Chess and Early Cold War Propaganda Chess, like many sports, has been used as a political instrument. Files recently released by the National Archives reveal how the Soviet Union exploited chess for propaganda during the early years of the Cold War (1953–1960). In December 1953,…
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On the eve of the press conference to announce the Kasparov-Kramnik match, David Levy addressed a remarkable billet-doux to Raymond Keene, his life-long business partner and former brother-in-law. An open letter to Raymond Keene: Raymond, We have known each other for 37 years. We have…
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Michael Basman International Intrigue It was Hastings 1967-8 at the annual congress run by Frank Rhoden. I had not been doing particularly well after having bullied Frank into giving me a place in the tournament. ‘I’ve got to invite Keene, Hartston and Penrose,…
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Michael Basman The Slippery Slope My first step along the road to perdition came in the London Under-14 Boys Championship in 1959 (in those days girls didn’t or couldn’t play chess). It was round 5 and I was playing J.N. Eyres of Colfe’s School…
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Edward Winter bemoans the lack of pen-portraits in chess writing: ‘a highly demanding form of writing which requires no particular chess expertise yet is almost universally avoided nowadays’. Chess writers are, with a few exceptions, chess experts rather than writers and rarely venture outside their…
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A couple of years ago, Hartston did the following calculation during a grandmaster tournament in Spain: assuming that all the prize money on offer was divided simply between the grandmasters (and there were some powerful IMs scrapping for the loot as well), their average earnings…
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