Alfonso Ferriz Plays the Muzio Gambit

     Alfonso Ferriz, an engineer by profession (born 1922 - died 2009), began his chess career in the 1940s and was was one of the most prominent Mexican players of of his day.   Besides being a tireless player he was also a promoter and educator of chess.  In his later years Ferriz promoted "smart drugs" and became expert on the subject. He had an interesting opinion on the use of alcohol. He believed it kills millions of neurons and pointed out that Alekhine was drinker and that was the reason lost the world championship, but he recovered after he stopped for two years.  Ferriz claimed that showed that the brain, if one stops drinking, will recover in two years. 
     Ferriz was born in Mexico City and studied chemical engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Administrative Sciences at the National Polytechnic Institute. He won the championship of Mexico City eight times and in 1966 he founded the Club Mexico. With his son Alfonso Ferriz Salinas he created the National School of Chess. He also served as coach of the Mexican Olympic team on three occasions. Coming from a family of chess players, he started playing at the age of eight. 
     He collected chess books and his library eventually grew to over 5,000 books making it the largest in Latin America. His favorites were a book on tactics by Kurt Richter, the collection of Alekhine's best games and a book on tactics by Fred Reinfeld. His favorite players were Alekhine, Tahl and Bronstein and his love of tactics showed in his play.
     Once, when asked why there were so few women chess players, he based his reply on Reuben Fine's thesis: the goal is to mate the King and that represents (for men only I guess) killing his father. Is that something that is psychologically foreign to women?  Anyway, Ferriz claimed Laszlo Polgar, instead of teaching chess as a battle to the death by killing the king, taught his daughters to view chess as art and not as a struggle for life or death. The result was they became great players. 
     He believed a chess player peaked at 30 years old but could maintain their rating, provided they continued to study, up into their fifties assuming their health remained good. After the age of sixty one's ability would naturally start to decline. 
     In the following game the tactical complications were enormous and black managed to reach a very unbalanced position in the ending, but the manner in which Ferriz wove a mating net against the black K is very instructive.
 

William Lombardy's Legal Struggles

I just ran across some articles on Lombardy's eviction.
From Lombardy's Blog...
There is even a GoFundMe account…
Back in April of 2010 Kevin Spraggett did a nice post on Lombardy. 

Apparently Lombardy is not alone. British veteran master Leonard Barden faced a similar problem, but I have no additional information on his situation.

Carmine Nigro, Chess Teacher, Mentor, Band Leader, Stockbroker, Electronic Genius and Golfer

     Carmine Nigro (January 2, 1910 – August 16, 2001 at age 91) is probably best known as the first chess teacher Bobby Fischer had, but other than that he seems not too well known.
     Nigro, who died in a hospice in Peachtree City, Georgia., first met the 8-year old Fischer at a chess exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York in 1951 where Max Pavey was giving a simul with Fischer at one of the boards. Nigro was president of the Brooklyn Chess and Checkers Club and noticed Fischer after he quickly lost his game and burst into tears. Years later Fischer denied that he had cried, but soon after the exhibition he became a pupil of Nigro who was a strong Expert or low-Master. 
     Carmine Domenico Nigro was the second of three sons in a poor family and when he was 14, his parents could no longer afford to take care of him so dropped out of school and left home. For a time, he lived with an older brother and they studied music together with Nigro playing the saxophone and clarinet. At that time he began to frequent the Brooklyn Chess and Checkers Club where he played card games.  Sometime his late 20s a master who was visiting the club lost some bets to Nigro while playing bridge and instead of paying him off in cash, the master gave him chess lessons. Nigro became a frequent competitor in local tournaments and his name frequently popped up in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in connection with speed tournaments. 
     In the late 1940s Nigro started a band, calling it Tommy Little and His Orchestra. His son wasn't sure where the name came from but thought the “little” part probably referred to Nigro's 5-foot 3-inch height. The band usually played in the Asbury, New Jersey area and was moderately successful. 
     Fischer quickly became a fixture at the Nigros' home and over the next three years he was there at least once a week for a lesson, spending Saturdays with the Nigros and then going to Manhattan with Nigro on Sundays to play chess in the park. Later, Master John W. Collins began tutoring Fischer who began spending less and less time with Nigro until finally in 1956, Nigro moved his family to Florida and lost contact with Fischer. Nigro left a lasting impression on Fischer who dedicated his book, Bobby Fischer's Games of Chess, to him, writing in the forward, "Mr. Nigro was possibly not the best player in the world, but he was a very good teacher." 
     Nigro's son Bill recalled, "Dad recognized he was a kid who excelled at chess with little pushing. He spent every weekend at our house for several years. He was an eccentric kid - he so much loved to win, he would throw the pieces across the room if he lost. I would play a game or two with Fischer, then I was ready to go play outside. He stayed with Dad the whole day." 
     Eventually Nigro and his wife decided he needed a more stable source of income, so he became a stockbroker. Nigro moved to Miami in 1956 which is when he got seriously involved in golf. His son Bill said, "Dad was a perfectionist and always wanted to be the best he could at whatever it was. There was a park near where we lived. He loved to fool around with his short game so much he had me take our lawnmower and mow a little green so he could improve his shot making. Every morning before work and every afternoon after work, he was out there in the park, hitting shots to this makeshift green." 
     When Nigro wasn't practicing his putting during the day, he was practicing golf at night at a driving range owned by Sam Snead's older brother, Homer. Speaking of Nigro Homer said, "He was an electronic genius." Homer's nephew, Jack, explained, "One summer I went to stay with Uncle Homer and brought a new CB radio kit with me. The whole thing was disassembled, and it was supposed to take 150 hours to put together if you followed all the instructions. I went fishing one morning, came back later that day and he had built it and had it working in one day. He never looked at the instructions." 
     It wasn't long before Snead had Nigro giving golf lessons at night because, according to son Bill, Nigro was a natural-born teacher, noting his father a Florida junior champion among his pupils. "He felt it was his duty to share knowledge to help somebody improve in whatever it was they were doing. He really had the ability to teach beyond what he was capable of doing, because he could visualize and had such a terrific mind. He could play chess blindfolded, sitting in another room calling out the moves in multiple games and play just as well."

1943 US Speed Title and Bobby Fischer's Teeth

      Today blitz games are played with a clock, but in the old days it was played with a 10-second timer and when the referee sounded a bell, you moved. 
     The US Lightening Championship of 1943 was played in the Capital Hotel in New York City and Reuben Fine scored 11 wins to retain his US Lightening Championship title by defeating Reshevsky in the last round. In the preliminaries and finals Fine's record was an impressive +20 -0 =2. In the final round Reshevsky had two draws so needed the win to tie, but Fine forced his resignation in 38 moves after getting a strong bind on the d-file. Even then Fine's advantage was only a slight one, but Reshevsky, rather than exchanging heavy pieces to lessen Fine's pressure, played a couple of passive moves and allowed Fine to increase his advantage and Reshevsky's position soon collapsed.  See game.
     One of the more exciting games was Fine's crush of Dr. Harold Sussman. Sussman (born September 15, 1911, died October 9 2004 at the age of 93) was a dentist and master from Brooklyn who had a Bobby Fischer connection. 
     In 1952 the 8-year old Fischer who had been studying with Carmine Nigro at the latter's house on Saturdays played in a match with Nigro's students against a team of kids coached by Sussman. Fischer won his first game and drew his second against Nigro's 10-year old son Raymond. Dr. Sussman was also an amateur photographer and took several photos that later became well known. 
     Dr. Sussman also became Bobby's dentist. Sussman said of Fischer, “He had a great set of teeth.” Like a few other things about Fischer, that changed later in life. He went from being a dapper dresser to looking like a homeless man, seldom changing his clothes or removing his baseball cap. And his teeth...he went from having a great set to having hollow, rotten ones with a few missing. 
     Sometime in the early 1980s Fischer told a long time friend, master Ronald Gross, he had been to a dentist to get all the fillings removed from his teeth. He told Gross that the KGB could bug them or use the metal to send damaging rays into his brain. 
     It wasn't long after that that Gross talked briefly to a local reporter, but didn't mention Fischer's obscene rant about “kikes and Jew bastards” and the “myth of the Holocaust” or his theory on radio transmissions through dental fillings, but like everyone both before and after him, because he had talked to the media about Fischer, Gross was unfriended. Fischer also had a low opinion of, among other groups of people, doctors and dentists. 

Final Standings: 
1) Fine 11.0-0.0
2) Reshevsky 9.0-2.0 
3) Kupchik 7.0-4.0 
4) Kashdan 6.0-5.0 
5) Green 5.5-5.5 
6-7) Heitner and Horowitz 5.0-6.0 
8-9) Seidman and Sussman 4.5-6.5 
10) Adams 3.5-7.5 
11) Feldman 2.85-8.5 
12) Schwatrz 2.5-8.5
 

Free Book - Storming Fortresses: A Political History Of Chess In The Soviet Union, 1917-1948

     Actually it's not a book, but a 422-page pdf thesis submitted in 2013 by Michael Hudson of the University of California that makes fascinating reading either online, or it can be downloaded.  LINK
     In addition to chess books and the Cleveland Public Library's John G. White Collection the author also was able to access private collections through the director of the St. Petersburg Chess Club. And, through a friend who is an official at the Lenin Library, he was allowed to access parts of the collection that was closed to the public at the time. It's a fascinating look behind the scenes into Russia's rise to the top in chess. Just look at the chapter titles:

Chess in Pre-revolutionary Russia 
Karl Marx's Chess Problem 
Lenin's Game 
Ilyn-Zhenevsky and the Origins of Soviet Chess 
The First Soviet Championship 
The Struggle for the Soul of Soviet Chess 1920-1924 
The Spectacle of 1925 
Retrenchment and Expansion Soviet Chess and the Workers' Chess International 
Botvinnik: The New Soviet (Chess) Man 
The Classical Land of Chess Soviet Chess and the Great Patriotic War 
Storming the Fortress 
Conclusion

Odds and Ends

Odds and ends are defined as a group of small objects of different types which are not very valuable or important. This expression may have originated as “odd ends” in the mid-1500s meaning short leftovers of some material such as lumber or cloth. It acquired its present form and meaning by the mid-1700s. That's what's here...just some miscellaneous things that don't deserve a whole post by themselves. 

Old Time Radio Programs
What do old time radio programs have to do with chess? Nothing except listening to them can be a nice break. I just listened to Blair of the Mounties, a Story of the Northwest Mounted Police that was broadcast in 1938. Dumbdotcom is an entertaining site for lots of stuff besides old radio programs. They also have other stuff like online games, viral and music videos, etc. There are some broken links though. Like, I couldn't play the game where you have to pop pimples off a kid's face and the more you can pop in a given time, the higher your score. Too bad...sounds like a lot of fun. How about a really old video of Ellen DeGeneres and a young and very skinny Oprah Winfrey in a rap battle? It was stupid, but then I'm not a fan of Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah or rap. 

Chess Archeology

Chess Archeology has a page devoted to online chess periodicals, both American and foreign, from Google that make for interesting reading. Some samples: American Chess Bulletin 1904-1912, American Chess Journal 1876-1879, British Chess Magazine 1881-1919, Chess Player's Chronicle 1841-1892, City of London Chess Magazine 1875-1876, Deutsche Schachzietung 1846-1922 ...plus many more. You will have to be familiar with descriptive notation, but that should not be a deterrent. If you are of at least below average intelligence you can learn it in 10 minutes. Chess Archeology is an interesting site to browse for a lot of other stuff, too. Photographs, newspaper clipping, articles, etc. It is maintained by Jacques N. Pope. Pope is the author of the definitive work on Pillsbury, Harry Nelson Pillsbury, American Champion. 

Chess and Religion 
The Studies in Comparative Religion site has an article titled The Symbolism of Chess and here is a blog post asking Should Christians Play Chess?  Then there is an article in The Economist titled Why Chess Upsets Religious Fundamentalists. And, finally, unless you are a lot more scholarly than I am, there is a 79 page pdf dissertation sure to bore you titled Queening: Chess and Women in Medieval France. 

Chess and Politics 
Redacted, the National Security Archive and an excerpt titled Henry Kissinger Jokes about Making a Pawn of Bobby Fischer. It's an excerpt from a taped conversation with Time Magazine’s Diplomatic Editor trying to get the scoop on Kissinger’s famous call to Fischer. Kissinger joked about the Fischer-Spassky match, saying he really just wanted Fischer to play so he could have an opportune cover to meet with Vietnamese Communist Party leader Le Duc Tho.  Kissinger also recommended that Nixon not invite Spassky to the White House because there were rumors that he was going to defect and he thought the government should not risk getting involved in that. 

World of Chess Hall of Fame and American Presidents. Which presidents played chess.

Humphrey Bogart Chess Hoax 
     Most everybody knows actor Humphrey Bogart was an accomplished player. The story of how he came to be one is interesting. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Depression that followed forced Bogart to look to Hollywood for gainful employment after work began to dry up in theaters in New York. His first attempt at stardom failed and he returned to New York, where in the early 1930s he still remained largely unemployed. Hustling chess fulfilled the need to make a few dollars. In New York City parks and places like Coney Island and Times Square, he played chess for fifty cents a game to supplement his income. Later he drew Reshevsky in a simultaneous exhibition and at one time was a director of the USCF and he was an active member of the Californian State Chess Association in the mid 1940s. 
     One story goes that Bogart was stopped from playing correspondence chess with US soldiers in veteran hospitals because US authorities thought Bogart was sending secret codes via mail. In the book by Bryce Avery, Correspondence Chess in America, he wrote that according to an article by Ben Schiller that appeared in The Chess Correspondent it never happened. 
     Schiller was stationed at Kingman Army Airfield and had visited Hollywood where he met Herman Steiner and had slept at Steiner's house. Schiller suggested to Steiner, who was friends with a lot of Hollywood stars, producers and executives that he contact Bogart's manager and put forth the idea that perhaps Bogart might be interested in playing correspondence games with soldiers. Bogart was presented with the suggestion, but he wasn't interested. 
     As a publicity gimmick Bogart's manager reported to the press that Bogart was playing postal games with the troops to help boost their morale. His manager also added that Bogart was playing almost 200 games! The Times published the story which included a photo of Schiller playing a game against Bogart with the caption that they were finishing a game that had been started by mail. According to the post newspaper the game was actually played on a movie set.  The related story that Bogart was investigated by the FBI after one of his postal chess cards with descriptive notation was thought to contain some kind of code wasn't true either.

Stockfish and Komodo 
     My preferred chess engine rating list is the CEGT 40/40 list because all engines use a general book up to 12 moves, 3-4-5 piece EGTB, the time control is 40 moves in 40 minutes, not blitz, and they run on the same computer, an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ (2.4 GHz). On that list Stockfish 7 64-bit 4 CPU is one rating point ahead of Komodo 9.2 64-bit 4 CPU. The other two recent Komodo releases are next in line and are 20 points or less behind...all are essentially the same rating, but in individual games Stockfish holds a big lead over Komodo in head to head competition. Houdini 4 is about 90 points back and it's been smashed by both Stockfish and Komodo. 
     The engines have different strengths. Komodo is best at evaluating middlegame positions accurately once the tactics are resolved. Stockfish seems to be best in the endgame and in seeing very deep tactics. Houdini is the best at blitz and at seeing tactics quickly. This is why it's important to have both engines, or at least one other one to be used in conjunction with Stockfish. 
     When analyzing the following position with Stockfish 6 64-bit POPCNT after several minutes its recommendation was 18.Rab1, but that move makes no sense to my untrained eye. I was thinking that 18.Nxc6 looks reasonable and when I switched to Komodo, it suggested 18.Qf2 with 18.Rac1 and 18.Rab1 all being evaluated at 0.00. As for my 18.Nxc6, it was also evaluated at 0.00. 

     So, it appears that this position is dead equal. Engines, especially Stockfish, seem to have the trait that when there is no clear cut “best” move...they make mysterious R moves. Stockfish is my main analysis engine, but when I see it making R moves that don't seem to make sense, I always switch to Komodo 8 to see if there is another plausible move. Here it would seem that from the human perspective trading off the misplaced N on b4 for the B is a reasonable move. In this position though it did not seem to matter which of the four moves were made as Shootout results were all draws.The point is that if you see an engine, especially Stockfish suggesting odd looking R moves then it's a good idea to investigate further.

Early U.S. Postal Chess

     Postal chess was played in the U.S. before the Civil War, but it was not until the introduction of the penny post card that it became popular. A New Jersey Congressman and banker named John Lee, who later claimed to have been unaware that such a thing existed in Europe, gets the credit for the beginning of the penny post cards when they were introduced on May 1, 1873. In the 1870s regular postage was three cents per letter. 
     In 1890 Steinitz and Chogorin got into a dispute over openings that had been played in their match and a couple of telegraph games, both of which Steinitz lost, were played to settle the matter. During the next decade Steinitz published a few postal games in his International Chess Magazine, including a few that he had played...for a fee, of course. 
     Around that same time Pillsbury also played a 5-game postal match against Charles Cochrane and in 1892 he played a 9-game postal match against John F. Barry. After his success at Hastings in 1895 Pillsbury was a national hero and in a meeting in Chicago in January of 1896 a group of players formed the Pillsbury National Correspondence Chess Association (PCCA).
     The original PCCA had 50 members spread around the country and and began its first tournament, the Grand National, in 1897. They divided the country up into eight sections and the entrants were divided up into round robins. Winners got a bronze medal and then played for the regional title, winners getting a silver medal. The winners then played in the finals with the winner getting a gold medal. 
     Dr. Otto Meyer of Richmond, Virginia won the first event which was completed in 1897. The club, which charged nominal dues, barely eked out an existence. Then in 1901 the PCCA organized a special Twentieth Century tournament that was easily won by Franklin K. Young with a score of +17 -0 =1! 
     Enter Isaac Rice in 1902. He sponsored a Rice Gambit correspondence tournament with a $250 first prize; that's worth over $6,800 in 2016 dollars! For their fifty cent entry fee (about $13.50 today) the players received entry into a five-player section where they played two games against each opponent, plus, get this, a book with all the latest analysis on the Rice Gambit donated by Rice.
     The tournament began in 1903 with 230 players. After it was all over the winner was Palmer Gunkel Keeney of Newport, Kentucky who scored 10.5-1.5 and pockets $100 (around $2,600) first prize. Keeney (born Mar-25-1877) was a well known amateur of his day and according to the Edo historical rating list he was rated around 2100. OTB the only OTB event he played in that I could locate was the historic 20th Western Chess Association Tournament played in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1919. Edward Lasker won the tournament while Keeney finished tied for 5th-6th with a score of 5.5-4.5. Jackson W. Showalter only managed to finish 4th with a score of 6.5-3.5. 
     The club was not to last much longer though and by late 1906 or early 1906 it just quit holding tournaments. Under a fellow named George Walcott who had finished second behind Keeney the club sputtered and in 1907 it held a few gambit tournaments and in 1908 the club played a correspondence match, which it won, against the British Correspondence Chess Association, but that was it. Walcott, for whatever reason, was unreliable and in 1909 PCCA member Stanley Chadwick started the Correspondence Chess League of Greater New York.
     Here is a game from the Grand National that appeared in William Napier's magazine, Chess Weekly, which, at the time, was edited by a young player, who at the time was an engineering student at Columbia University, named Jose Raoul Capablanca; you may have heard of him.
 

Spassky Interview!!

Chess24 has a must read interview with Boris Spassky: his acrimonious divorce, view of the movie Pawn Sacrifice, opinion of Fischer, Korchnoi and spies.  Great article!

Olga Rubtsova

In the early years

     Olga Nikolaevna Rubtsova (20 August 1909 – 13 December 1994) was a Soviet player and fourth Women's World Chess Champion. 
     Chess was always the favorite game in her family and her father, a professor at a technical institute in Moscow, had a First Category rating during his student years and often played n Moscow tournaments. A First Category rating was equal to around 2000 Elo. 
     During the Moscow 1925 tournament is when he taught Olga to play chess; afterward she attended the tournament and analyzed the games. Not long after that she was invited to play in her school's championship and made a creditable score. After the tournament, with the help of her father, she analyzed the games she had lost and was determined not to repeat the mistakes she made in those games. 
 

In the later years

    At the end of 1926 she scored 7–1 to take first place in the women's division of a large youth tournament sponsored by the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. At the age of 17 in 1927 she made a brilliant showing in the first USSR women's championship where she demonstrated a good understanding of chess and a lot of tactical skill when she won the tournament.  That was the beginning of many tournament successes. Some highlights: Winning the USSR Womens Championship in 1927, 1931, 1937 and 1949. The last coming 22 years after her first title. She won the Women's World Championship in 1956 by defeating Ludmila Rudenk and Elizaveta Bykova in a match-tournament and did much to promote women's chess in the Soviet Union.  Rubtsova was a foundry engineer by profession. 
     She also played correspondence chess, and became first Women's World Correspondence Chess Champion in 1972 (she also finished second in the next championship, only losing the title to Lora Jakovleva on tie-break, and fifth in the one after that). She is the only player, male or female, to become World Champion in both over-the-board and correspondence chess. Her daughter, Elena Fatalibekova, is also a strong player. 
     In the following game U.S. women's champion Mona Mae Karff plays too slowly and instead of seeking counterplay she resorts to defensive moves and ends up getting a sound whipping. 

A Pawn Snatcher Lost His Q But Almost Saved the Game

     When you win the other guy's Q at move ten the rest of the game should be easy...or so you'd think. I played about half a dozen 15 minute games on the Internet the other day against the same opponent and noticed he had a habit...he was a Pawn Snatcher. In all the games I advanced my b-Pawn and offered him a Pawn and in every single one of the games he neglected development in order to grab one or more Pawns. 
     That's not to say he wasn't a decent player. This game is an example...I managed to win his Q in the first 10 moves when he went Pawn hunting, but he put up manly resistance and the Q almost wasn't enough. I had a Q+R+2Ps against his 2R's+B+3Ps and later it was reduced to a Q+P vs R+P. 
     To make matters worse, at the end I was down to less than two minutes and was about to offer a draw. I doubt he would have accepted though because he had 4 or 5 minutes left so all I could do is keep checking because I couldn't think of a plan. Fortunately (for me) he fell into a mate.   It was a close call even though I had won his Q!
 

Being a Snot

    In the recent issue of Chess Life a reader told this Walter Browne story. About 30 years ago Browne was giving a simultaneous in which the reader had one of the boards and a kid about 10 years old was sitting next to him. Late in the exhibition Browne arrived at the kid's board and made his move whereupon the kid told him he couldn't make that move because he was in check. Browne stared at the board then “with one majestic sweep of his hand sent the kid's pieces flying then moved on to the next board.” The writer told the nonplussed kid that he'd remember beating Walter Browne the rest of his life. I saw Browne a few times at tournaments and he always looked very nervous, like he was ready to blow a gasket, but really? Against a 10-year old kid? Why be such a snot? 
     Elizabeth Vicary, a US lady FM, once wrote an article where she said, “Chessplayers are very tolerant. I say this because so unbelievably many chessplayers have unbearably annoying board manners/habits/smell/loudness of breathing and/or compulsively vibrate the table with their legs, yet it seems like I’m the only person who ever says anything. Everybody else is a complete saint. I really do not know how they do it.” Read more on Ralph Ginsburg's article.
     Are there no nice Grandmasters? These guys come to mind.

Edit:  I forgot one...this guy:

Edmar Mednis