English Chess Forum

To answer the original query, you can find the Laws of Chess (going back to the year dot) on the Chess Arbiters Association website under the link "Laws". http://chessarbitersassociation.co.uk/html/laws.html Yes that is a useful site and my laptop's Bullguard antivirus did not signal any problem wi...

To answer the original query, you can find the Laws of Chess (going back to the year dot) on the Chess Arbiters Association website under the link "Laws". http://chessarbitersassociation.co.uk/html/laws.html Yes that is a useful site and my laptop's Bullguard antivirus did not signal any problem wi...

Thanks for the update on White, Gordon.

Could someone personally recommend a publication on the history of Soviet Chess. I would ideally prefer something written by or with input from an historian rather then something written by a titled chess player. I recently bought Soltis's Soviet Chess 1917-1991 but I found it to be disappointing o...

Botvinnik certainly did not visit Dublin 1979, if ever. I organised a FIDE rated tournament in Dublin at Easter 1979; that is when Colm Barry would have played George Botterill. Please ask Colm to contact me, and give him my regards, thanks. I would never dream of using chessgames.com as a source fo...

http://www.chessville.com/BillWall/DeathsofChessPlayers.htm 1) I see that (as of late May 2013) the link which began this thread no longer works and just goes to a general Chessville page. Does anyone know what, if anything, has become of Bill Wall? 2) While going through some old volumes of The Fi...

BCM is writing about chess at Olympia at the School Boys and Girls Exhibition, now long buried. Who can help us with memories? We have a photo of the 1958 Primary Schools Champ, one Roger Taylor. Did you know him? James Pratt www.britishchessmagazine.co.uk Bob Wade ran the stand for (I think) the C...

Leonard Barden previously corrected me on that in another thread...... Bagirov had his ultimately fatal heart attack whilst playing, but did not actually die until a while afterwards. Something similar happened to Latvian grandmaster Aivars Gipslis who collapsed at the board while playing an open t...

On this topic, read "Birth of the Chess Queen" by Marilyn Yalom (published 2004).

Thanks to those who have recommended my book 'Eminent Victorian Chess Players'. Certainly you will get a much more nuanced view from reading it, but I can suggest the following picture roughly. I am taking the initial question about this being England's number one player literally, assuming that we ...

Alan, now that the absence of Staunton from your list of "Masters who visited Scotland" has been rectified, perhaps notes about other visiting masters can be offered by other forum members. For example, Harrwitz visited Aberdeen! http://chessscotland.com/history/mastervisits.htm Alan, I think you c...

Maybe not, his second marriage was in 1941 - to a much younger and probably wealthier lady, so this does sound plausible. During the war years, I would imagine there was little organised chess. So if all the BCF did was to continue to exist, it could function with officials out of action, although ...

5. J H Donner vs Keene 1-0 41 1971 London (England) D07 Queen's Gambit Declined, Chigorin Defense 6. Keene vs J H Donner 0-1 20 1971 Team Match E04 Catalan, Open, 5.Nf3 As far as I know Donner didn't play against keen in the Olympiad 1968. I think this is the second game of Vlissingen 1968 I'd thin...

I doubt the grading reference for GH Davies is right - he was about 175 in 1976. ... I know H Erdogan did change his name from something, but I'm not sure it was what was suggested earlier. (But that is only a vague memory). Gordon H. Davies (probably the same person) is an ICCF senior internationa...

Yes, Ashcroft won that pretty game against me in the Postal Chess Club in 1971. I never met him in person. While doing research in the British Library some years ago, I found out that he must have been pretty left-wing in his youth, as he was mentioned in "Time and Space", official organ of the Work...