Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Chess

  • An Old Chestnut of a Chess Joke for the Holiday Season

    A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. "But why," they asked.  "Because", he said, "I can't stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer."

  • Seneca and the Consolations of Chess and Philosophy

    A correspondent reminds me of the following passage from Seneca's De Tranquillitate XIV, 6-7, tr. Basore: Will you believe that Canus spent the ten intervening days before his execution in no anxiety of any sort? What the man said, what he did, how tranquil he was, passes all credence. He was playing chess when the…

  • The Tal and the Short of It

    Why, with so many painful losses to my 'credit,' do I continue to submit my aging self to the rigors of tournament chess? Because the strenuous life has a property Bobby Fischer once ascribed to 1. P-K4: it is "best by test."

  • Chess: A Road to Health and Wealth?

    H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford UP, 1913), p. 164: Hippocrates and Galen apparently found in chess a potent antidote to diarrhoea and erysipelas, and prescribed it with success, while Aristotle figures among the many hypothetical inventors of chess. Another story tells how Galen once met a friend whom he had not…

  • Above the Urinal at the Chess Tournament

    Urine check! I didn't make that up. It was at some cheesy Knight's Inn or similar venue in Phoenix in the early-to-mid 'nineties, when Myron Lieberman presided in his inimitable manner over well-attended tournaments and Ed Yetman, bandanna around his neck and sidearm strapped to his hip, manned the book concession. Say what you want…

  • The Neuroanatomy of a Chess Player

  • ‘I Don’t Mind Losing’

    'I don't mind losing' illustrates the non-identity of sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. Anyone who understands English knows what the sentence in question means. Its meaning is fixed by the rules of the language system, English. But what the sentence means is what very few people mean when they produce a token of the sentence.…

  • Chess Enthymeme

    In life there are no takebacks. "Chess is life." (R. Fischer) Ergo, etc.

  • Of Blogging and Blitz

    Blitz chess is supposed to hurt one’s slow game, but it is not altogether clear: blitz teaches one to size up a situation very quickly indeed, a skill needed when one drifts into Zeitnot in a slow game. Blogging may hurt one’s slow writing, but again it is not entirely clear: blogging teaches one to…