Lockdown and subsequent restrictions have given me time to browse
the dustier reaches of my chess library, including Napier's Paul
Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess, a compilation of his
three booklets Amenities and Background of Chess, each a
selection of 100 lightly annotated games to amuse and provide an
educative ABC. Horowitz edited this combined work and commented:
Barry Wood wrote a piece on this, reprinted in _Reinfeld's Treasury
of Chess Lore_.
He suggests (I paraphrase), read Poe's passage.
Now say to yourself: "Poe has only just learned to play chess,
and is still unsure of the moves of the pieces".
Read it over again.
Does that fit? Chess is like driving a car, after a bit you
don't notice the gear changes and so on, you just enjoy the drive.
Poe is still struggling with 'which one's the clutch again?'.
"If you play Botvinnik, it is even alarming to see
him write his move down. Slightly short-sighted, he stoops over his
scoresheet and devotes his entire attention to recording the move
in the most beautifully clear script; one feels that an explosion
would not distract him and that examined through a microscope not
an irregularity would appear. When he wrote down
1.c2-c4 against me, I felt like
resigning."
Not Safe For Work.
Or Juniors.
Or the Faint of Heart.
Proceed at your own risk...
Nigel Short speaks:
"I'm going to give him a good
rogering"
"T.D.F." (= Trap, Dominate, Fuck)
"I'm going to give it to him good and
hard"
Chapter One, page 9, Dominic Lawson's The Inner
Game.
If psychoanalytic/psychodynamic/depth psychology
approaches to chess interest you, there is Ernest Jones' very
well-known account of the life of Paul Morphy, and Cockburn's
Chess is a fun game and easy to learn. You play on a board of
164
squares, which are coloured light and dark, and there are two armies,
one black and grey. The rows are called ranks and the columns are
called officers.
