LCCC Week 36 B-13 – Nice Night at Teekos – Fischer’s No. Six Player

Six players made the Thursday meeting. One Ladder game played as Mike N held on to the spot in a tough game. But some casual "coffehouse" games were also played.

Next Monday, we are still taking players for our league. The league starts September 23^rd, so show up next week and claim a spot in the league.

Here is Bobby Fischer’s 1964 list of the top ten grandmasters of all time.

Alexander Alekhine

Alexander Alekhine

“Alekhine is a player I’ve never really understood. Yet, strangely, if you’ve seen one Alekhine game, you’ve seen them all.

 He always wanted a superior center; he maneuvered his pieces to the king side, and around the 25^th move, he began to mate his opponent.

He disliked exchanges, preferring to play with many pieces on the board. His play was fantastically complicated, more so than any other player before or since.

Alekhine was never a hero of mine and I never cared for his style of play. There is nothing light and breezy about it. It worked for him, but could scarcely work for anyone else.

 He played gigantic conceptions, full of outrageous and unprecedented ideas. Its hard to find mistakes in his game, but in a sense, his whole method of play was a mistake. Alekhine developed much more slowly as a player than most great players. He didn’t reach his world class strength until well into his thirties.

But he had a great imagination and could see more deeply into a situation than an other player in chess history.

He disliked clear cut positions. He liked it cloudy and complex positions, and it was his stamina and vision that carried him to victory. It was in complicated situations where Alekhine found his greatest concepts.

Many consider Alekhine to be a great opening theoretician, but I don’t. He played book lines – and not very well. He always felt his natural powers would get him out of any dilemma.

At the chessboard, Alekhine radiated a furious tension that often intimidated his opponents.”