Sir George Thomas wrote more about badminton than chess, which makes this article (published in 1927) something of a rarity. In it he compares chess with his favourite sports, tennis and badminton.

 

‘the true chess fiend is a creature without counterpart’

Chess Fiends!

By

Sir George Alan Thomas, Bt.

This is the second of four articles about the many games he plays which Sir George is writing specially for “The Evening News”. At 46 he is the leading player of Lawn Tennis, Chess, Hockey, Badminton, and other games: in the recent International Chess Congress in London he shared the first and second prizes for the best individual score in the Team Tournament.

If the merit of a game could be measured by the extent to which it obsesses the more fanatical of its devotees, chess would, I think, be without a rival. I know many badminton and tennis fiends; and (though not myself a golfer) golf fiends; but, in my experience, the true chess fiend is a creature without counterpart. This may be partly due to the fact that, while there are obvious limitations to the playing of most games, there are virtually none in regard to chess. You may, if built that way, play tennis all day, talk lawn tennis all the evening, and think about it when you go to bed. But you can actually play chess practically anywhere and all the time—even if alone!

I have a pleasant memory of the great Polish expert Rubinstein, his nose buried in a pocket chess-board, crossing a point where half-a-dozen lines of traffic converged, and calmly pausing to move a piece while motor-buses rushed upon him from all directions. Yet chess-masters are, on the whole, a long-lived race.

That was during the Hastings tournament of 1922. And Rubinstein, not content with impeding the traffic, held up the concluding stage of the tournament for some hours with a little unwilling assistance from myself. We met in the last round and our game ran to 119 moves and lasted more than thirteen hours.

Off Form

Chess-players—a conservative tribe—cling to that dreadful function a formal prize-giving. But when the time for the ceremony, and the lady who was to perform it, arrived, Rubinstein and I were still hard at it; and it so chanced that the destination of every prize depended on our game. I forgot what happened to the lady; she went, I fancy, for a walk, to give us time to finish; and then a second walk—and even a third. But I shall never forget Rubinstein, the unperturbed centre of a maelstrom of harassed officials, persisting for hours in the vain attempt to win a drawn position; and, incidentally, almost losing it in the end—a frequent penalty of chess for those who refuse to accept the inevitable.

That was the longest game I ever played, though far from being a record. By way of contrast, two games in the recent international matches in London each finished in less than five minutes. One of these was prematurely ended by a remarkable blunder, but the other was quite a normal sort of game, except that both players were apparently content to follow the line of least resistance and indulge in a wholesale exchange of pieces which could only result in a draw.

In competitive events, chess has two noteworthy advantages over my other favourite games. It is almost entirely free from those hopelessly one-sided matches which occur so frequently in lawn tennis and badminton tournaments. This is due to the fact that practically all these chess tournaments are played on what is known as the American— as opposed to the knockout— system in which each competitor plays a game against each of the others.

Consequently the entrants have to be divided into comparatively small sections, carefully graded as to strength—each section forming an independent competition. Of course, there may be an appreciable difference in strength between the best and the weakest in a section. But it is not usually so marked as to make their individual encounter a foregone conclusion.

Moreover, it is a curious fact that an upset of form is more likely to occur in chess than in either lawn tennis or badminton. One would expect the reverse to be the case; not only because of the scientific character of chess, but also because the other games are played under such widely differing conditions of weather light and so forth. Yet, in spite of these influences, a really startling reversal of form is extraordinarily rare in lawn tennis but by no means so uncommon at chess.

At the recent Scarborough tournament, for example, Bogoljubow—usually regarded as one of the six strongest players in the world— only scored 4½ points out of a possible 9, finishing below six other competitors, not one of whom could be ranked as his equal.

The Tyrant Clock

The other special advantage I have in mind is that, in chess, one is spared the hanging about while waiting for a match which is so tiresome a feature of lawn tennis—and to a less degree of badminton—tournaments; and no less tiresome because much of it is unavoidable. Much of it, too, could be avoided. Competitors are well aware that they will not be scratched except in extreme cases; and the less considerate take advantage of this knowledge. With all sympathy for the player who has a legitimate excuse, I think far too much licence is permitted to the habitual latecomer at lawn tennis tournaments.

Nothing of that sort is possible at chess. You cannot postpone to some odd period of the day a game which may last six hours or more! So 9.30—at which horrible hour play commonly starts— really means 9.30; and the player who comes late finds his clock running, and must make good the time lost by moving more rapidly than the normal rate. His opponent, as a matter of courtesy, is usually willing to give him a reasonable amount of grace; but some lynx-eyed director of play will always intervene after a few minutes and himself start the absentee’s clock.

The method of regulating the rate of play, a mystery to most non-chess players, is quite simple. Two clocks, connected by some contrivance which prevents them running simultaneously, is used at each board. When a player moves he stops his own clock and, in so doing, automatically starts that of his opponent. So that the time expended by each player, when it is his turn to move, is recorded independently, and he must complete so many moves in a fixed period of time. Overstepping the time limit forfeits the game immediately.

It frequently happens that an absorbed player forgets to stop his clock after moving—an expensive slip if unnoticed for any length of time, since he cannot recover the minutes so lost. He would almost always be reminded of this omission by his opponent; for the average chess player, like the normal exponent of any other game, prefers the spirit to the letter of the law.

The Evening News, 15 August 1927

George Thomas at Beckenham, 1912

This article will appear in a forthcoming biographical games collection covering Sir George’s careers in chess, badminton and tennis. If you have any information  you would like to contribute please contact Kingpin.

For more about Thomas’s family and sporting career, see Edward Winter’s wide-ranging collection of notes.

GM Matthew Sadler provides an excellent overview of Thomas’s chess career and games.

Display photograph courtesy of Jimmy Adams.