Word: patzer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...must be hard to play a decent game of chess with all these bombs going off, but Slobodan Milosevic is no patzer -- he's had the white pieces all along and now he's looking to checkmate NATO at the negotiating table. Time for Madeleine and the boys at State to start boning up on their Nimzo-Indian defense. Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993) is the best chess movie CP has ever seen (although the Russian wrestler from Kubrick's The Killing should have got a spin-off movie of his own). It's also about a player whose every...
...picture often has the flashy moves of a chess patzer. Phone books are smashed and chessmen trashed. Josh plays catch in a sepulchral chess club, inhabited by a veritable cuckoo's nest of chess nuts. The movie also distorts the chess education of this bantam Rocky. It has Josh learning almost equally from Pandolfini (Ben Kingsley) and a kindly street hustler (Laurence Fishburne). In fact, Pandolfini was the boy's main teacher. Kingsley does have a charismatic gravity and the carriage of -- Fred Waitzkin's phrase -- "a ruined aristocrat." In portraying a teacher whom Josh refers to as "a great...
Then Karpov did the unexpected: he advanced a pawn, unbalancing the position and not a few grand masters. Instantly all the heretofore examined lines, entire symphonies of hypothetical variation, vanished into the ether. "Unheard melodies," murmured the yellow-tied patzer sitting near me. His tone was wry and regretful...
...yellow-tied patzer had come for beauty, but Ljubo had come for truth. In chess, that means finding not just a good move or even a harmonious move but the perfect move. God's move...
Even the exalted were amazed by the innovations, the sacrifices, the / speculative attacks, the kind of stuff a patzer like me tries out in Washington's Lafayette Square, not the kind world champions play with $1.7 million at stake. I asked the great and wizened Tal what he thought of the opening games of the match. "Hitchcock movies," he replied with a grin...