Word: chess
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Chess players are usually precocious small hairy people who never know what to do with their hands or knees. Unless chained down, a teen-aged tournament player will pinch his nails together, rock back and forth, and in the presence of other players, begin to mutter and giggle about opening variations and to tell juvenile jokes. As far as appearances went, we were golden. Our problem was that we weren't very good at chess...
...faces, or opening up a New York Times to its full expanse and holding it in front of my opponent's face, just to speed him up. But by the end of the first day, Harry and I were at the bottom of the pack, never to inch up. Chess tournaments can build a lot of character...
...everybody goes through that kind of awakening. Sammy Reshevsky was a master by age eight, and at the same age Bobby Fischer was astounding people by playing speed chess at the Brooklyn Chess Club. These lucky types are the subject of Harold C. Schonberg's latest book, "Grandmasters of Chess." Schonberg, the top music critic for The New 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...
Writing personal histories, but not evaluating specific games or chess theory, Schonberg displays arresting personalities and tells dozens of famous stories. There is the remark with which Tarrasch began his 1908 match with then world champion Emanuel Lasker: "To you, Dr. Lasker, I have 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...
...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...