Exeter Chess Club Stories: Several Stories

From: Avital Pilpel (ap241@columbia.edu)
Organization: Columbia University
Subject: Some chess ancedotes.

• About "Chess and James Bond":
  A family friend of ours, a chess master, went to see the movie THREE DAYS IN A ROW in the movie theatre (it was before VCR's) just so he could figure out the position and then spent another week figuring out where the position was from!
• A humorous definition of chess tournaments:
  1. Swiss system: Very much like swiss cheese, full of holes and comes in different flavors.
  2. Round Robin: You have to play everybody, including those that you are scared to death to play against...
  3. Elimination: Not for you, what will you do after the first round?
• A story about Rubinstein, the great master:
  In one tournament, he needed only a draw to clich first place uncontended in the last round. A few moves were played, and his opponent offered a draw. Rubinstein refused! After a few more moves, when Rubinstein had an obvious advantage, HE offered a draw that was gladly accepted, and then he said: "I will decide what the result will be with a player of YOUR caliber".
• Two chess stories from Israel, my home country:
  1. One time, Nimzovitch visited Israel and went to the local Lasker chess club anonymously. He naturally crushed everyone else, and eventually one of the old kibitzers there told him: "You're a pretty good player, your style reminds me of Nimzovitch...".
  2. A few days after the 1973 Yom Kippur war started, the next round of the Israeli open was supposed to begin - naturally nobody showed up except for a few old kibbitzers who wondered why the hell nobody came!
• The worst blunder:
  One of the marks of the amatuer is that he or she seems to consider material advantage better than mating the opponent for some reason. I was once in a tournament in NYC, where white had the following advantage: Q