The 1948 World Championship Tournament was reported in CHESS by Harry Golombek, who implied that Paul Keres was forced to lose four games in a row to Botvinnik. Keres wrote a book called Sto Partii which was published in three volumes, but he did not mention the 1948 Tournament. William Lombardy reviewed Golombek’s book and [...]

2001 Chess Oddities by Alex Dunne © 2003 “No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted by any means.” THANK GOD! This is the worst collection of trash I have ever seen! There are HUNDREDS of mistakes. “Paul Morphy died of a stroke while taking a hot bath.” On July 10, 1884 in [...]

Several Masters are playing a consultation game. Kasparaov says: “The weak point in our opponent’s position is g7, therefore we should play R-g1.” Direct attack. Spassky says: “yes, we should attack g7 but let’s play N-d4 first, then we can attack g7 with N-e6 or N-f5, either before or aftter R-g1.” Combination. Karpov says: “Those [...]

Book Review: Bobby Fischer’s Conquest of the World Chess Championship by Reuben Fine “The psychology and tactics of the title match” David McKay Co, November 1973 Review by James Schroeder published in 1974 For several years one of the best analysts in the world, Fine degenerated rapidly after he quit playing chess in 1952. In [...]

Soviet Chess 1917 – 1991 by Andrew Soltis, 2000, McFarland and Company Soltis is notorious for writing the worst researched books in history. This has so many factual errors it is worthless. It is very poorly written and abounds with inane comments such as “The tragedy of Spassky’s brief reign was that it came just [...]

New York 1936: The First Modern United States Chess Championship by John Hilbert and Peter Lahde review by James Schroeder In 1985 I discovered that the John White Dept. of the Cleveland Public Library had a box containing the original game scores of the 1936 U.S. Chess Championship Tournament. So I hand-copied all of them [...]

American Chess Masters from Morphy to Fischer by Arthur Bisguier and Andrew Soltis; Macmillan Publishing Company; 1974 Many years later Soltis said that he alone wrote all of the book. Despite agreeing to help write the book, Bisguier did nothing at all, for which he should be thanked, as this is absolutely worthless trash. There [...]

Grandmasters of Chess by Harold Schonberg; 1st ed. Lippincott 1973; revised WW Norton & Co. 1981. Grandmasters of Chess by Harold Schonberg is a rotten book that consists of yellow jounalism based upon the writer’s ignorance and incredible stupidity. Mr. Schonberg does not understand chess, chess masters, chess history, or anything else of what he [...]

by James Schroeder Once upon a time a man found a large bone, flat on two sides. He put a mark on one side and two marks on the other side and then found another man with whom he gambled. The man tossed the bone in the air and the other man called one, or [...]

Book/movie review © 2003 James Schroeder The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabakov. 1930. Translated from Russian by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author. Copyright 1964. I have read the novel and the movie is an atrocious disgrace that has only superficial resemblance to the story. In short: Luzhin is a Russian who suffers from [...]