6 against S3.
       From what I have read though, blitz games often give different results than games played at long time controls so that doesn’t really tell you how good the engine actually is. I ran two 10 minute + 15 seconds games on my AMD Athlon II Dual Core M300 2000 MHz using the Fritz 12 opening book pitting S3 against Houdini 2 and the result was both games were drawn.

John Littlewood

  

    Littlewood (25 May 1931 – 16 September 2009) was one of England’s leading players for many years and won the British national senior champion in 2006. He was the best British attacking player of his generation during which time he notched up numerous grandmaster scalps. His 19 British championships spanned 50 years.
      His first big break was when he was invited to the British Chess Championship where he performed well and as a result was invited to participate in the Hastings tournament of 1961/62. It was in this tournament that he played his famous loss to Botvinnik. Littlewood started with a promising attack, but he missed the best continuation which enabled Botvinnik to turn the game around and defeat him. In the same tournament he defeated GM Arthur Bisguier in a vicious attack and after the game Bisguier asked, "What do you feed this guy on? Raw meat?"
      Littlewood was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire in 1931, the fourth of his eleven siblings. He did not start playing chess until he was 13 when he was introduced to the game by a friend. He kept on losing to his friend, so he went into the school library and checked out every single chess book and began studying tactics.
      At 16 he joined the local chess club and as he had not played many different opponents, he was surprised when he found he could beat everyone in the club which whetted his appetite for the game. While at Sheffield University he won three university tournaments and the Sheffield Championship. After graduating he entered the military service where he taught reading and writing. After completion of his service he worked as a French teacher.
      Littlewood played at two chess Olympiads, several Anglo-Dutch matches, and European and World Seniors. He was proud to have defeated the German GM Wolfgang Uhlmann on two occasions. Littlewood also managed the national blind chess team and for a while served as the Director of Junior Chess.
      He was the outright winner of the British Senior Chess Championship in 2006 and at age 77 finished equal first in 2008. Littlewood wrote a column called "Littlewood's Choice" for the English Chess Federation magazine. His brother Norman also played in four Olympiads, and his son Paul, an IM, won the British Championship in 1981.
      In the following game it is interesting to see how Littlewood whipped up an attack against Cafferty’s King with a Q and a R.

Dennis Waterman

 

     Waterman became a master by the age of 16; his last USCF rating was 2251. He gave actor Peter Falk (tv series Colombo) lessons in the early 1970s and played in the Lone Pine tournaments of that era. Waterman has authored books and articles covering science fiction, chess, spiritual teachings, meditation and poker. As a result of his spirituality books he has been nicknamed "Swami" by the people in poker. He also owned a logging company in Oregon.
      Born in Myrtle Point, Oregon in 1948, he became a chess master and backgammon player but eventually opted to pursue a career in professional poker. As it turned out, it was a good decision because he has always been successful in the poker world.
       Waterman attributes his success in poker to reality and experience saying that although reading poker books and watching poker games on television or in casinos helps a lot in augmenting the people's knowledge of the game of poker, they will never succeed unless they try playing the game themselves. He says that reading and watching are entirely different from actually playing. But like chess players, Waterman likes to watch and play against famous poker players because he admires the strategies they use at poker tables.
      The first time Waterman became recognized as a major poker player was when he attended the 29th Annual World Series of Poker in 1998 where he finished in the money and poker has made Waterman a millionaire; he has won over one million dollars in poker tournaments.
      Waterman, an elusive figure on a quest for enlightenment, describes himself as a hologram from hundreds of previous lives as a Buddhist monk. He's a man of nature, a former logger who lived in seclusion deep in the Oregon forests. Born and raised in Oregon, Waterman became a logger at the age of 13. As a teen he excelled at strategy games, playing backgammon and chess when bad weather kept him from logging.

Oregon forest

      He was a good enough chess player to have won the Brilliancy Prize at the 1973 American Open and it was during that time that he had a ‘spiritual awakening’ and studied subconscious visions.  He eventually experienced a ‘lucid dream’ while at a tournament in Lone Pine in which three men in the dream told him they would provide him with spiritual guidance as well as teach him about the physical reality in which humans live, ancient languages and how to survive natural disasters. As a result, Waterman has written extensively about his meetings with the men in an online series entitled, "Knowledge from the Ancient Cave."
      Losing interest in chess, he quit playing in 1975 and returned to Oregon to work as a logger, but a prominent U.S. businessman had read a chess profile of Waterman in the Los Angeles Times and decided to track him down. After about a year of searching, Waterman was located in the Oregon woods where he was without a phone or any connection to the outside world. The businessman offered him a membership with the Chicago Board of Trade, $2 million in wages, a $10 million line of credit and a regular job. Waterman accepted the opportunity and worked as a corporate troubleshooter in Chicago before relocating to New York to work in finance.
      By that time, he had turned to backgammon as his game of choice but managed to fit in some poker tournaments on the side. Eventually he quit both business and backgammon and embarked on a career as a professional poker player.
      Waterman made his mark in poker in 1998 when he began popping up at poker tournaments and doing well by winning minor events. Then, in 2002, he scored his first major tournament win: first-place in the Los Angeles Poker Classic in Pot-Limit Hold'em and subsequently he played in two World Series of Poker finals taking fifth in the $1,500 Pot-Limit Hold'em event and eighth in the $3,000 Pot-Limit Hold'em event. In 2002 at the Bellagio Five Diamond Poker Classic No-Limit Hold'em table Waterman won over $100,000 and that was only the beginning. He has won more than 180 poker tournaments.

Pontificating on Miscellaneous Stuff

Timing out on Chesshood:
  

   Chesshood has introduced a novel idea: In order to keep the site fun and clean, a new feature has been installed: Any members who do not log on the site for a period of 15 days (players on vacation excluded of course) will receive an automated private message and email, 24 hours after that if no log on has been recorded for that player, the account will automatically be deleted. That will also apply to members timing out more than 7 games with or without logins recorded.
      There needs to be some repercussions when a player forfeits on time in a lot of games. Some sites don’t seem to do anything while on Lechenicher SchachServer you get put on probation and suspended for a certain number of days, but your account is never deleted. I used to play on Chessworld and I don’t think you got suspended or anything but, like LSS and probably other sites, your name remained on the rolls. Some players have not been active on these sites for years. It’s wrong to keep a player on the rating list when his last login was 3 or 4 years ago. I think Chesshood has the right idea of deleting accounts for inactive players.

Is Chess Getting Played Out?

     Some people think that at the top level chess pretty well worked out and its possibilities exhausted with draws plaguing the elite GM level. And, as I mentioned in a previous post, chess engines are making winning correspondence games harder and harder.
      I saw a game in Shirov’s Fire on Board the other day where he wrote that he discovered a move in home analysis on, if memory serves, move 32 or 33. Bobby Fischer believed traditional chess is played out…finished. When Capa said the same thing, if you remember, about the only opening they ever played was the Queen’s Gambit Declined, or some such and it was getting harder to find any new ideas. But, then along came the K-Indian, for example, which was at first believed to be bad, but as we all know it wasn’t. Maybe somebody will discover 1.h3 has merits. Who knows?
      Chess has a tremendous number of moves, so I am not sure how it can be played out. Just like yesteryear, the elite GMs may have to start playing openings heretofore considered unplayable and perhaps discover they aren’t! There is always a new generation moving into the top 50 players at an ever-younger age who, hopefully, will be the new ultra-hypermoderns and opening theoreticians of their day and they will discover resources in what are today considered ‘unplayable’ openings.
      In any case, to me it does not matter what happens because until I gain several hundred rating points, chess is still a mystery.
Reprehensible Conduct

      Correspondence opponents who refuse to move in lost positions (sometimes I have noticed they have logged in and moved in other games), Internet opponents who abandon games, badger opponents, make cheating accusations, call their opponents names, swear, you name it...they remind me of people who write crude stuff on toilet walls.
      According to an Associated Press report of several years ago the fast-paced, high-tech existence has taken a toll on manners in society. From road rage to high decibel cell-phone conversations, people behaving badly has become the hallmark of the world.
      Nearly 70 percent questioned in an Associated Press poll said people are ruder than they were 20 or 30 years ago although more city dwellers report bad manners, 74 percent, than do people in rural areas, 67 percent. The generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s are now parents who don’t stress the importance of manners.
      We live in a world of sulking athletes and boorish celebrities, etc. and the media glorifies their crude behavior. Nowadays many people have little respect for authority and always want blame somebody else because whatever happens, it’s always somebody else’s fault. So why would one think chessplayers would be any different?      

New LSS “World Champion”

      Lechenicher SchachServer has announced the new 2011 LSS World Champion is Sinisa Loinjak of Croatia who has won it for the second time, the first being in 2009. 
      Looking at the crosstable the first thing I noticed was that out of 15 players, three withdrew and did not finish the tournament. Not counting the games of those three players and the two games remaining (which have no bearing on the standings), 142 games were played. Total decisive games…11, or less than 8 percent!! Loinjack accounted for 4 of those wins and the games among the top five finishers were all drawn.
      Engines are, of course responsible for this situation. I was reading a message board the other day and one guy was asking about the best computer and software to play chess…his budget? $12,000.
      If you want to play correspondence chess these days your choices are pretty much limited to: 1) anonymous opponents with meaningless ratings who are using an engine or 2) opponents whose names you do know, have meaningless ratings and who are using an engine. I prefer the latter and I don’t see why I should pay to enter a tournament under these circumstances, so I use a free site that allows engine use…LSS.
      In any case it seems that chess engines are not optimized for correspondence play. Of course, if you expect to get a high rating in modern CC play, you have to start at a high rating because it is extremely difficult to defeat another engine unless you are keenly aware of how engines work.
      My understanding is engines prune a lot of moves out of the search tree and sometimes they are good moves but that only would become apparent at deeper search depths.
      Under normal circumstances as long as a move does not lose it’s good enough, but for these really highly rated CC players that’s not enough. One problem is that often times an engine move shows an evaluation score and because it has pruned some moves, it doesn’t make any difference whether it searches 2 hours or 2 days, it’s not going to change its evaluation.
       In CC these is no such thing as two moves with an equal evaluation score; one move simply must be preferred over another. The result is that if you just let an engine run and run then play its recommendation, guys like Loinjack will beat you. The thing is they somehow manage to get positions engines don’t understand and they have the resources and the patience to keep searching.
       One high level CC player noted that you must use tablebases and gave one example where his opponent’s mistake was using the wrong engine for the relevant position. He then went on to explain how, using three engines, he basically strung together a composite of their moves. He added that, ideally, you would want to examine at least ten different alternatives and each one needs to be evaluated thoroughly.
       Capablanca complained about the draw death of chess back in his day and proposed a variant in the 1920's. He believed chess would be exhausted in the near future, that games between masters would always end in draws. Fischer made the same claim. He believed the chess openings have been analyzed to the point that games are decided by opening preparation alone and that engines and databases also contributed to the death of chess.  Indeed opening research wins games, both in OTB GM play and top level CC play.

      Look at the following table:

first 15 world CC championships

white wins 37%, black wins 24% draws = 39%

1996-2007 championships

white wins 27%, black won 12% draws = 61%

2008-present championships

average percentage of draws exceeds 80 percent.

      Upsets. In the first 15 world CC championships, upsets happened in about 10 percent of the games. Between 1996 and 2007 the percentage was down to 4% and since then it’s 1%.
      Playing on LSS even at my level shows how difficult it is to win: Wins: 23.7% Losses: 23.0% Draws: 53.3% Compare these to a Senior IM I played a while back: Wins: 20.5% Losses: 19.9% Draws: 59.6%
      Now, compare these to Loinjak: Wins: 51.1% Losses: 00.0% Draws: 48.9% He clearly knows something about using chess engines I (and a lot of others) don’t!

Hotness and Mate-O-Meter

      I have known from the beginning that Fritz 12 has a panel showing a “Hotness meter and a Mate-O-Meter” but have never paid any attention to it. Recently, out of curiosity, I decided to investigate. A complete explanation by Fritz Guru Steve Lopez can be found on Youtube HERE.
      These two meters are supposed to help you “develop a sense for recognizing critical game positions” by alerting you to sharp tactical situations or major positional changes. These gauges oscillate depending on the sharpness and mating possibilities of the position. The gauges measure the potential that something important is about to happen.
      The Mate-O-Meter tells you how much danger the Kings are in and the Hotness meter rises when the position enters a sharp tactical phase or, in some cases, it measures changes in positional features like material exchanges, the win of material or strong or weak positional features like pawn positions or piece mobility. There’s also a small light that glows red when the engine is in the process of making evaluations and when the bulb goes out, the engine has completed the evaluation.
      The exact measurements aren’t so important as the movement of the meters. If you see the needles rising there are tactical opportunities, positional motifs or mate threats on the horizon. Checks and captures move the needle up. If the needles are falling the position is becoming more stable.
       I was curious to see how this might work in one of my own games so played through the game below which was played many years ago against a veteran USCF Expert. I resigned the game because I saw ghosts and somehow thought I was completely busted. Immediately after the game, a visiting master from Chicago who had been watching the game, pointed out things weren’t as bad as I thought and I could have played on. It’s been 51 years since I played this game and I’m still upset about having resigned too soon!
      The Mate-O-Meter never moved until I played 17…Qc7 threatening a mate in one and after that it dropped back to about 1.0 and stayed there. As for the Hot meter, starting with my 11…d5?!, it bounced around between 3.5 to 8.2 for the rest of the game. I guess what it was telling me was that the position was complicated, but I already knew that. The meters are fun to watch, but personally, I didn’t find them to be much help.

Play Online Chess

[Event "Cincinnati Open"]
[Site "?"]
[Date "1962.??.??"]
[Round "?"]
[White "RH"]
[Black "Tartajubow"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteELO "?"]
[BlackELO "?"]

%Created by Caissa's Web PGN Editor
{Sicilian Dragon: Classical System} 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6
5. Nc3 g6 6. f4 Bg7 7. Be2 O-O 8. Be3 Nc6 9. Nb3 a6 10. a4 Be6 11. O-O d5 {
Unbooked and bad. Either 11...Rc8 or 11...Na5 were correct} 12. f5 Bc8 13.
exd5 Nb4 14. fxg6 hxg6 15. Bc4 Bf5 16. Rc1 {I just can't seem to get the P
back!} 16... Ng4 17. Bc5 Qc7 {With this mate threat the Mate-O-Meter is at 5
and the Hotness Meter is in the red zone at 8.} 18. d6 {Squelching the mate
threat. Now, as was pointed out to me after the game, 18...exd6! equalizes.
After 19. Qxd6! Qxd6 20.Bxd6 Rfc8 chances are equal.} 18... Qc6 {Now white
should have played 19.dxe7 after which I renew the mate threat with 19.Qc7
forcing 20.g3. My R is under attack by the P on e7 and if I play 20...Rfe8
then 21.Bxf7+ wins because if I take the B my own B is pinned allowing 22.Qxg4
and white has won a piece not to mention being two Ps up.} 19. h3 Ne3 20.
Bxe3 Qxc4 21. dxe7 Rfe8 22. Rf4 Qe6 23. Bf2 Nc6 24. g4 Qe5 25. Qf3 Be6 26.
Nc5 Rxe7 27. Re1 {White i clearly better, but it was still too soon to resign.
The Mate-O-Meter is at 0. 5, but the Hotness Meter is in the yellow at 7.0.}
1-0

I Need Another Hobby

      When I was a kid there was one summer when I used my dad’s workshop to make bird houses which I then sold to old ladies all over the neighborhood.  Woodworking looks like a lot of fun and I never miss watching Norm on the New Yankee Workshop.

      What I would like to do is combine woodworking with chess and make a chess set.  I found a few sites that tell you how to do it but I really didn’t like any of the designs.  If I made a set it would have to be a Staunton-like design and after considerable web surfing , I  did find this set and I think the knights could be modified somewhat:

 

 

LINK to site

 

      I’d really like to give this a go but there are a couple of snags.  One is time.  I have a ton of work to do outside this summer because my yard has a moss infestation and it all has to be dug up by hand and the lawn reseeded.  Then the garden has to be put in and some general house repairs need to be made.
      I would also have to buy a couple of thousand dollars worth of woodworking equipment and convince the wife to park her car outside because the garage is the only place we have to set up a workshop. Wood!  Has anybody priced wood lately?!  All this brings me back to reality and I’ll have to be satisfied with what one of my book review Blog readers informed was my "fake" Zagreb set, but he did provide THIS link to an intersting site.



The Reshevsky-Fischer Connection

      After Fischer returned to chess in 1970 to play in the USSR vs. the Rest of the World tournament in Belgrade Reshevsky was his teammate and when Reshevsky’s game against Smyslov had been adjourned Fischer sat down with Reshevsky to analyze the position. This was the first time in years that Fischer had had a friendly relationship with Reshevsky, the man whom Fischer had once proclaimed to be one of the ten greatest players in history.
      Known in his youth as “Shmulik der vunderkind,” Reshevsky had developed a relationship with Rabbi Yoseph Yitzchak Schneersohn a Chabad-Lubavitch Rebbe. He once asked for a blessing from the Rebbe, who agreed on the condition that Reshevsky study Torah daily which Reshevsky dutifully did for the rest of his life. In the years before his marriage, Reshevsky had developed a relationship with Rabbi Schneersohn and this bond was greatly strengthened during the years following his marriage when Reshevsky lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn which was the same neighborhood where Rabbi Schneersohn lived the last ten years of his life.
      In 1982, at age 70, when Reshevsky was considering retiring from professional chess he approached Rabbi Schneersohn and asked for advice. According to Rabbi Dovid Zaklikowski, Rabbi Schneersohn told Reshevsky that playing chess was his “way of fulfilling the commandment of sanctifying God’s name” and suggested that he should not yet retire.
      In 1984, at 72 years old, Reshevsky tied for first place at the Reykjavik Open. After his victory, Reshevsky received a congratulatory letter from the Rebbe, which ended:

“P.S. The following lines may appear strange, but I consider it my duty not to miss the opportunity to bring it to your attention. You are surely familiar with the life story of Bobby Fischer, of whom nothing has been heard in quite some time. Unfortunately, he did not appear to have the proper Jewish education, which is probably the reason for his being so alienated from the Jewish way of life or the Jewish people. However, being a Jew, he should be helped by whomever possible. I am writing to you about this since you are probably better informed about him than many other persons, and perhaps you may find some way in which he could be brought back to the Jewish fold, either through your personal efforts, or in some other way.”

      When Reshevsky received the letter, he was pleased that the Rebbe had chosen him for a special task despite the difficulty it entailed. Fischer was a paranoid recluse and at time was living in Los Angeles. Not long after receiving the letter Reshevsky was in Los Angeles for a tournament and the first thing he did upon arrival was phone Fischer and related the Rebbe's request. It must have been something of a surprise when Fischer, who usually did not receive visitors, immediately agreed to see Reshevsky. Their meeting lasted three hours, during which Fischer asked many serious questions about Judaism. According to Nenad Nesh Stankovic, Fischer’s personal assistant in Yugoslavia during his match with Spassky and author of The Greatest Secrets of Bobby Fischer, Fischer believed in some sort of cosmic higher  power, but was not a religious man and so is likely his questions were of an intellectual nature.
      Fischer's bizarre anti-Semitic rants were all the more weird because Fischer was Jewish by birth. Fischer started railing against the Jews as a young man and for whatever reason, he was filled with pure, unadulterated hatred for the Jews. What makes that odd is he was raised by a Jewish mother and was surrounded by Jews in Brooklyn as well as having played chess with many Jews. This makes it even odder that he would so readily agree to meet with Reshevsky.
      As far as I know, the only comment that Reshevsky ever made concerning his discussions with Fischer was, “He has his views. I have mine.” Reshevsky could be a booger at the chess board, but he had his priorities in life straight.

RIP Robert Byrne

 

I was saddened to hear that GM Byrne, 84, passed away at his home in Ossining, NY, Friday.  I met Byrne at the 1974 US Championship and was pleased to find him a most affable person.  He was a fixture in US chess for many, many years; he will be missed.  Byrne’s NewYork Time Obituary

Booby Fischer Material

I recently came across a site called Orwell Today that has lots of material from Fischer’s second match with Spassky through his time in Iceland:  radio interviews, rants, articles etc. for anybody who wants to go back and visit those times.

Speaking of prize money...

      When Bobby Fischer won the world championship in 1972 his prize money was $250,000. That doesn’t sound like much, but in 2013 dollars it amounts to about 1.3 million. Fischer’s $250k exceeded the total prizes for all previous title matches held since 1886. By contrast, Spassky’s prize money for winning the world championship just three years earlier amounted to $1400…not quite $9000 in today’s dollars. Curiously, in 1889 when Steinitz and Chigorin met for the world championship, Steinitz pocketed the equivalent of $50,000.
       The First American Congress, held in 1857 had the equivalent of about $7200. Morphy won but turned down the money. Instead, he accepted a silver pitcher, four goblets, and a silver tray. Prior to the First American Chess Congress, Charles Stanley was considered the U. S. Champion but was near penniless because of his drinking problem. After the the tournament Morphy played a casual match against Stanley at odds of Pawn and move and won easily: +4 -1 =0. Morphy gave his prize money to Stanley. Actually he gave it to Stanley’s wife because he feared Stanley would have drunk it all up.
      The winner of the Tarrasch-Mieses match in 1916 got a half-pound of butter. No doubt this was because the war was on and butter was a real treat. In Berlin a tournament winner received given a keg of schmaltz herring.

      At a rapid tournament in Breslau in 1925, part of the first prize was enough silk to make six shirts. Nimzovich, taking it for granted that he would win, found out everything he could about the silk even before the tournament began. As it happened, however, Mieses defeated him in the first round and went on to win the tournament and the silk.
      In 1889 Steinitz defended his title against Mikhail Chigorin which was played in Havana the total purse for the players was only $1,150 ($29,000 today), the smallest prize fund of any world championship match.
      When I began tournament play in weekenders in the 1960’s most class players played for a cheap trophy or a book. First prize usually ranged from $50-100 based with a typical entry fee of around $10. In today’s dollars the EF would have amounted to $60-70 and that $50 prize amounted to about $360 today. I can remember playing in one tournament in downtown Cleveland Ohio and meeting a friend in the lobby right after he had checked in and he was upset at the hotel rate at the Holiday Inn…$33 a night or about $192 today!   
      Probably the best story about prize money was Reshevsky’s about how one time he won a tournament (the Western Open in the 1930s?) and his ‘prize’ was a few kind words!