World Champion…Who Cares?

       I have to admit that I haven’t closely followed the world championships since the days of Kasparov.  There was the time they had those stupid knockout “championships” and now it’s no longer determined by classical games, but rather blitz. 
      In the recent Kazan matches Alexander Grischuk (a late replacement for Magnus Carlsen) adopted a strategy that was disgusting. He believed he couldn’t beat the better players in classical chess so used what GM Ian Rogers called “poker strategy.”  Grischuk threw in his hand if the cards didn’t favor him…meaning he agreed to short draws with White if he felt he didn’t have a clear advantage. He didn’t even try to win in the classical or blitz games. He counted on winning with tiebreakers. He freely admitted he couldn't beat his opponents from an equal position so, as Rogers put it, he "avoided dragons rather than slaying them."  So this is what world championship chess has been reduced to.  Rapid games and tiebreaks.
      Supposedly the idea of finishing all games in one session was to eliminate adjournments and the use of engines.  That’s nonsense.  What’s the difference between having a gaggle of GM seconds analyze an adjourned position or using an engine?  None. In fact I would sooner rely on the analysis of two or three GM’s than any engine.  In amateur chess, engine use for analyzing adjournments is no problem at all.  Let’s face it.  Average players can’t remember 10 moves of their favorite opening let alone a whole lot of lines generated by Fritz.  No.  It’s about money.  Organizers want chess speeded up so they can get sponsors and everybody can make some money.
       Just picking a tournament at random, the Atlantic Open held this month in Washington, DC has an entry fee of $120 and most of the prize money goes to players rated under master.  First is $2000 and class prizes are between $400 and $1500.  Even a player rated under 1300 can win $1200. 
       It used to be everybody played the same schedule and at the same time limit.  There weren’t any accelerated parings.  In those days with my lowly mid-1600 rating there were many times I was paired against a master in the first round.  OK, so it was an automatic defeat, but there was the thrill of playing a master and if I was having a good day, making him work for his point.  I remember the pride after one defeat when my opponent, rated 2202, asked my rating and when I told him 1660, he said, “Really?  I thought you were about 2000.”  Prizes?  We class players were playing for a cheap trophy or a book. 
       GM Nicholas Rossolimo once complained that he couldn’t get a book of his best games published because he wasn’t scoring points.  When he pointed out how many games he had played with Q-sacs and how many brilliancy prizes he had won, he was told, “Who cares? You didn’t score a lot of points.”  Rossolimo was a far cry from guys like Gata Kamsky and Yasser Seirawan before him.  Kamsky has announced that if he isn’t world champion by the time he’s 40, he’s retiring.  Apparently chess is not enjoyable for these guys; it's about the money...nothing but the money. OK, so maybe no big international events, but why not a weekend Swiss just for fun?  Apparently because there is no money in it especially if you probably have to split the prize fund with a bunch of other GM’s.  At least Kamsky is on record as stating that in the Kazan matches he decided to play for a win in every game whether it was rapid or classical because the spectators were watching and he can’t play like Grischuck or Kramnik.  For that we can be thankful even if it cost him a shot at the world title.

New pdf Book

I have a new pdf book (58 pages) of Grandmaster games ranging from 1950 to 2002.  These games have excellent annotations by masters and GM’s and their notes are very instructive.  As a supplement I have also included my tips for improvement and move selection that are based on the teaching of former World Correspondence Champion C.J.S. Purdy. Download 



Good Engine Analysis is an Art

...but for most of it’s more like a kindergartner’s crayon drawing.

I use Fritz 12 with the Houdini 1.5a x64 bit version.  If you have a single core processor you will have to use the 1.5a w32 bit version.   So far I have not found any engine that consistently defeats Houdini and the Fritz 12 engine does not even come close.

Opening books really do not matter because for correspondence play or analysis I use a database. There are many good commercial and free DB’s available, but I have always used my own which consists of about 3.5 million games.  The main thing is to make sure you keep it updated.  For this you can use a site like The Week inChess to download new games every week.

I also use the DB that contains all the games ever played at the now defunct InternationalEmail Chess Group because it contains openings used by some of the world’s top CC players and their games are good models to follow. I don’t search for my own opening innovations like most top level CC players because I’m not one…I wisely rely on their research!  Openings will need to be solid mainline openings and not dubious gambits.  Successful CC usually means winning in the ending and to do that you are best advised to play positional chess.

You should set the hash on the maximum Ram you can and give the engine plenty of time to select a move.  Then, as I have pointed out in previous posts, check the analysis!

Houdini can use the Gaviota End Game Table Base which can be found at Gaviotachessengine but I never use it.  I prefer to check potential endings at the Shredder Endgame Database. The EGTB access is very slow and if you do choose to use it download time can run 30 to 80 hours and at least 50 GB of hard disk space. Should you choose to download them you can interrupt at any time and when you start again, the program knows at what point you stopped and it continues from there.

The latest issue of Chess Life had an interesting interview with CCGM Stephen Ham. Ham stated in the interview that his chess tends to be technical with an emphasis on long range planning and his wins are usually the result of the accumulation of small advantages resolved in the ending.  When analyzing with an engine he investigates positions that interest him and not the engine.  He added that (strong) players know which lines are worth looking at and which are not.  He also added that he relies on his own evaluation of the position and not the engine’s which he claims are often unreliable.  I have heard other very strong players make the same claim. 

One interesting statement he made was that in closed positions with hypermodern strategies (e.g. King’s Indian) engines often play weakly and their evaluations usually favor White which are unreliable and incorrect.  Perhaps this explains why in top level CC you often see a lot of Queen’s Gambit’s and Nimzo-Indians.  He also advised that when playing CC one ought not be influenced by the engine...often his moves were not even in the top ten engine choices.  This is in line with what I heard another CCIM say: The initial search for moves should first be broad, not deep.  Only when one has selected moves that look promising should deep analysis begin. 

For most of us, we enter a game into our engine, let it analyze at 10 seconds per move and call the result “analysis.” But, whether one is playing CC on a site where engine use is allowed or simply analyzing games with the idea of improving, serious analysis is time consuming and requires considerable skill.  That’s unfortunate because most of us are looking for an easy way to improve and improve fast. 

Troyis – Knight Tour

 

 

Use a Knight to paint all the white squares on the board as quickly as possible. The faster you are, the more points and better world ranking you will get. As you complete each Knight tour a new board with more squares pops up so it keeps getting harder and harder. You are limited to 30 free minutes a day.  Quite amusing…and frustrating. LINK

Training in chess: A scientific approach

A 24 page research paper by Fernand Gobet & Peter J. Jansen that deals with how players who have already reached about 1800 and would like to reach a higher level of expertise, say, 2400 Elo can do so. Open to debate, but interesting. I guess it’s like anything else, when you get desperate, you’ll try anything!!

Fischer’s Incredible Win Streak

       I was looking through some old issues of Chess Review magazine the other day and came across a couple of articles on Bobby Fischer’s incredible 20 game winning streak starting on December 2, 1970 with a win over the Argentine player, Jorge Rubinetti in the Palma Interzonal.  After defeating Rubinetti, Fischer mowed down Wolfgang Uhlmann, Mark Taimanov, Duncan Suttles, Henrique Mecking, Svetozar Gligoric, Oscar Panno, then scored 6 straight match wins over Taimanov and another 6 straight over Bent Larsen and, finally a win over Tigran Petrosian before he lost the 2^nd game of their match.  He went on to defeat Petrosian, who had a reputation as being one of the toughest players in the world to defeat, by the lopsided score of 6-1/2 - 2-1/2.
      In the Interzonal Fischer posted a score of 18-1/2 – 4-1/2 finishing 3-1/2 points ahead of Robert Heubner, Bent Larsen and Yefim Geller.  It was hardly fair that Fischer’s phenomenal score overshadowed the 21-year old Heubner’s success in the tournament .  Heubner started the tournament a “mere” IM and finished ahead of, Uhlmann, Taimanov (5^th - 6^th), Portisch and Smyslov (7^th- 8^th), Gligoric and Polugayevsky (9^th -10^th), Mecking and Panno (11^th -12^th) followed by, Hort, Ivkov, Minic, Suttles, Reshevsky, Addison, Matulovic, Naranja, Uitumen, Filip, Rubinetti and Jiminez.  Quite a feat!  Here is the game that started it all.  

Fischer’s opponent, Jorge Rubinetti (born 31 March 1945) won the Argentine Championship four times (1971, 1982, 1988, and 1991) and played eight times for Argentina in Chess Olympiads (1968, 1970, 1972, 1974, 1980, 1982, 1988, and 1992). In the 1970’s he was one of Argentina’s top players.

Improve Your Chess-Eat Like a Grandmaster

      An interesting article by Roberto H. Baglione, RD. Departament of Nutrition, National Sport High Performance Center (CeNARD), Buenos Aires, Argentina on the nutritional practices of Grandmasters can be found HERE.

      Investigations carried out by the German Grandmaster Helmut Pfleger, MD, et al. have demonstrated that the elite chess players have comparable physiological parameters in competition as those who practice sports such as shooting, car racing and golf; consequently, chess could be classified as the same category of sport as those according to these criteria. As a result, it will be necessary not to limit preparation to hours of study on the board, but to extend it to a more complete program involving physical training and an adequate nutritional plan for the demands, among others.
      Regardless of what you are doing many investigations have shown that mental concentration can be affected when doing intellectual activities in the morning without having had breakfast previously. The most preferred solid food by Grandmasters included chocolate (80.5 %), fruits (14.6 %) and cereal bars (9.8 %). Regarding types of fluid, main preferences were water (72.1 %), coffee (42.6 %), tea (29.5 %) and fruit juice (23.6 %).

Roman's Chess Blog

 

From time to time while surfing the Internet for chess blogs I come across one that is really interesting and that I think has particular merit.  One such is by an individual who is apparently a Canadian Master that is called Chessblogger.

       This blog contains some excellent instruction and annotated games that make it well worth a visit!  “Roman” analyzes 38 GM games, 75 of his own, offers books reviews, databases, endgame instruction, advice on opening preparation, opening analysis, great players games analyzed, strategy, tactics, videos and software reviews.  In short, this site has something for everyone.  Another site by the author has well annotated games worth playing over.  Be sure and pay both of these sites a visit!

Some Thoughts on Correspondence Chess

  If you have a plenty free time and enjoy analysis you will enjoy correspondence chess. And if you want to play at the master level, in addition to being a strong player, you’ll need a strong engine and a knowledge of the finer points of how to analyze with one. Just like in OTB chess, nobody reaches correspondence master without a good understanding of the game because to reach master, you have to be able to shoulder your way past all the other engine users. Please, if you are going to use an engine, then be fair and play on a site that allows them! If your playing strength is good enough and you are patient enough you can get a master title. It would help if you were like the Norwegian Frank Hovde who in the 1980s chose to live alone so he could do proper analysis without interference or outside distractions but that’s not an option for most of us.

       Most OTB players and even some CC players don’t understand how chess, especially correspondence chess, can survive in an era where engines are in such heavy use. For now the fact is that CC at the top level is a demonstration of the limitations of chess engines.

       But if you want to play CC, you should be aware of the conditions you will face. As a CC player you will have a lot of time for analysis and when you throw a strong engine into the mix, CC as it is played today even at lower levels, is at a really high level. Of course I’m talking about international play on sites where there are no rules against engine use. On server sites that forbid their play none of this applies...at least below the master level.

       It is extremely hard to beat anybody and their engine. To do so you will have to know when your engine is giving you misleading evaluations and that is very difficult unless you are of at least IM strength. The best most of us can hope for is that we are more patient than our opponents and are willing to let our engines run longer than they do plus by patiently double checking the engine analysis for missed opportunities, we get lucky once in awhile and find a flaw...it can happen.

       Programs don’t play perfect chess so a lot of work is still required. Once player who is both an OTB and CC master once pointed out that before you start going deep into the analysis of a position, you must make sure you look at a broad selection of moves because sometimes you will find variations that an engine may have discarded in its trimming process. This was the way he discovered many good ideas. Of course being a 2300+ OTB master gave him the edge over most people when it came to rooting out those ideas!

       It’s true that a deep understanding of chess and strong OTB strength is required to be successful when engines are in use and therefore, climbing to the top levels will remain beyond the reach of most players. But isn’t the same thing true of OTB chess? Nevertheless, we all keep trying.

       If you play CC at the lower levels, don’t worry about engine use...have fun. If you are going to be playing at a level where you do run into engine users you will need to make a decision of what to do about it. I elected to confine my play to sites that allow engine use and educate myself in the fine art of engine analysis. The result has been that my engine based analytical skills have improved leading to better results. Also as a result, maybe my chess has gotten better, too. The main goal remains the same as when playing at the lower levels...have fun. Hopefully as a bonus there will also be some improvement.

I Don't Believe This!

      Some guy posted a question on how many opening lines one should know and how deeply they should be memorized. The best answer was, if you’re not a master, none. Study strategic/tactical themes that are the result of common middlegame positions from your opening of choice. That way when an opponent plays something you haven’t seen, at least you will know whether or not his move fits in with the requirements of the position. If it doesn’t you know he made a less than optimal move and by being familiar with basic middlegame themes and patterns that result from your opening, you will be able to plan correctly.

      He thought that was crappy advice. His idea is to memorize 30 lines 8-10 moves deep. Reminds me of the guy who once wrote a letter to the editor claiming that if one could memorize Modern Chess Openings, he could become a GM and challenge the Russians.
      Anyhow…the guy went on about how he rarely loses, so either he’s really good in which case he does not need to be asking such a question in a forum haunted by amateurs or he’s playing really weak opponents. The other possibility is he knows nothing about chess and isn’t interested in learning.
      Case in point: Once upon a time my 1400-rated opponent took about 5 minutes for his first 20-some moves while I used about an hour and a half. Finally he sank into deep thought and after several minutes played and outright blunder and resigned a couple of moves later. In the post mortem I had to listen to him yammer on and on about what a bad move I had played. When I asked why it was so bad, his only answer was that it wasn’t the move Fischer played in a game he had memorized. It didn’t matter because once “out of the book” he didn’t understand the position.

This Sticks In My Craw!

       Why is advice on improving that comes from 1400-1600 rated players always the most popular on forums?  Are these guys qualified to give advice?  I was furious when I read  one post where a strong US Master and in another post where an IM were told to go pound salt by several below average rated players because it was felt these two accomplished masters didn’t know what they were talking about!  Personally, I wouldn’t have the guts to tell a veteran master who was winning tournaments when I was a kid and an IM that they didn’t understand anything about how to improve.  Even though they may be old geezers well past their prime with ratings that have “dis-improved” over the years, they understand the game as well as they ever did even if their results are no longer that great.  I know of at least two GM’s who are barely rated 2200 these days, but they are both well over 70.  In their prime they both defeated world class players.  They haven’t gotten stupid with age.  They know as much about chess as they ever did, but at 70+ years old you just can’t stand the strain of tournament chess and calculate like you did 40 or 50 years ago!  In fact you can’t do anything like you did 40 or 50 years ago.
       I think this is the reason why so many masters I’ve met are reluctant to share what they know.  One chess instructor confessed that most of what he taught his students was worthless and would not help them very much.  Why did he do it?  Because students coming to him had preconceived ideas about what they needed and if he didn’t give it to them, they would simply find another coach.
      It reminds me of the time 20 years ago when I got a letter from someone in town asking me to coach him.  I don’t k now how he got my address, but I turned him down.  First I’m not good enough to actually accept money for coaching, second, I don’t have the patience, third, at the time I was working about a thousand hours a week, fourth I hadn’t played chess for about 10-12 years and finally, he outlined in the letter what he wanted help with.  BTW...if I give any advice in this Blog, it's not mine; it's from qualified players...masters and GM's.  It's real advice, not that crap you see today that's designed for no other reason than to sell books or CD's.  I'm not selling anything.  Well, actually I do have a Google Adsense account associated with this Blog...so far it has accumulated $0.86.

Exciting Houdini News

       The Cruxis Website has some exciting news about the new release (Version 2.0) scheduled for release sometime between September and December 2011.  Besides a number of minor bug fixes, and the ability to adjust its strength from beginner to full strength it will have some features that will aid the serious analyst.       
      Houdini 2.0 will focus on features that improve position analysis. One welcome feature will be the ability to save the complete hash table to a file and reload it later.  This means you can stop the analysis and save it then reload it at a later time and start from the point where you stopped. 
       A "Never Clear Hash" option will also be available. The "Position Learning" mode will automatically save analysis in a “learning database” that will be reused in future analysis.
       Houdini 2.0 will support Chess960(Fischer Random Chess). To speed up solving deep mates, you can fix a limit on the search depth during the mate search.  A Houdini version will be available to support the next generation of CPUs with 16 to 32 cores.
       The developers are not saying how many elo points the improvements will add to its strength, so we will just have to wait and see.

Salvaging a Draw from a Hopeless Position

…or Knowing When NOT to Trust an Engine.  In a recent correspondence game I reached the following position as Black:

It should be fairly obvious that Black is lost.  Houdini suggests that the position favors White by about one Pawn but it is probably won for White with correct play so should be a lot more than one P. However, here I began asking what would happen if you removed the minor pieces?  With just R’s on the board the game is easily won for White because my K is so far away as to be useless. Any elementary endgame book will show that if you remove the minor pieces, Black’s K must be at least on the c-file in order to draw. 

Then I asked what about if the R’s were off the board?  In the diagrammed position, if you remove the R’s the game is a draw. Finally a plan began to emerge: bring the King closer to the P’s and trade R’s at the right time.  Unfortunately the R trade cannot be forced so if White keeps them on the board he will probably win…eventually.  My hope was that in his haste to force the win he would believe the engine evaluations that after the trade of R’s White still has a large advantage…1-1/2 P’s.
 

In the above position it is obvious that the attacked N must move, but where? 41...Rg1+ 42.Kc2 Ne3+ 43.Kd3 Nd1 does not look too inviting.

My pieces are too scattered and far from the action. So I selected 41…Nb4 and play continued 42.Kc1 Kf7 Moving the K closer to the P’s.

If instead of 42…Kf7 I had played 42...Nd3+ then if 43.Kd2 Nb4 (Both 43...Nxe5? 44.Rxe5 and 43...Rb4? 44.Rxb4 Nxb4 win for White) we have this position:

Black could draw IF the K was on the f-file and it was his turn but it’s not so the position is lost.  Back to the game:

43.Bc3 Nc6 [Not 43...Na2+?? 44.Kb1 Nxc3+ 45.bxc3 wins] 44.Rb6 Ne7 45.Rd6 [45.Kd2 was probably better because it improves the position of his K. 45…Ke8 46.b4 Rg6 and now, not 47.Rxg6 because once again, White keeps winning chances by keeping the R’s on 47…Nxg6 Draw] 45...Rg6! Hoping he takes the bait.

46.Rxg6? He did!  He should have tried something like 46.Re3 and be prepared to slog it out another 50 moves or so, but he trusted his engine. 46...Nxg6

The engines favor White by 1–1/2 P's but that is because, due to their horizon effect, they can't see the draw...it's too far away. The interesting thing is that if White’s K were anywhere on the 2^nd rank in the final position he would win. 

Donald Byrne vs. James T. Sherwin

In the 1953 Lessing J. Rosenwald Tournament held in New York City the final scores were:
1. Reshevsky 7.5 – 2.5
2. Evans 6.5 -3.5
3. Bisguier 6 – 4
4. D. Byrne 5- 5
5. Sherwin 3 – 7
6. Kramer 2-8

Donald Byrne is a member of the US Chess Hall of Fame. 

 

  

James T. Sherwin

 

This game was a hard fought draw where Byrne had the better of it all the way, but Sherwin’s bulldog-like defense held and in the end there just wasn’t any way for Byrne to make progress.



More Youtube Videos

Alexander Tolush

Alexander Tolush (1 May 1910–3 March 1969) was a Soviet grandmaster and one of Boris Spassky's mentors. As Spassky’s trainer, Tolush is considered to have enhanced Spassky’s attacking play. Tolush earned the title of International Master (IM) in 1950, Grandmaster (GM) in 1953, and International Master of Correspondence Chess (IMC) in 1965.

Tolush won the Leningrad Championship in 1937, 1938, 1946, and 1947 and played in the USSR Championship ten times. His best result was second place (+8=6−3 shared with Aroninand Lipnitsky) behind Keresin 1950. He finished fourth in 1952 (+8=7−4, equal with Boleslavskyand behind Botvinnik, Taimanov, and Geller) and fourth 1957 (+10=6−5 equal with Spassky and behind Tal,Bronstein, and Keres).

His best international result was first place (+10=8−1) at Bucharest 1953, ahead of Petrosian,Smyslov, Boleslavsky, and Spassky. Bucharest 1953 was the first informal foreign tournament, in which several Soviet chess players participated. The marathon lasted from 25 January to 27 February 1953. László Szabó took the lead during the first part of the tournament. The five Soviet players were on top at the end. Tolush gained the title of international grandmaster and his pupil Spassky became international master. In 1968 he was second at Keszthely +7=3−1 behind Portisch.Tolush represented the USSR in two European Team Chess Championship.

Although he never reached the very highest level of chess, Tolush was an imaginative attacking player. He worked as a chess journalist and was a noted trainer whose pupils included Keres and Spassky.

Though he was an outstanding master of  attack, his play was never sound enough for the highest honors.  He became a Soviet national master in 1938, served in the Red Army in WW II, then really blossomed.

Link to some chesspuzzles from the games of Alexander Tolush.

Old pdf Book of the 1953 Reshevsky vs. Najdorf Match

You can download an old pdf book of the Reshevsky vs. Najdorf match held in Buenos Aires in 1953.  Reshevsky won: +5=9-4. 

The book is 57 pages in Spanish descriptive notation and the games and notes can easily be followed if one is familiar with descriptive notation.  Even if you don’t speak Spanish, the games are interesting and easy to follow.

Free Botvinnik Book

A 110 page pdf book titled Secret Matches: The Unknown Training Games of Mikhail Botvinnik edited by Hanon Russell with selected games annotated and a theoretical section by Jan Timman is available for download from Chess Café. There are 96 games (only 10 are annotated). This book was prepared for release as a small book, but Chess Café never published it so they finally decided to make it available free of charge. Here’s a hint: You can highlight the game and then copy and paste it into you chess program. If it’s an annotated game the notes won’t copy and you will have to fill in the game header yourself, but it’s a good way to play over these great games.  One of the ways Botvinnik prepared for matches and tournaments was to play serious games under actual tournament conditions but the games were kept secret. The games are against Averbakh, Balashov, Flohr, Furman, Kan, Rabinovich, Ragozin and Smyslov.

Youtube Videos

Abe Turner

Fischer and Turner playing in the 57-58 US Championship

       Abe Turner (1924–October 25, 1962) was an American master who, at the time when IM’s and garden variety GM’s were usually rated 2450-2500, had a USCF rating of over 2400, putting him in the “Senior Master” class.  Turner was good enough to be invited to play in several US Championships back when they were round robin events.  Turner was born in New York City and learned how to play chess in 1943 at a naval hospital while recovering from shrapnel wounds he received during World War Two. 
       He was best known for his prowess in blitz chess and had a reputation as a chess hustler.  His style of play consisted mostly of grabbing a pawn and then trading pieces to reach an endgame. He frequented the Chess and Checkers Club of New York in Times Square.  The club was better known as the "flea house" and was a place where anyone could play chess for ten cents an hour.  Fischer also hung out there in his early days and was a “student” of Turner's.
      Turner placed second in the Manhattan Chess Club championship on five occasions but his best performance was probably his fourth place finish in the US Open in 1955.  Shortly after that he tied for first at San Diego with William Lombardy and James T. Sherwin.
      Turner was found stabbed to death in the basement of the building where he had been working for Al Horowitz’ magazine, Chess Review.  He had only been employed there for about three weeks.  Turner, who weighed 280 pounds, had been stabbed nine times and his body had been dragged down a corridor and placed inside a safe where it was found that afternoon by the building superintendent, Miguel Vasquez.
      After the body was discovered, the police arrested a clerk-typist named Theodore Smith who was also employed by Chess Review. According to one version of the story, Smith, who had been recently released from an asylum, said he killed Turner while they were taking an elevator to a basement storeroom because Secret Service agents had told him Turner was a Communist spy and Smith needed to kill him. Smith told police he had thrown the knife away in Central Park but it was never found. Turner had only been off work half an hour before his body was found.

      The other version told by Arthur Bisguier, who was also employed as a writer by Chess Review at the same time, was that Smith killed Turner while they were in the elevator because Turner made a homosexual pass at Smith who then became enraged and killed Turner.  Bisguier said that he knew Smith and liked him, adding that whenever his (Bisguier’s) wife showed up at the Chess Review office, Smith was always very polite and would pull Mrs. Bisguier’s chair out for her to sit on.  Turner, who was 38, never married and lived with his father
       Shortly before his death Turner appeared on a television game show hosted by Johnny Carsen called Who Do You Trust where the interview went like this:

Turner:  If I lost 25 lbs. I could beat anybody in the world.

Carsen: Why would losing 25 lbs. help you win at chess?
Turner: It just would make me mentally alert and give me more vim and vigor.
Carsen: Why not go on a diet?
Turner: I don't eat much anyway.
Carsen: So how do you account for your weight? You're pretty heavy.
Turner: I drink lots of soda pop every day.
Carsen: What do you do to relax?
Turner: I go to the zoo. I like to watch the monkeys. It makes me feel superior to them, puts me at ease.

Chess Violence and Crime

You have to check out Bill Wall's list! By the way, I witnessed one of the incidents listed. It was the one where Zuckerman threw a Bishop at a noisy spectator. Zuckerman kept asking the guy, who was really quite annoying, to be quiet and when he wouldn't, Zuckerman threw the Bishop at him.