Word: capablanca
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...more intellectually gifted, there is bridge ("Dole's out of trumps, and Clinton can run clubs for the slam, Charles"). Or perhaps chess ("Dole's down a rook and two pawns, and his queen is under attack. I don't think Capablanca could get out of this...
...York Times, a patzer and Pulitzer Prize winner, has written "Grandmasters" for a general audience, including failed patzers. It is an immensely entertaining book, lavishly illustrated with photographs and drawings. Schonberg traces the history of grandmaster chess, beginning with Philidor in the 1740s and moving to Morphy, Steinitz, Marshall, Capablanca, Alekhine, contemporary Russians like Petrosian and Spassky, and ending with Bobby Fischer...
...only three words, check and mate." He lost. Or Paul Morphy, the American who was acknowledged as the world's best player during a career of only a year and a half in the 1850s, and who died insane, a hater of the game. And the Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca, arguably the greatest player of all time. His government gave him a permanent position as a roving diplomat, transferring him to a post in whatever city his next tournament was scheduled...
Schonberg dotes on his masters, sympathizing with their troubles, seeing them through difficult times, paternally chiding them for their faults. He cannot resist the music critic's temptation to liken them to composers, setting both grandmasters and musicians in parallel hierarchies. Capablanca--"pure, classic, elegant... yet capable of demonic force in his great moments... the complete technician" is the Mozart of chess, and Alekhine, "a nervous tiger who stalked his prey with involuntary physical twitchings and psychic lust" is Wagner. Fischer, Schonberg asserts, surpasses even Wagner in terms of "monomania...
...chess were not complicated enough in its classic format, innovators have over the years developed variations that make the game even more complex. In one version called Capablanca Concentric Chess, the pieces move in spiraling arcs around a circular board. A number of three-dimensional chess games have also made their appearance, including one invented by Russian-born Mathematician Ervand G. Kogbetliantz that was so bewildering that it never really caught on; it is played on an eight-tiered board with 64 pieces to a side. Now, working independently, two other buffs have devised chesslike games for three players...