Stuart Conquest recalls his reckless youth When one’s surname is Conquest, and when one spends ten years of one’s life in the town of Hastings, then the line: ‘Is your middle name Norman?’ (or similar witticisms) does tend to crop up with alarming frequency. I…
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‘John Witherow and Fraser Nelson, editors of the Times and Spectator respectively, are happy to employ a hack who regularly steals other writers’ work and passes it off as its own … This isn’t the first time the Penguin has been caught red-handed.’ Private Eye…
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Kingpin is privileged to be the first site to publish part of the Official Souvenir Transcript of the 2013 London Classic. (tape shows a stage with chess tables, too many chairs, irritated-looking GMs. A gaunt figure strides into their midst) Welcome to the 2013…
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‘The worst blunders occur on the days when you’re feeling in form and aren’t expecting the chess gremlins to strike.’ ‘If you go through my games at the Hastings tournament of 1961/2 you may well expect my greatest error to have occurred there. I…
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April 1981 was a fast month for news. John Hinkley had been arrested for the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. There were riots on the streets of London. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, went on trial. The Sun newspaper revealed to a rapt nation that…
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OLAF STEFFENS After years of trying, FIDE has finally succeeded in crafting a truly abysmal public image for itself. Its Vice President became embroiled in a fist-fight during the closing ceremony of one of its showcase events; the rules for the Candidates’ matches seem to…
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Sergey Tiviakov was born in Krasnodar on 14 February 1973. Alexey Osachuk was his first coach and from 1980 until 1984 he was a pupil of former World Champion Vassily Smyslov. He won the World U-16 Championship in 1989 and World U-18 Championship in 1990….
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Elisabeth Paehtz (pronounced ‘pates’) was born on 8 January 1985. She learnt chess from her father Thomas, himself a Grandmaster, and became the youngest ever German women’s chess champion in 1999. Three years later she won the World Youth Championship (U-18) and became World Junior Champion (U-20)…
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A big family too – one that’s grown from 60 member countries in 1970 to 185 in 2015. Its vast bawling brood of small and poor satellites has made FIDE the world’s second largest sports body after FIFA. Membership and birth rate aren’t the only…
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