‘For decades the world championships had been run by FIDE, the International Chess Federation; but increasingly there were collisions between this entrenched bureaucracy and volatile egos with high financial expectations. Relations between FIDE and the top players deteriorated sharply under the Presidency of Florencio…
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‘If all players were as intelligent, voluble and linguistically assured as Gary Kasparov, the game could print its own cheque-books.’ Julian Barnes, ‘TDF: The World Chess Championship’ The New Yorker (December 1993) reproduced in Letters from London 1990-1995 (Picador, 1995), p.273 See also…
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‘the best chess contains a striving not just for victory but for something beyond: for an ideal harmonious state that produces a perfect mixture of creativity, beauty and power.’ Julian Barnes, ‘TDF: The World Chess Championship’ The New Yorker (December 1993) reproduced in Letters…
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‘Chess is, famously, an activity entirely unrelated to the rest of life: from this springs its fragile profundity.’ Julian Barnes, ‘TDF: The World Chess Championship’ The New Yorker (December 1993) reproduced in Letters from London 1990-1995 (Picador, 1995), p.249 ‘We could even make…
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‘If you watch a video of an old Wimbledon final or Ryder Cup match, you aren’t really re-analysing, you are merely reminding yourself of what happened and suffusing yourself again with the emotions provoked by the original events. But a chess game, after it…
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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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When you eavesdrop on the chatter of chess, you discover that it reproduces and confirms the game’s compelling mixture of violence and intellectuality. As pieces are finger-flipped around demonstration boards in swift refutation of some other grandmaster’s naïve proposition, half the language has a street-fighting…
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