Although I wrote my last post about something fictional, in fact there is real chess news to report! Today Gata Kamsky won his fourth U.S. Chess Championship in an exciting playoff against Alejandro Ramirez that went to an Armageddon game. Without wishing to minimize Kamsky’s hard-fought victory, I think the biggest story of the tournament was the performance of the young people. Even Kamsky, in his interview with Maurice Ashley afterwards, conceded as much. “They kicked our ass,” he said.

In this case, “they” refers specifically to four young people who outperformed expectations by a huge margin: Alejandro Ramirez, Conrad Holt, Kayden Troff, and Samuel Sevian. The first three scored more than 2 points above their expected scores (based on ratings).

I am most familiar with the 12-year-old Sevian, whom I have seen in many Bay Area tournaments and played against twice. His rating has shot up within the past year, but even so, he was by far the lowest-rated player in the tournament and no one would have been surprised if he had been totally  outclassed. But he in fact acquitted himself very well. He lost only two games, won one and drew six for a very solid score of 4-5. That earned him an International Master norm (although I don’t think he actually needed it).

Troff (who turned 15 during the tournament) did even better, scoring 5-4 in his first U.S. Championship appearance and earning a Grandmaster norm. Ashley said that this was “Bobby Fischer territory,” although to be fair, Fischer at age 15 had already earned the GM title and was among the world’s top ten players.

Conrad Holt, age 19, was even more spectacular, going into the last round at 5½-3½ with actual chances to win the championship. Unfortunately, he suffered a devastating defeat to Timur Gareev in the last game. Holt got to a Q+N versus Q+B endgame where he had some winning chances, but he went astray and Gareev kept pressing him, even when it looked like a dead draw, until Holt finally blundered in time pressure and lost. Even with the disappointing finish, Holt took one of the five qualifying spots for the World Cup in Norway, a nice consolation prize. I have to think that this defeat to Gareev will not slow Holt down. It’s like the Golden State Warriors’ defeat against the San Antonio Spurs in the first game of their National Basketball Association playoff series: a defeat that announces better things yet to come.

And finally, there is Alejandro Ramirez. I first saw him play at the U.S. Open three years ago, which he won.  I’ve been a fan ever since then, and in 2010 I correctly predicted that he would eventually move to America and become our tenth grandmaster named “Alex.” I didn’t predict, though, that he would compete so soon for the title of U.S. Champion!

In the first few rounds of the tournament it looked as if Gata Kamsky was going to run away with the title, scoring 4 wins in the first 4 games. Meanwhile, Ramirez stumbled at the start, with a draw in round 1 and a loss to Holt in round 3. But Kamsky then had one game after another where he couldn’t capitalize on superior or won positions. He played five draws in a row, while Ramirez caught up with a sizzling 5-1 finish (four wins and two draws).

Today, as I mentioned above, Kamsky and Ramirez played off for the championship title. In each of the first two games (played at a game-25 control) Kamsky got a small edge, but Ramirez defended like a virtuoso in the rook-and-pawn endgames. That took them to an Armageddon game, where Black gets draw odds but White gets a time advantage.

Ramirez “won” the Black pieces by bidding 19 minutes and 45 seconds, while Kamsky bid 20 minutes. This meant that Ramirez as Black would get 19 minutes and 45 seconds for the whole game, while Kamsky as White would get 45 minutes. They got to a Maroczy bind type of position where Ramirez fought ferociously for counterplay. Here was maybe his last real chance to save the game:

Black to move.

FEN: 1r2r1k1/4ppbp/6p1/qpRPnP2/1N6/1P4PP/P2Q2B1/5R1K b – - 0 1

Here Black has sacrificed a pawn to try to get out of his bind. Yasser Seirawan, who was commenting live online, could barely contain his eagerness for Black to play the move 1. … Nd3!, which the computer also recommended. After 2. Qxd3 Qxb4 White is discombobulated somewhat and in particular he loses the knight at b4, which proved to be an immensely strong piece in the game. Instead Ramirez played the more routine 1. … Rbc8, and after 2. Rxc8 Rxc8 3. fg hg Kamsky played the powerful move 4. Qf4!

Position after 4. Qf4. Black to move.

FEN: 2r3k1/4ppb1/6p1/qp1Pn3/1N3Q2/1P4PP/P5B1/5R1K b – - 0 4

I just love how harmonious White’s position is. The queen at f4 both defends the knight on b4 and menaces the pawn on f7. The knight, from its unusual post on b4, defends a2 and c2 and also threatens Nc6!, deflecting Black’s knight from its defense of f7. Not only that, as Seirawan pointed out, if Black plays a plausible move like 4. … Bf6 to close the f-file, White can play 5. d6! after which White’s minor pieces become a rampaging horde — the bishop is activated and the knight can come to d5.

It’s really hard to see how Black can even fight on, but to his credit Ramirez did put up energetic resistance. He played 4. … Qc7 and now Kamsky played a super instructive move, 5. a4! You or I would have played Nc6 or maybe h4 to attack on the kingside, but Kamsky presses his advantage in every part of the board. Grandmasters accumulate every possible advantage they can before committing themselves to a move that irrevocably changes the position, like Nc6 — even if it’s a good move.

Getting increasingly desperate, Ramirez played 5. … ba 6. ba f5!? and now Kamsky finally played 7. Nc6 Nxc6 8. Qxc7 Rxc7 9. dc e5 10. Bd5+ Kf8.

Position after 10. ... Kf8. White to move.

FEN: 5k2/2r3b1/2P3p1/3Bpp2/P7/6PP/8/5R1K w – - 0 10

Now comes one more instructive moment. GMs Ashley and Seirawan did not like Black’s 9. … e5 at all, even though I think it’s what 99 percent of amateurs would have played, because it seems natural to activate your protected passed pawn. But Ashley and Seirawan (and Kamsky, who was actually playing the game) instantly saw that White can play 11. g4! here, which “forces” Black to play 11. … f4 and freeze his pawns on dark squares. It then becomes much more difficult for him to use the bishop for active defense.

In fact Kamsky did play 11. g4, and Ramirez refused to let his pawns become immobilized in this way. Instead he sacrificed another pawn with 11. … Ke7 12. gf gf 13. Rxf5. I think this is also instructive in its way because it shows that a grandmaster is concerned with getting the most play out of his pieces, even if it means going a couple pawns down. This probably forced Kamsky to work harder to win than he would have if Black had played the passive 11. … f4.

Nevertheless, the two pawns were too much for Ramirez to overcome, particularly because Kamsky has passed pawns on both wings. Kamsky finally got a chance to end the 2013 U.S. championship in style:

Position after 22. ... Rxa4. White to play and win.

FEN: 8/8/2Pk3P/4b1R1/r7/5B2/8/7K w – - 0 22

(Space inserted in case you want to think about it.)

For a grandmaster like Kamsky this position has a degree of difficulty about 0 out of 10, but nevertheless he paused a minute to check and re-check before playing the clinching sacrifice: 23. Rxe5! Kxe5 24. c7 Black resigns. Black’s rook cannot stop both of the pawns.

Congratulations to Gata Kamsky! The victory in the Armageddon game earned him $10,000, because first prize was $30,000 and second prize was $20,000.

By the way, I’ve stated before that as a player, I hate the Armageddon playoff concept. I would be happier to have co-champions than to have the title determined in an artificially uneven match (even though the bidding procedure arguably makes it fairer). The drawback of the Armageddon format would be especially apparent if both players had bid 20 minutes. In that case, the arbiter would have flipped a coin to determine who played White and who played Black — so that in effect, the tournament could come down to a coin flip.

Nevertheless, for spectators the Armageddon playoff is great fun, because you know for sure that the title is going to be won or lost in this game. No pussy-footing around with draws. So I suspect that my one-man crusade against Armageddon chess is a losing one. For chess to succeed as a televised sport, Armageddon playoffs will probably be a necessary evil.

This brings up an interesting question: If you’re going to let the tournament be decided by an Armageddon game, why not just play the whole tournament that way? Make every game an Armageddon game. You could even have a U.S. Armageddon Chess Champion in addition to a U.S. Classical Chess Champion. Just a thought…

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The Time Lords invented it! That’s what Doctor Who said on TV last night, and if you can’t trust a fictional time-traveler, well then, whom can you trust?

For those readers who haven’t watched BBC or followed science fiction for the last 50 years, Doctor Who is the longest-running science fiction show on earth and probably in the universe. It debuted in 1963 and is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year (although there was an intermission from 1989 to 2005, which for a time traveler is nothing). It’s also one of the few television shows I watch religiously.

So in last night’s episode, the Doctor (the last survivor of a time-traveling race called the Time Lords) faces a mechanical nemesis that takes over 49.883 percent of his mind, leaving him in control of 49.883 percent, and they decide to play a chess game for control of the rest. (Note: I might not have the numbers quite right, but it was something like this.) It gave the actor, Matt Smith, a great chance to play a split personality, the Evil Doctor against the Good Doctor. At a certain point the Evil Doctor says he is winning, which the Good Doctor says is not possible because “the Time Lords invented chess.”

Just one problem. If the evil nemesis controls 49.883 percent of the Doctor’s mind, don’t you think that the Evil Doctor knew that already? In fact, why does the Doctor even bother talking to himself?

Well, I don’t want to spoil the episode for anyone, so let me just say that the Doctor resorts to stratagems that would get him kicked out of any chess tournament. To find out which Doctor and what stratagems, you’ll have to watch the show.

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In my last post I wrote about one of the most ubiquitous kinds of mistakes, in life as well as chess: the kind of mistake where you assume you know what is going on, and the assumption seems so obvious to you that you aren’t even aware of making it.

Here’s a nice chessboard example of this kind of mistake.

Last weekend I analyzed a game I played on New Year’s Day against Rayan Taghizadeh, who is currently the #5-rated 10-year-old in the country with a rating of 2078. At the time of this game his rating was around 1980, so he has gone up 100 points in just a little over four months! That shows you how rapidly he is improving.

The game ended in a very curious fashion. It was even for the first 35 moves, and in fact on move 35 I could have basically forced a draw. But I wanted to play for a win. As so often happens, in trying too hard to win I played a dreadful series of moves, and by move 44 I was in desperate circumstances.

Position after 44. ... Kh5. White to move.

FEN: 2r5/2p5/3p3p/pP1n1p1k/b2PpP1B/4P2P/P3NK2/1R6 w – - 0 45

Here Rayan has just played 44. … Kh5, attacking my bishop. Now I saw a surprising opportunity to stop the downward death spiral of my position. Do you see what my saving move was?

(Space inserted in case you want to think about it.)

The answer is 45. Ng3+! You want my bishop? Go ahead and take it!

Well, there isn’t much of a choice for Black here. If he plays 45. … Kg6 White could just try for a three-fold repetition with 46. Ne2. However, even better, White could play 46. Rg1, setting up a murderous discovered check threat. If 46. … Kf7 to get out of the discovered check, White plays 47. Nxf5 and the tide is very definitely turning in White’s favor.

So Rayan played 45. … Kxh4 46. Nxf5+.

Position after 46. Nxf5+. Black to move.

FEN: 2r5/2p5/3p3p/pP1n1N2/b2PpP1k/4P2P/P4K2/1R6 b – - 0 46

Now Rayan wisely avoided taking the poisoned h-pawn. If 46. … Kxh3?? it’s mate in two: 47. Rh1+ Kg4 48. Nxh6 mate! A nice “out-of-the-blue” combination. Instead he played 46. … Kh5, and I slammed the door shut with 47. Rg1, and the game concluded 47. … Nf6 48. Ng7+, with a draw by repetition. Ironically, thirteen moves earlier I would have been disappointed with a draw, but now I was quite relieved!

So what does this have to do with questioning assumptions? Well, somewhere in the analysis I have given you, I have deliberately written a lie. But it’s a lie that I told myself during the game, and I suspect that it’s a lie that Rayan told himself too. We were both guilty of making an incorrect assumption. I didn’t realize it until I looked at the position with Rybka yesterday.

Have you found the lie yet? It’s after 45. Ng3+. I wrote that Black could not play 45. … Kg6 because of “46. Rg1, setting up a murderous discovered check threat.” Those are pretty much the words I used in my head when I was thinking about the position. But it’s not true! The only one getting murdered is White.

Position after 46. Rg1 (analysis). Black to move.

FEN: 2r5/2p5/3p2kp/pP1n1p2/b2PpP1B/4P1NP/P4K2/6R1 b – - 0 46

Here Rybka came up with the amazing, cold-blooded move 46. … Rf8! Now if White plays his “murderous” discovered check 47. Nxe4+ Kh5! White has two pieces en prise! You might say, “Wait a minute, can’t White just go 47. Ng3+ as before?” But it’s different now, because after 47. Ng3+ Kxh4, White doesn’t have 48. Nxf5+. Even though Black’s king seems to be in a mating net, White has no way of delivering check. Meanwhile, Black is simply a piece up and has lots of useful moves, such as … Bxb5 and … Nc3-e4, that will get him out of trouble.

Lesson 1. Not all discovered checks are murderous. Look very carefully at the followup, and don’t just assume that the side that plays the discovered check is winning. Positions with hanging pieces can be very tricky.

Lesson 2. Sometimes the best move is to take back your previous move. Psychologically this is extremely difficult to do. When I unexpectedly played 45. Ng3+ in response to his move 44. … Kh5, Black had to have the presence of mind to say, “Okay, I didn’t see that. Let me go back and look for another plan.” Indeed, if he plays 45. … Kg6 and I play some other move than Rg1, say 46. Ne2 trying for a threefold repetition, then he can play 46. … Rb8, which is what he should have done in the first place. Black just wins a pawn with a dominating position.

Lesson 3. A rook and knight can often force a draw (or even win) against a king that is trapped on the edge of the board. This is a lesson I learned a long time ago. It helped me save a draw when I was three pawns down against IM Tim Taylor (a game I showed once on ChessLecture), and remembering that fact enabled me to save a draw here, too.

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I don’t know if anybody noticed this, but on Friday a new lecture of mine, called “Learn From Your Fellow Amateurs, Episode XXXIII,” went live on ChessLecture. It was a lecture I was particularly excited about, because I thought that it was a game where a nine-year-old (CL subscriber Advait Patel) defeated a 2300-rated player (Chris Mabe) with a queen sacrifice! A gorgeous game, which would certainly rank as one of the all-time great games by a nine-year-old player.

Except… I got the players backward. It was actually Mabe who played the beautiful queen sacrifice. All of my analysis is still correct, but the whole story line is different. Instead of a once-in-a-lifetime upset by a prodigy, it’s a much more commonplace example of a 2300 player systematically exploiting the mistakes (mostly, too passive play) of an 1800 player.

Poor Advait was in the awkward position of receiving my extravagant praise for a brilliancy he didn’t play. And if Chris Mabe ever found out that I had him losing to a nine-year-old class A player, he would have a right to be very upset.

So for that reason, the lecture that went up on Friday has now been taken down and replaced by another of my lectures (the King’s Gambit I won against Praveen Narayanan). I will re-record the game between Patel and Mabe, giving credit where credit is due this time.

You might wonder how I could make such a bad mistake. Well, there’s sort of a lesson here. When Patel first sent me the game, several months ago, I thought it was sort of odd that he was submitting a game where his opponent played all the great moves. In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be anything surprising about that, but in the real world most people want to show off their own brilliant victories, not their opponents’ brilliant victories.

By the time I came back to the game a few weeks later, I had forgotten who was who, and I just assumed that Patel was the winner. I got too caught up, psychologically, in this wonderful story line of the kid winning a Game of the Century. And so I forgot to check my assumptions.

This is a lesson I have learned over and over in my writing career. It’s the assumptions that you make unconsciously, the questions that you didn’t even realize you should ask, that always trip you up. But I never expected to be tripped up in quite this way!

By the way, this same thing is true in chess, too. It’s the assumptions that you didn’t even know you were making that often lead to mistakes. I’ll show you an example of this in my next post.

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Going off topic today, for obvious reasons…

Yesterday the UPS deliveryman left a heavy box on my doorstep. Sender: American Mathematical Society. I knew immediately what it was: the complimentary copies of my new book, What’s Happening in the Mathematical Sciences, Vol. 9.

Coming out on May 16.

As you can tell from my Web page, What’s Happening (or WHIMS for short) is an ongoing series of books that I write roughly every two or three years for the AMS. I spent about 75 percent of my work time last year putting Volume 9 together, so it’s a great feeling of accomplishment to see the finished product. It looks really sharp!

The articles in WHIMS are written at varying levels of mathematical sophistication, but most of them should be easily understandable to a high-school student who is interested in math, and they all should be understandable to a college math student. Many of them have to deal with current events outside of mathematics, and so you might find it interesting to read about “the math behind the news.”

Here is a brief table of contents:

1. Massive Breakthrough. The discovery of the Higgs boson.
2. Tubing Through Hyperspace. The solution of the Willmore Conjecture and two other problems, all having to do with inner tubes!
3. Tsunamis: Learning from Math, Learning from the Past. The title says it all.
4. Today’s Forecast: Ten Percent Chance of Burglary. Predictive policing — a concept first tried out right here in Santa Cruz!
5. Topologists Cross Four Off “Bucket List.” Last year Bill Thurston, one of the greatest 20th-century American mathematicians, passed away. Just before he died, four problems that he posed in the early 1980s were finally solved.
6. Mathematicians Do the Twist. The math of Rubik’s cube. With some cool photos that I took! (See below.)
7. The Right Epidemic at the Right Time. The flu pandemic of 2009 didn’t kill millions of people, thank goodness, but it did provide a great test of mathematical models to predict the spread and severity of the outbreak.
8. Thinking Topically. “Topic modeling” is a hot new way to browse large text databases, and perhaps stop cyber-bullying.
9. Thinking Tropically. Tropical geometry is a new “stick figure” approach to algebraic geometry that also has applications to string theory (in physics) and evolutionary trees (in biology).

As usual, WHIMS has lots of pictures and photographs. Two of my favorites are photos that I took of a speedcuber, Lucas Garron, during a Rubik’s Cube competition. I’m not a great photographer and ordinarily I leave the pictures to others. (99 percent of the pictures in the book are not produced by me.) But I just love this pair of photos because they show the split-second speed of Rubik’s cube solvers. The first one shows how speedcubers can spin a layer of cubies with just one finger. The second one shows Garron throwing down the cube at the moment of completion. Even though one face is slightly askew, this will count as a valid solution.

The hand is quicker than the eye!

Not a second to waste.

If you’re interested in getting a copy of WHIMS, you can either pre-order it at Amazon.com or order it from the publisher, the American Mathematical Society. List price is $25, price for AMS member is $20, and the price if you order it through Amazon is $17.64. According to Amazon, the official publication date is May 16.

When, you might wonder, am I going to write a chess book? Probably not for a long, long time… although I did wake up from a dream last week with an idea for a chess novel. But don’t hold your breath. I prefer writing things that I know I’ll get paid for!

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A while ago I sent in a submission to Chess Life for their column “My Best Move,” which appears on the last page of every issue. In this column, famous and semi-famous players share their favorite moves from their entire chess careers. I felt a little bit presumptuous putting myself in the company of players like Walter Browne, Alex Onischuk, Ben Finegold, and Irina Krush… but hey, why not? Non-presumptuous people never get anything published.

Besides, as ChessLecture fans know, I had a really good candidate for “My Best Move,” and I’m not talking about my queen sacrifice against David Pruess. (That story has already been told.) If you’ve seen my 100th ChessLecture, you’ve seen my favorite game-winning move.

Today I got the news from the Chess Life editor that they are putting my contribution in the next (June 2013) issue. I was in the right place at the right time; an anticipated submission from some other (presumably more illustrious) player didn’t show up on time, and my submission was there to fill the gap.

This brings the number of articles I’ve written for Chess Life up to five. For anyone who might be interested, here are the previous four.

“Chess in Russia: An amateur’s impressions of chess life, Soviet style”

Chess Life, August 1981, p. 15. (Note: This was written under my previous name. It’s also the first paid article I ever wrote for any publication. I was so naive back then that I didn’t even realize that Chess Life paid for articles, and I was shocked when a check arrived in my mailbox!)

“Sac Your Queen on Move Six! (A New Anti-Computer Variation)”

Chess Life, March 2007, p. 30

“The Hook & Ladder Trick”

Chess Life, July 2007, p. 44

“Don’t Just Reassess Your Chess — IMPLODe It!”

Chess Life, May 2008, p. 37

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I didn’t even notice it until this morning, but ChessLecture hit a pretty big milestone three weeks ago — we now have more than two thousand recorded lectures! As of today (April 24) there are 2015, in fact. The two thousandth lecture was a very appropriate one: a lecture on “Anand’s Immortal Game” by David Vigorito. This was a game from earlier this year where Anand beat Aronian with multiple piece sacrifices. There were some questions as to how much of Anand’s brilliancy was preparation (possibly computer-aided) and how much was discovered over the board, but it is nevertheless a fabulous and inspiring game.

Another reason this was an appropriate 2000th lecture is that David Vigorito has recorded more lectures for CL than anybody else. But it’s extremely close. Little did I realize that he and Bill Paschall are having a nip-and-tuck battle for the top spot, which they took over not too long ago from the currently-on-hiatus Jesse Kraai. There’s also a pretty close race going on for the #4 through #6 spots.

Here’s a scorecard of all the ChessLecturers and how many lectures they’ve recorded:

1. David Vigorito — 308
2. Bill Paschall — 307
3. Jesse Kraai (inactive) — 287
4. Eugene Perelshteyn — 190
5. Valeri Lilov — 185
6. Dennis Monokroussos — 182
7. Bryan Smith — 149
8. John-Paul Wallace (inactive) — 137
9. Dana Mackenzie — 129
10. Leonid Kritz — 62
11. Josh Friedel (inactive) — 20
12. Mark Diesen (deceased) — 17
13. John Watson (inactive) — 11
14. Roman Dzindzichashvili (inactive) — 9

Kind of amusing to see Dzindzichashvili on the bottom of this list. He’s actually a very good lecturer and you can catch his lectures on Chess.com. I don’t really know why it didn’t work out for him at ChessLecture, and I will keep any speculations to myself.

Segueing into a slightly different topic, does anyone have any suggestions or ideas on how ChessLecture can improve its marketing or attract more subscribers? I have a few ideas: Bring back Jesse Kraai. Make the website more dynamic and/or interactive. Bring back Jesse Kraai. Offer special package plans for chess coaches. Bring back Jesse Kraai. Any other ideas?

I’m not on the management, so I can only make suggestions. It seems to me that the real problem is that we’re a boutique store competing with supermarkets (Chess.com, Internet Chess Club) that offer the same product we do (lectures) but also a whole lot more (forums, blogs, online chess). The only way that ChessLecture can prosper, I think, is to make the case that our product is better or unique. But I’m not sure how to do that, and not sure if it’s even true.

Finally, for anybody who might wonder what I’m up to on ChessLecture, I have a nice surprise in store for you! I have started recording a new series called “Awesome State Champions.” I’ve recorded the first two lectures in the series, which will probably air a month or two from now. The first lecture features John Curdo (17 Massachusetts championships over a 37-year span, 1948-1985) and the second features Orest Popovych (4 New Jersey championships, spanning 42 years, 1959-2001! This may be a record for the longest time between a person’s first and last state championship.) One pleasure I did not expect is that their opponents have been almost as interesting as the state champions themselves. This is truly a forgotten slice of American chess history. I hope you’ll enjoy this series as much as I have so far.

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I know most of my readers don’t come here for cute kitten videos … but you get them anyway! At least this one has some chess involved (as you’ll see beginning about 1:25 in the video). You can also watch it on YouTube if you prefer.

The gray kitten is named Misty, and she is the first foster kitten in the Mackenzie Finishing School for Felines for 2013. We thought she seemed a little bit lonely, so we brought home a second kitten a couple days later, whom we named Stormy.

I’d appreciate it if someone could write down a PGN for this game.  

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This week TIME magazine published its annual list of “the 100 most influential people in the world,” and guess who was on it? Oh, I guess the title of this post gave it away. Magnus Carlsen made the list, and got a nice one-paragraph bio from Garry Kasparov, who wrote, “his intuitive style conserves the mystique of chess at a time when every CPU-enhanced fan thinks the game is easy.”

I thought it was interesting that TIME divided the list into Titans, Pioneers, Icons, Leaders, and Artists. What a puzzling list. What is the difference between a Titan, a Pioneer, and an Icon? Can they not be one and the same? Why include Artists but not Scientists? I guess scientists aren’t influential enough.

Anyway, Magnus was listed as a Titan. Last I heard, the Titans were a race of old gods that came in second in a war against the Olympians. I hope this isn’t a bad omen for him. Congratulations on the recognition, Magnus … now go back to getting ready for Viswanathan Anand!

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On my recent trip, I was surprised when a friend asked me if I had heard of Webster University and their chess coach, a woman from “somewhere in Eastern Europe.” In fact, I had just read the Chess Life article about the Pan-Am Intercollegiate tournament only a couple days earlier. The CL article was my first inkling that Susan Polgar had left Texas Tech University and started a chess team at Webster, a university in St. Louis that I had never previously heard of. (And what a team! Eight grandmasters!)

But that didn’t explain how my friend, a non-chess player, had heard of Polgar. It turns out that Susan, along with Ray Robson and Wesley So (both GMs and freshmen at the university) had appeared on the National Public Radio program “All Things Considered.” And you, too, can hear what they have to say at the NPR website by clicking here.

Unfortunately, the moderator didn’t ask the questions I would have been curious about, like: What other colleges did you apply to? Why did you choose Webster? What courses are you taking? Actually, he did ask Susan about the number of chess scholarships available at Webster (it sounds as if it’s unlimited) and sort of hinted that she left Texas Tech because of disagreements over that issue. I would have liked to hear more about that.

The NPR website also has a very recent interview and guest appearance by GM Maurice Ashley, which you can listen to here. Did you know that his sister was a world champion boxer and his brother was a world champion kickboxer? In the interview he says, “I haven’t ever been a world champion, so in my family I’ve underachieved.” Well, first American black grandmaster is a pretty good accomplishment, IMHO!

The podcast includes a segment where he plays a trivia game involving questions on chess. I was surprised that Ashley didn’t know what Aron Nimzovich famously said after losing a game to Friedrich Saemisch. Do you know the quote? (Answer below.) However, Maurice did impress me by figuring out the city named in the 1980s musical “Chess.” (Answer below.) It was kind of amusing when he told the interviewer that no chess players watched that musical. She was aghast. In fact, I suspect that most chess players don’t watch musicals. Period. But maybe I’m generalizing a bit too much here.

Finally, if you’re in a radio-listening frame of mind, I have one more treat for you. When I was visiting Emory and Henry College last week, I was interviewed for the college radio station, WEHC. The interview aired yesterday (April 17) on a program called “This Conversation,” hosted by a professor named Teresa Keller who is also the manager of the radio station. I thought she was a fabulous interviewer. She did a terrific job of summing up my occasionally rambling answers into short, comprehensible sound bites. The interview was very minimally edited; what you hear is basically the way the conversation went.

I’m afraid that I didn’t get to say anything about chess (there just wasn’t time for it), but you can hear about the mathematics of juries and sea ice in Antarctica, among other things. The interview is archived here. (Be warned, the 30-minute interview takes a little while to download.)

******************

Answers to trivia questions:

1) Nimzovich said, “Why must I lose to this idiot?”

2) The city mentioned in the musical “Chess” is Bangkok. (You might know this from the hit song, One Night in Bangkok, which reached #3 on the American music charts in 1985.)

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