It's All About Money

Let's take a break from the chess curriculum series, last seen in Pre-chess, and return to a related subject last seen in The Riddles of Chess. The related subject is chess and Alzheimer's disease, about which a nasty fight has broken out on English blogs.

How is a chess curriculum (i.e. chess in schools) related to chess and Alzheimer's disease? Because both are areas in which their proponents tout the magical benefits of chess on the brain. Anyone buying into those magical benefits might very well buy into chess, meaning more money for everyone involved in chess instruction and training. Given that there is so little money in chess today, any additional sums would go far.

The English blog fight began quietly more than four years ago with a post titled Chess Against Alzheimer’s on Chessimprover.com. The post has been removed, recently I suppose, and now returns a 'Page not found' message, although it still survives in the Google cache.

There's no need to look in the Google cache, because the Streatham & Brixton blog (S&B) has copied most of it into a post from last week titled DG XXIII: Doctor Nigel. In case you're not up-to-date with S&B terminology, 'DG' stands for 'Doctor Garry', as in GM Garry Kasparov, and XXIII means the 23rd post in a series rooting out all proponents of the magical benefits of chess on Alzheimer's. Kasparov was S&B's first target in the series. 'Doctor Nigel' is GM Nigel Davies, the latest target. He replied to S&B with Dear Professor Verghese..., which starts,

Due to some recent controversy on the matter I have been considering writing to Professor Verghese about his Alzheimer's study. Although 'board games' were cited as being associated with a lower risk of dementia, would this happen to include chess?

and then went on to accuse the S&B crowd of 'pedantry', along with a Wikipedia reference in case anyone doesn't know the meaning of the word. I happen to agree with the S&B line of reasoning, as overzealous as it might seem, and would replace the word 'pedantry' with the phrase 'responsible journalism'.

Responsible journalists don't overhype the direction of medical research. They don't give false hope to people who find themselves in difficult circumstances, or to their families. No one knows what effect chess might have on Alzheimer's disease -- that 'no one' includes GM Kasparov, GM Davies, the S&B crowd, and me. In his original 2011 post, Davies wrote,

As this research has been around for a few years it amazes me is that chess federations around the world are not singing this from the rooftops.

Perhaps the chess federations understand their responsibility to society in a larger context.

Watered Down Chess

For this edition of Video Friday, I couldn't decide which clip I liked better.

1) Too little water...

ZIP EXPERIMENTS : Can A Glass of Water Help a Kid Beat Chess Grandmaster? (2:14) • 'It’s all too easy to take water for granted, it’s almost everywhere and it’s free. But new scientific research is suggesting that regularly drinking plain old H2O may give you remarkable powers.' • For more about the experiment, see Zip Experiment 4. Poor GM Rogers!

2) Or too much water...

The 2015 Diving Chess World Championship (1:53) • 'The Diving Chess World Championship took place on August 9, 2015 at the Third Space Gym in Soho, London. [...] Diving Chess is like normal chess but played in a swimming pool with submerged chessboard. Each player can only think as long as they are able to hold their breath.'

Editing Matters

In my previous post, 2015 CJA Awards, I wrote,

Another piece deserving special note was 'Winner: Reconnecting with Caissa' by GM James Tarjan, which received two awards: 'Best Features Article' and 'Best Story of the Year'. An Honorable Mention for 'Best Features Article' went to 'How to Catch a Chess Cheater' by Howard Goldowsky. [...] The Tarjan story didn't impress me as much, so I'll return to it in a future post.

Why did I like the Goldowsky piece better than the Tarjan piece? This question has been bothering me since I learned that the Tarjan piece won two awards. Both stories were based on topical ideas, developed into feature length articles by writers who know their subject matter thoroughly. I read the nine-page Goldowsky piece straight through in one sitting, but put down the six-page Tarjan piece after two pages. I had to force myself to pick it up again and read it to the end. Here are the first few paragraphs of the Tarjan story.

In case you don’t know, chess is ruled by a goddess; her name is Caissa. She presides over a beautiful kingdom, but she is fickle and difficult. If you are lucky (or should we should say, if you are unlucky), she will call you to worship.

Caissa called me when I was very young. In my adulthood, it was time to worship at other altars. Caissa was not happy to lose a devotee, but she talked it over with her fellow gods and goddesses. Some of the other devotees did not understand, but Caissa herself did, and accepted it.

Years later, with the aid of a human-created silicon monster, she called on me again, and I heard the call.

The start is very good, but note the first paragraph : 'should we should say'. The entire piece is badly edited. Later on:

So if you said to me, Jim, you scored seven of nine in the U.S. Open. Big deal. Who cares? If you said that to me, I would be happy to concur.

That sort of unfocused writing is tedious to read and the meandering article is full of it. This criticism is not against GM Tarjan, but rather against the editors of Chess Life. Someone should have taken a red pencil to the whole thing and turned a promising story into a great story. As it was published, it didn't merit two CJA awards.

***

I don't want to end this post on such a negative note, so let's look at a chess story that happened more than 46 years ago, 'Battle of Junior Giants' by Andrew Kempner.

The genesis of a six-game match between the top two ranking juniors (according to USCF rating tables), Walter Shawn Browne, formerly of Brooklyn, now a citizen of Australia, and James E. Tarjan of Sherman Oaks, California, was a simple question: who is better?

Walter's answer was instantaneous: "l'm better!" Tarjan's was reflective: "Maybe Browne's better." The result, a 3-3 tie, was thus a mild surprise to even the staunchest Tarjan supporters, who found themselves in the vast majority. Only one fan hoped for a Browne victory, stating simply: "Tarjan won't analyze with me any more."

The report included the following photo.

Chess Life, March 1969

Browne made a lifelong career out of chess; Tarjan retired at age 32. Who could have guessed that their chess careers would have turned out so differently?

2015 CJA Awards

Three months after the 2015 CJA Awards Announcement, Offline, we have the Prize List for 2015 CJA Awards (CJA = Chess Journalists of America, in case you're wondering). As in past years, I'll just list the four awards to which I pay the most attention:-

• Best Book (paper-printed only) -- Winner: Liquidation on the Chess Board by GM Joel Benjamin - New In Chess
• Chess Journalist of the Year -- Winner: Mike Klein
• Best Chess Art -- Winner: Square One, December 2014 Cover of Chess Life - Keith Halonen
• Best Chess Blog -- Winner: Chess Book Reviews by John Hartmann

The 'Journalist of the Year' and 'Best Chess Blog' have been known since the entries were published -- Entries Received for Chess Journalist Awards 2015 -- because there were no other entries in those categories. By coincidence, it is the second time on the podium for both winners; see my posts on the 2012 CJA Awards and 2013 CJA Awards for details.

The winning entry for 'Best Chess Art' is shown on the left. I corresponded with artist Keith Halonen back in the late 1990s, after he wrote to tell me how much he liked my World Chess Championship site. Despite this character flaw, his work is excellent; more can be found on his personal site, e.g. Chess Gallery.

The book category included an Honorable Mention: 'The Classical Era of Modern Chess' by Peter J. Monté - McFarland & Company, Inc. I mention it because I hadn't heard of the work before and am using this blog post to jog my memory later.

Another piece deserving special note was 'Winner: Reconnecting with Caissa' by GM James Tarjan, which received two awards: 'Best Features Article' and 'Best Story of the Year'. An Honorable Mention for 'Best Features Article' went to 'How to Catch a Chess Cheater' by Howard Goldowsky. Last year in a post titled The 'No Cheating' Jigsaw Puzzle, I wrote, 'The Goldowsky piece has "award winning" stamped all over it.' The Tarjan story didn't impress me as much, so I'll return to it in a future post.

Heartfelt congratulations to all 2015 CJA prize winners!

Google and the Brussels Bureaucrats

I generally use my Monday blog posts to develop a series on a theme that can't be handled by one or two posts. Two months ago I suspended a series on 'Going Mobile', last seen in

• 2015-06-15: Going Mobile : CFAA Site

to explore 'Early Chess on the Internet'. This was first covered in

• 2015-06-16: Early Chess on the Web, and
• 2015-06-23: Early Chess Newsgroups,

then expanded to a half-dozen more specific posts on chess engines:-

• 2015-06-22: Origin of 'Chess Engine'
• 2015-06-29: Searching for Fritz
• 2015-07-06: Computer Chess in the Early 1990s
• 2015-07-13: Deep Thought/Blue in the Early 1990s
• 2015-07-20 'The Chips Are Down!'
• 2015-08-03: Early Computer Chess Ratings

Now I have to return to the same sort of web site maintenance that I did for the 'Going Mobile' series, once again dictated by Google policies.

Dear Publisher, We want to let you know about a new policy about obtaining EU end-users' consent that reflects regulatory and best practice guidance. It clarifies your duty to obtain end-user consent when you use products like Google AdSense, DoubleClick for Publishers, and DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

'EU' stands for 'European Union', where I happen to reside, giving me a second reason to pay attention. If you search on one of the phrases from that excerpt, e.g. 'We want to let you know about a new policy', you'll find plenty of discussion on the subject.

Satyajit Ray Lobby Cards

Just as I did a few weeks ago with Novag Robot Adversary, I'm using the current edition of Top eBay Chess Items by Price to return after a short break from blogging. The item pictured below, titled 'India Bengali Cinema 1977 THE CHESS PLAYERS set of 10 lobby cards Satyajit Ray', sold for $722.50, Buy-It-Now.

Besides photos of the lobby cards, the auction had no other useful information in its description. I once featured the film in an August 2009 edition of Video Friday, Shatranj Ke Khilari, and more information is available on a Wikipedia page of the same name, Shatranj Ke Khilari, 'a 1977 Indian film by Bengali director Satyajit Ray, based on Munshi Premchand's short story'.

A Chess Skyline

The caption said,

The Sydney skyline planned for 2050. The biggest concern is that the now so prominent Opera House will drop out of the skyline.

That's the biggest concern?

Sydnew © Flickr user Guido Veltmaat under Creative Commons.

This artist's vision of the future brings to mind 'A Rook Lighthouse For Bobby' and Chess City, Dubai.