‘The British School is characterized by a great show of brilliancy. No idea is too bizarre for them, no concept too fantastic. They are hard workers, to be sure, but rather bent on finding new sensational effects than on constructing something useful. For the main…
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Inspired by Tony Miles’ famous two-word book review, several readers have offered suggestions for chess books that should never be written. There are more on Kingpin’s Facebook page. They say that everyone has a crap book in them, so please send us your ideas! (Mig…
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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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Jonathan Rowson A polished pine bedroom in a convent school, Tallinn, Estonia, September 1997. A bottle of whisky, unpacked suitcases, and three drunken chess players playing blitz. Andrew Martin, Simon Williams, Jonathan Rowson. And, our invisible friend, ‘The Spirit’. It is intriguing. It is intriguing…
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‘A raking pin by the proud prelate. White threatens to thrust the flagship of his armada forward with the galloping move e5, leaving his discomforted steed on f6 feeling like Yasser Arafat at a barmitzvah.’ A great spoof by Colin Crouch from Kingpin 20 (Spring 1993).
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It’s a measure of how drab the World Championship has been that Magnus Carlsen allegedly falling asleep at the board and the double blunder in Game 6 have provided its most dramatic moments. The blunder is beautifully captured in this short clip featuring IM Lawrence…
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‘As a man Hugh was a wholly delightful companion. He was extremely lively and talkative, full of ideas and genuinely interested in everything that his friends were doing. He liked arguing for its own sake, but was never quarrelsome. He was the kind of person…
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Part 2 : Bayswater – Tales from the Crypt Jimmy Adams At the beginning of the 70s I joined the Bayswater club, holed up in a long narrow side section of a Serbian Orthodox church quite near to Notting Hill in West London….
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Part 1: A memorable introduction Jimmy Adams I was an eleven-year-old chess novice and had recently joined the Islington club, which met on Friday nights in the lecture room of a library further down the road from where I lived in north London. The…
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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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