Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Chess

  • Is the King Ever Captured?

    The dignity of the king allows no such thing.  He never leaves the board during the game.  When the game is over, however, he  goes into the same box with the lowly pawns.  Which is to say: all earthly dignity is as naught before the tribunal of the Great Equalizer.

  • When the Goddess Caissa Becomes the She-Devil Impecunia

    We patzers can sport with Caissa and her charms without too much harm.  It is the very strong players, who yet fall short of the highest level, who run the greatest risk.  Chess sucks them in then leaves them high and dry.  The goddess Caissa becomes the she-devil Impecunia.

  • The Calvin Blocker Story

    When I lived in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, I was within walking distance of the old Arabica coffee house on Coventry Road. The Coventry district was quite a scene in those days and there I met numerous interesting characters of the sort one   expects to find in coffee houses: would-be poets and novelists, pseudo-intellectual bullshitters of…

  • Cute Internet Chess Club Handles

    I just beat a guy in a five-minute game who rejoices under the handle 'noblitz-oblige.' I guess that counts as an inaptronym given that he was playing blitz.  3:22 PM.  Just beat 'keresmatic' whose play was neither reminsicent of Paul Keres nor  charismatic.  Cute handle, though. I've prepared a line to use next time I hike…

  • The Pleasures of Chess

    The pleasures of chess are admittedly paltry, but well-defined, innocuous, cost-free, reliably anodyne, and  indefinitely repeatable.  Related articles Cat Blogging Friday: Alekhine and his Cat, Chess

  • Overheard at the Chess Club

    "Analyze long, analyze wrong."  To which the kibitzing philosopher added, "In life as in chess."

  • Cat Blogging Friday: Alekhine and his Cat, Chess

    Reuben Fine, The Psychology of the Chess Player (Dover 1967), p. 53: In 1935, an international team tournament was held in Warsaw.  Alekhine played top board for France, of which he was a naturalized citizen.  However, on this trip he arrived at the Polish border without a passport.  When the officials asked him for his…

  • Life’s Chess

    The opening is hopeful and the middle game absorbing. But then comes a series of checks culminating in mate.

  • Chess Banned in the Heartland

    Here are further examples of liberal stupidity that we shouldn't forget.  A repost from the old Powerblogs site.   Written 1 September 2005.  You might expect chess to be banned in a Left coast place like Berserkley.  Unfortunately, chess   actually has been banned in a couple of places in fly-over country, places where one would not expect to…

  • Peter Hitchens Remembers His Brother

    Excerpt: Last week I saw my brother for the last time in a fairly grim hospital room in Houston, Texas. He was in great pain, and suffering in several other ways I will not describe. But he was wholly conscious and in command of his wits, and able to speak clearly. We both knew it…

  • Legal’s Mate Via the Smith-Morra Gambit

    The summer of '95 found me in Charlottesville, Virginia. A lovely place hard by the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Appalachian Trail. The largesse of the American taxpayer had made it possible for me to attend a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at the University of Virginia. One dark and rainy night, wearied…

  • Chess Players Commiserate on Their Failed Marriages

    A: "We were bishops of opposite color."  B:  "Sorry to hear that.  In our case the union ended when she discovered I had insufficient mating material." C:  "We just couldn't get it together.  When ever she wanted to make love, I was busy making Luft." D: "She blew her stack when I gingerly brought up…

  • John Leslie and Hostage Chess

    I learned recently that the philosopher John Leslie is the inventor of a chess variant, Hostage Chess. Left-click on the hyperlink and scroll down. I have never played any of the chess variants, and they don't interest me. Penetrating the arcana of standard chess has me sufficiently occupied. Such a patzer am I that I…

  • Lipking on Brady on Bobby Fischer

    Lawrence Lipking reviews Frank Brady, Endgame: Bobby Fisher's Remarkable Rise and Fall — From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness.

  • The Drawn Game in Chess with Special Attention to Three-Fold Repetition of Position

    (Written November 2002 for the sake of some local  patzers who proved to be largely unteachable.) "How shall I draw thee? Let me count the ways."  (Anon.) There are exactly seven ways to draw a chess game. 1. STALEMATE. "The game is drawn when the king of the player who has the move is not…