Chess is a beautiful thing, a gift of the gods, an oasis of sanity in an insane world. Thanks to Traitor Joe and the chucklephuckery of his supporters, we are teetering on the brink of WW3. It is an exciting time to be alive in part because it may prove to be an exiting time. If you need a break from the madness, Caissa's arms beckon.
I've been patzin' around at LiChess the last few days under the handle, SeldomSeenSlim. My preferred time control is three-minute blitz with a two-second increment. That way, I do not take too much time from my other, my main mistress, fair Philosophia.
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 about the chess scene, it is chock full of colorful characters.
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I posted the above on 21 October 2009. I received an e-mail message from Yetman today informing me of Lieberman's passing on Christmas Eve. Hats off to Myron and to Ed too for their services in promoting chess and organizing tournaments in Arizona.
Myron Lieberman (left) with former US Chess Presidents Harold Winston (center) and Don Schultz in an undated photo. US Chess archival photo
Anent the Yetman reference supra, the record will show that I am against open carry. Are You a Gray Man? explains.
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin, 2002), p. 11:
Philosophy today gets no respect. Many scientists use the term as a synonym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his father that he would major in the subject, his father's reply was "Luft!" — Yiddish for "air." And then there's the joke in which a young man told his mother that he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, "Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?"
Well, to adapt a chess player's expression, better to make Luft than to make war! (One 'makes Luft' in chess by moving a pawn in front of the castled king's position as prophylaxis against back rank mate. The allusion is to the Vietnam era's 'Make love not war.')
As for 'Doctor of Philosophy,' 'doctor,' etymologically, means teacher (from L. docere, to teach) and 'philosophy' stands in for knowledge or science broadly construed. Thus as late as the 19th century, physicists were still referred to as natural philosophers. 'Ph.D.,' of course, abbreviates Doctor of Philosophy, which is why it is an abomination to see it written as 'PHD.' And when a Ph.D does it it is doubly abominable. But then I'm a linguistic conservative, as well as every other kind of conservative.
In fairness to Pinker, I should point out that after citing the above anecdotes he goes on to say some words in defense of philosophy.
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Addendum: Kevin Spraggett on the importance of making Luft. White to move.
Kai Frederik Lorentzen writes,
In your latest blog entry you refer to Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Being aware that you are a chess player, I want to ask: Do you know that his rule number nine had earlier been formulated by grandmaster Tartakower?
Alinsky: "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself."
Tartakower: "Die Drohung ist stärker als die Ausführung."
I am well aware of the saying, both in German and in English, but I was under the false impression that it originated with Aron Nimzowitsch, most likely because of the famous 'smoking threat' anecdote. Edward Winter, the chess historian, provides all the details one could ask for, and more:
Page 138 of Schach 2000 Jahre Spiel-Geschichte by R. Finkenzeller, W. Ziehr and E. Bührer (Stuttgart, 1989) ascribed to Tartakower a remark quoted as ‘Eine Drohung ist stärker als eine Ausführung’. In the English-language edition (London, 1990) that came out lumberingly as ‘A threat is more effective than the actual implementation’, whereas the usual rendering is ‘The threat is stronger than the execution’. Moreover, Nimzowitsch, rather than Tartakower, is customarily named as the coiner of the phrase, with everything tied into the famous ‘smoking threat’ anecdote.
On page 191 of the July 1953 CHESS M. Lipton pointed out two contradictory versions of the story of Nimzowitsch complaining that his opponent was threatening to smoke. On pages 31-32 of Chess for Fun & Chess for Blood (Philadelphia, 1942) Edward Lasker asserted that the incident, involving a cigar, had occurred ‘in an offhand game between Nimzowitsch and Emanuel Lasker in Berlin’ (although there was still, according to Edward Lasker’s account, an umpire to whom Nimzowitsch could protest). On page 128 of The World’s Great Chess Games (New York, 1951) Reuben Fine stated that the scene had been New York, 1927, and that Nimzowitsch complained to the tournament director, Maróczy, when Vidmar ‘absent-mindedly took out his cigarette case’.
New York, 1927 was also given as the venue by Irving Chernev (‘This is the way I heard it back in 1927, when it occurred’) on pages 15-16 of The Bright Side of Chess (Philadelphia, 1948). Nimzowitsch, we are told, complained to the tournament committee that Vidmar looked as if he wanted to smoke a cigar, but Chernev mentioned no remark about the threat being stronger than the execution. [. . .]
"The threat is stronger than the execution" is undoubtedly the best translation of Die Drohung ist stärker als die Ausführung. Winter, however, cites Eine Drohung ist stärker als eine Ausführung which is not as good in German or in English: "A threat is stronger than an execution."
As for Alinsky, it hadn't occurred to me that he was essentially repeating the Tartakower line. Very interesting, and I thank for pointing that out. We pedants derive inordinate but harmless pleasure from such bagatelles.
I don't know whether Alinsky played chess (many Jews do). I learned about this most famous Tartakowerism when I played the game seriously in my early youth. Not only with teenage peers but also with a grown up team in the third national league (Verbandsliga) where I played at board four (of eight) and had positive overall results in all three seasons. The teenage boy I was enjoyed making grown up men - architects, doctors, lawyers - sweat in their suits ... I also liked to play Blitzschach a lot, with five or two minutes time for the whole match. I still have a beautiful English chess clock from the late 1970s but hardly ever play today. Other things became more important, and laymen often tend to avoid former club players. And if it doesn't sound too kulturpessimistisch, I may add that I sometimes have the impression that digitalization killed the poetic spirit of the game. Can Goddess Caissa survive the algorithms?
Chess is Jewish athletics, as the saying goes, and they dominate the game. See Jews in Chess. I would expect that Alinsky had some knowledge of the game. I conjecture that one of the roots of Jew hatred is envy. Jews have made contributions to high culture far out of proportion to their numbers.
If our paths ever cross, Kai, we will have to play. I am a patzer, but on a good day I rise to the level of Grand Patzer. My highest USCF rating was around 1720. So I am a 'B' player. I am 'strong coffee house' at least in the coffee houses around here. I came to serious play (tournaments) too late in life to to get any good. But I beat everyone around here and so people think I'm a master. A big fish in a small pond. I try to explain to them the hierarchical nature of chess and of life herself, but I rarely get through to them. I play a few 3-minute blitz games per day on the Internet Chess Club, the premier site for chess play.
The poetic spirit of the game will never die as long as there are romantics like me around. Caissa, like Philosophia, will ever evade the algorithms.
Chess is a beautiful thing, a gift of the gods, an oasis of sanity in an insane world. If I met Alinsky at the barricades we'd meet as enemies; over the chess board, however, as friends.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartakowerismen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals
https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2019/03/liberal-immigration-hyper-hypocrisy.html
I cited him often over the years and disagreed with him only once. I admired his penetrating intellect, but more importantly his good judgment. In his personal life he was a profile in courage.
He was a major contributor to the high quality of Fox commentary.
On the debit side, he was perhaps too much of the Washington establishment. He failed to make the right call re: Trump.
A good man who died too young. Let the encomia roll in.
Last but not least, he worshipped at the shrine of Caissa.
“The story at Starbucks isn’t racism but entitlement. The two men felt entitled to loiter on private property without buying anything. They decided that the rules didn’t apply to them. And apparently they were correct.” —Matt Walsh
I love hanging out in coffee houses, reading, talking, and most of all, playing chess. I fancy myself a strong coffee house player, which means that I'm a patzer, but I'll clean your clock if you learned the game from your uncle. (Full disclosure: I'm in the B category; highest USCF rating = 1720. I beat Reppert once in a coffee house (on the White side of a Smith-Morra gambit) and two or three experts (2000-2200) at tournaments.)
I consider myself entitled to take up space only if I have purchased something.
Being black is not carte blanche for bad behavior.
I left the house at 5:15 this morning, hiked 45 minutes over the local hills to arrive at 6:00 sharp at Gecko Espresso where I met up with Lowell S. a local chess aficionado. We played under the influence of caffeine for a solid two hours, one game, recorded, to be analyzed when next we meet. I checkmated the old man.
Chess is a delightful game, especially when you win. An oasis of sanity in an insane world. But we must admit that it is a deeply racist game and that all who play it are racists. The following excerpt from a cognate post explains why.
Another proof that chess is racist and oppressive and ought to be banned is that blacks are woefully under-represented among its players. This evil can have only one explanation: racist suppression of black players. For everyone knows that blacks as a group are the equals of whites as a group in respect of intelligence, interest in chess, and the sorts of virtues needed to play the undemocratic and reactionary 'Royal Game.' Among these are the ability to study hard, defer gratification, and keep calm in trying situations.
For these and many other reasons, we must DEMAND that chess be banned.
We must manifest solidarity with our oppressed Taliban brothers who have maintained, truly, that chess is an evil game of chance.
Not only is chess racist, it is also sexist and patriarchal. The fact that the Queen is the most powerful piece on the board proves nothing to the contrary. The powers allowed to the Queen are in truth nothing more than so many sops thrown to the feminists to keep them quiet.
The sexism and patriarchalism of chess is proven by the dignity afforded to the King.
Wherein resides the dignity of the King? At every time in every possible game, the King is on the board. He cannot be captured: he never leaves the board while the game is on. He may be checked and checkmated; he is never captured. His royal consort, however, must submit to sacrifice, and is sacrificed gladly in the most beautiful of games. She has no dignity unto herself; she is but a means, nothing more than an overgrown pawn, and in some cases an ambitious upstart who has clawed her way to the eighth rank with the determination of a Hillary. She must die, when called upon, for the glory of His Majesty.
Another proof that chess is racist and oppressive and ought to be banned is that blacks are woefully under-represented among its players. This evil can have only one explanation: racist suppression of black players. For everyone knows that blacks as a group are the equals of whites as a group in respect of intelligence, interest in chess, and the sorts of virtues needed to play the undemocratic and reactionary 'Royal Game.' Among these are the ability to study hard, defer gratification, and keep calm in trying situations.
For these and many other reasons, we must DEMAND that chess be banned.
We must manifest solidarity with our oppressed Taliban brothers who have maintained, truly, that chess is an evil game of chance.
It is therefore most heartening to read that chess has been banned in some places in America. May this trend continue as we march forward, ever stronger, together to the land of social justice where there are no winners and no losers.
London Karl, an Irish resident of London, checks in with this update:
I'm just back from my first ever trip to America. Only New York, which I am reliably informed is representative of nothing other than itself, but I was touched and impressed by the civility and friendliness I encountered. People there are way friendlier than the Brits. You may despair over your country, but you have that at least!
This is funny. New Yorkers are generally regarded as rude and obnoxious. Donald Trump, for example, is a New Yorker, as is Brian Leiter. No, I am not hastily generalizing from two examples, I am illustrating with two examples an antecedently established general proposition.
It is too bad that London Karl did not have the time or the wherewithal to travel deep into Real America where he would have found much better examples of civility and friendliness.
Some years back I read a paper at Tulane University in New Orleans. Wandering around one afternoon on my own, not in the French Quarter, but in some rather nondescript part of town, I walked into a restaurant for lunch. There I was greeted by a woman who displayed a level of hospitality and friendliness and warmth I had never encountered before. This, I thought to myself, is what must be meant by Southern hospitality. There was, of course, a commercial motivation behind the display; but it was also deeply genuine. That was back in '87 and I have never forgotten the experience.
During that same trip, however, I ran into chess master Jude Acers in the French Quarter. Stationed on the street in his red beret, he plays (or played) all comers at $5 a game. Nothing particularly civil or friendly about him, rather the opposite. But then he is a chess player, one, and not from the South, two. After five games, I paid him his $25 and he made sure that I understood that he had played me for a chump and 'taken me' for 25 semolians. Me, I was happy to part with the money for chess lessons on Bourbon Street in the romantic city of the great Paul Morphy.
He said one thing that has stuck with me. Near the end of a game, he pointed to one of his pawns which had an unobstructed path to the queening square. I couldn't stop it, but it still had a long way to go. He announced, "This pawn has already queened."
A deeply Platonic comment. A timeless use of 'already.' Sub specie aeternitatis, the pawn had queened, or rather IS (timelessly) queened.
"Before Abraham was, I am." (John 8:58)
UPDATE. London Karl responds:
Trust me, I had the desire and the wherewithal to go into the real America; I just didn't have the time. I preferred the edgy friendliness of the New Yorkers to the passive aggression that passes for English 'politeness'.
Related articles
Despite the lukewarm reviews, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. But then I am a chess player who lived through the Fischer era and who remembers that far-off summer of '72 when Caissa and Mars colluded to give a chess match geopolitical significance.
Boris Spassky had the support of the Soviet state; Fischer stood alone, his sole state support consisting in a phone call from Nixon's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger urging him to play. In some Cold War calculus there is perhaps a computation of the contribution of Fischer's victory to the ultimate demise of the Evil Empire.
Who is Caissa, you ask?
Caissa is the "patron goddess" of chess players.
She was created in a poem called Caïssa written in 1763 by English poet and philologist Sir William Jones.
In the poem, the god Mars falls in love with the goddess Caissa, portrayed as a Thracian dryad. Caissa rebuffs his advances and suggests he take solace in the company of the god Euphron—the god of sport. After hearing Mars' laments, Euphron
...fram'd a tablet of celestial mold,
Inlay'd with squares of silver and of gold;
Then of two metals form'd the warlike band,
That here compact in show of battle stand;
He taught the rules that guide the pensive game,
And call'd it Caissa from the dryad's name:
(Whence Albion's sons, who most its praise confess,
Approv'd the play, and nam'd it thoughtful Chess.)Mars then presents the game of chess to Caissa in an attempt to win her affection.
Jones' work was inspired by the poem Scacchia ludus ("The game of Chess"), written by Italian poet Marco Girolamo Vida in 1510.
I've said it before: beware of unsourced 'quotations.' An über-conservative correspondent forwarded me the following:
"Negotiating with Obama is like playing chess with a pigeon." "The pigeon knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board and then struts around like it won the game."
~Vladimir Putin
Now Obama is indeed a feckless fool, and a disaster for the country and the world. It is a blot upon the American electorate that this mendacious incompetent was elected and then, horribile dictu, re-elected. I hope we can all agree on that. Mockery and derision are appropriate weapons to deploy against him and his supporters. But we who stand up for truth ought to be especially scrupulous about getting things right. So I ran the 'quotation' past Snopes.com whereat it is plausibly maintained that Putin said no such thing. There I snagged this nifty graphic:
Emmanuel Lasker, Die Philosophie des Unvollendbar, 1919, p. x:
Aber eine harte Kindheit macht einen starken Mann.
But a hard childhood makes a strong man.
In the '80s I read a chunk of Lasker's Philosophy of the Incompletable and concluded that the grandmaster of chess was not one of philosophy. But I didn't read much of it and it was a long time ago. Now available in a paperback reprint via Amazon.com. I am tempted to take another look.
Too many in philosophy and other fields confine themselves to the horizon of the contemporary. Explore, get lost, discover.
A marvellous sublunary trinity: chess, philosophy, and a cigar.
I am teaching chess to some women who have joined our club, "The Lost Knights of the Superstitions." Nice title, eh? At once both romantic and self-deprecatory with an allusion to the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine and Jacob Waltz, the 'Dutchman' himself who was not Dutch but Deutsch.
The following excerpt from an article by Lubomir Kavalek may help inspire the newly recruited distaff acolytes of the Royal Game.
Amazing Menchik
Vera Menchik (1906-1944) was the first women's world champion who could play successfully against the best male players. She almost stirred an international conflict. Three countries claimed her: she was born in Moscow, played chess mostly for Czechoslovakia, married an Englishman and died in London.
Menchik won the first official women's world championship in London in 1927 and defended the title six times in tournaments with an incredible overall score of 78 wins, four draws and one loss. She also defeated the German Sonja Graf in two world title matches in 1934 and 1937. Menchik played positionally most of the time, but she could deliver a nice tactical blow.
Menchik,Vera - Graf,Sonja
Wch (Women) Semmering (14), 13.07.1937
Position after 20 moves
21.Rd7! (A beautiful decoy. The rook deflects the queen, allowing a spirited queen sacrifice: 21... Qxd7 22.Qxh5! gxh5 23.Bh7 mate.
White would have a decisive advantage after: 21...Qxh2+ 22.Qxh2 Nxh2 23.Rxe7 Nxf1 24.Bxg6! e5 25.Nxf7 Kg7 26.Nxe5+ Kf6 27.Rxb7.)
Graf resigned.
The Czechs honored Menchik with a postage stamp designed by Zdenek Netopil. He could not make up his mind, but eventually let her smile. It was issued February 14, 1996. Menchik held her world title for 17 years, the longest of any woman. Last year, she was inducted into the Chess World Hall of Fame - the first woman among chess giants.
During the 1929 Karlsbad tournament, the Austrian master Albert Becker founded the Vera Menchik Club. He suggested that anyone who loses to the lady should become a member. He was the first victim, but there were others. Among her most famous casualties were dr. Max Euwe and Sammy Reshevsky. Out of 437 tournament games against male opponents, she won 147.
She didn't fare well against the very top players. She was hammered by Jose Raul Capablanca (9-0), Alexander Alekhine (7-0), Mikhail Botvinnik (2-0), Paul Keres (2-0), Reuben Fine (2-0) and Emanuel Lasker (1-0).
In 1921 Menchik's family moved from Moscow to England. Vera was 15. When she saw bottles of milk left outside of English homes, Menchik said: "In Russia, they would immediately be stolen." The quote didn't make it to Elizaveta Bykova's biography of Menchik. Bykova had a different idea of what should be taken.
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