We had another fine evening of casual chess and conversation at the Buffalo Wild Wings in Brighton, MI.
We will be meeting again this coming Monday, December 6th, between 4pm and 10pm.
Stop on by.
We are also having our Club Speed Chess Championship that night. Entry fee is FREE!
The tournament should start around 6:30ish. Every entrant will play 2 games against his opponent each round. Each player will have only five (5) minutes to complete the game. No delay or increment will be used. You will play one game with White and one game with Black. Two wins or a win and a draw, and you win the match.
Depending on the number of entries, we may complete the tournament that night, or we will finish it on December 20. I am guessing we will get it done in one night! Even a 6:30pm start and 40 minutes for a round, we can get 4 rounds in.
Feel free to stop in and try out your chess skills! And if you don't want to play in the speed tournament, there is usually other non-participants around to play casual chess with. Or, watch the action! Speed chess is very exciting!
Now for a few more chess facts:
The worst score ever recorded in a chess tournament took place in Monte Carlo in 1903. Colonel Moreau played in all twenty-six rounds and lost every game. (Sounds like your humble scribe on casual chess night)
Ernest Grunfeld, one of the greatest authority on the openings back in the early 1900's, always opened a game with White with 1. d4. (Bobby Fischer of course said 1. e4 is best for White)
Frank J. Marshall found what he thought was a winning line in the Ruy Lopez opening and saved it for ten years to use on a specific opponent. That opponent was Jose Capablanca, who Marshall played in New York in 1918, and lost the game.
Perhaps the most fanatical devotee of chess ever known was Daniel Harrwitz. He played at the Cafe de la Regence in Paris, morning, noon and night seven days a week. In addition, he had chess figures embroidered on his shirts and wore stick pins shaped like chess pieces.
But perhaps, you know someone like this yourself.
Harrwitz was one of the very few players to beat Paul Morphy with the black pieces. He played a 12- game match against Morphy in Paris and won the first two games! But then lost the next five of six with a draw sprinkled in there. Down 5.5 to 2.5 Daniel quit the match siting health reasons.
We mentioned child prodigy and American GM Sammy Reshevsky in the last article. Before the Western Open in 1933, a reporter asked Sammy if he expected to win the tournament? Sammy replied, "There is no one here who can beat me." He was correct. No one did beat him, but he did not win the tournament either. Rueben Fine won the tournament, drawing Sammy and beating more of the other participants than Sammy did.
Speaking of Sammy and Rueben, here is another piece of chess lore. But we have to add into this tale the American chess Master and author Fred Reinfeld.
Reshevsky and Fine were grandmasters. Fred Reinfeld was a master, but never earned even an International Master title, let alone a GM title. But with Reshevsky being #1 and Fine being #5 in the United States, and Reinfeld ranked usually between #8 and #15 in the country, they seemed to meet each other quite often in big tournaments in the USA.
Now rankings at this level are usually even more accurate than ratings in the more normal ranges of let's say 1900 to 1000. There is much fluctuation and many upsets at that lower level. In the nosebleed section of the rankings, there is much less of that.
So Reshevshy had a predictable winning record against Fine. Sammy was too great a tactician for Rueben. That just makes sense.
And Fine had a dominating record against Reinfeld. Fine just crushed Reinfeld in the middle game or the endgame. Again, sort of expected.
However, the lower rated Reinfeld had a winning record against Sammy Reshevsky! How can this be??
Well, you might have heard it said that styles make fights, or classic battles in other sports. The puncher versus the counter-puncher, the strong offense against the strong defense, the attacking player versus the volley/return tennis player.
Well Fred Reinfeld was a chess opening expert! He wrote books on the subject, from beginner to grandmaster level books. Sammy, as we told you in the last article, never bothered to learn openings that deeply. He played mostly by genius, tactical analysis and some chess intuition thrown in.
Reinfeld was Sammy's perfect Achillies Heel. Sammy would get so bogged down in the opening against Fred, that Sammy would fall way behind on his clock. This time trouble caused him to error even worse. Other times he just fell into clever opening traps Fred knew and Sammy did not.
As we maintain on this blog, chess is the greatest game in the world. Period.
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