Word: chess
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...CHESS. Trevor Nunn (Cats, Les Miserables, Starlight Express) directs a fourth Broadway musical barn burner, mixing board games, romance, East-West relations and a superb rock score...
...hotel ballroom near Chicago's O'Hare Airport is crammed with rows of banquet tables covered with paper chessboards. In silent confrontation, 700 miniature armies face one another across half as many checkered playing fields. The National Open, a major annual chess tournament, is about to begin. A short, plump man dressed completely in black calls the contestants to order. "If you lose a game," he wryly suggests, "congratulate your opponent. Do not disturb the tournament by exploding, screaming or weeping loudly." On hearing this, Hans Berliner breaks into a grin. A former world chess-by-mail champion, Berliner will...
...telephone line. While Hitech "thinks," Berliner watches the moves being considered as they scroll rapidly down the laptop's screen. In one second, Hitech can analyze as many as 160,000 possibilities. "Hitech," beams Berliner through thick-framed glasses, "is two orders of magnitude smarter than any other computer chess player in the world...
...fact, Hitech is so smart it disdains playing its fellow computers. Since 1986, Hitech has been competing on the regular chess circuit, matching wits only with humans. It has a solid master's rating of 2376, well behind former World Chess Champion Mikhail Tal, the top-ranked player in this tournament, with a 2700 rating, but Hitech is a dangerous enough competitor to have caused a minor furor last August by scoring a first-place finish in the Pennsylvania State Chess Championship. It is the 22nd-ranked player in the National Open...
...downplayed the London theme that the U.S. and the Soviet Union are morally -- or amorally -- equivalent. He focuses instead on three people who have paid a huge emotional price for success, only to realize that glory does not bring contentment: an American (Philip Casnoff) who has reached ! the world chess finals; his Soviet counterpart (David Carroll); and the American's adviser and erstwhile bedmate (Judy Kuhn), who falls in love with the Soviet. Theirs is not a charming Ninotchka-style romance: the CIA and the KGB hover on the periphery, exploiting the players and the game. Offsetting the gloom...