English Chess Forum

Dr Tim Harding of Trinity Cpollege Dublin will give a lecture in the Ecclesiastical Room at the Institute of Historical Research (Senate House, Malet Street) on Monday 1 March 2010 5.15 PM 'Home accomplishment or public competition: The dilemma of the Victorian chess queens' Apparently anyone who is...

Dear Mr Spivack, With regard to your eyes, do not despair. I suffer from multiple sclerosis and when I noticed that my eyesight had declined assumed it was due to this. As you are doubtless aware, MS is an incurable illness and consequently I assumed that nothing could be done about my eyesight. How...

Dear Mr Spivack, Thank you for your reply, though I cannot say that I found the vast majority of your statements remotely convincing. An example of this relates to the reply you make to a statement in a letter from Andy Burnett to me. Naturally I assumed that your comments related to me, though acco...

Dear Mr Spivack, I read your recent communication with some surprise and wondered if your attack on pedantry was an attempt to pull my leg. If you forgive me saying so, the intensity of your response towards my errors, typos and such like, seems quite disproportionate and embodying someone who is a ...

My contention concerning Steinitz's greatness was essentially based on the fact that during the period when he was supreme there was a fairly good structure for enabling the top players to compete with one another (by contrast in Philidor's day there was nothing really) and Steinitz embraced matches...

Dear Andy, Pardon me for misunderstanding you. I am afraid that I am ignorant concerning the meaning of the symbol that you used! I am afraid that I am not equipped with even the basic elements of tec speak and could probably do with something like a Ladybird (remember them!) book of computer terms....

Dear Mr Spivack, Thank you for your reply and I hope the following will clarify things. (1) My reason for including an apology to Isaac Wallis and broadening it out to anyone who had participated in my request for information on the demise of the clubs at Islington and Hampstead was because Isaac's ...

I am a little puzzled that my brief note has produced the rather strange remarks that it has. With regard to Mr Spivack's declaration that my 'reading skills leave much to be desired', I am a little puzzled. Yes, I reallised that Mr Mendez was writing from Spain, but as the subject of his research w...

I would have thought the best place in England to locate old copies of Chess would be the British Library in central London, which officially holds them all. I am sure there must be numerous libraries on the continent that hold similar collections. In England the university libraries at Cambridge, D...

Sorry, I like Olympiads and am trying to obtain the scores of the chess games by the England men's team in the following matches: They are all from the 1974 Nice Olympiad the games by Keene, Whiteley and Stean against Ecuador The games by Hartston, Whiteley and Stean against Rhodesia The games by Ha...

Dear Peter, My definition is a bit reductive. So far as I am concerned the player who genuinely confronts all his most plausible challengers in match play for the longest period is the greatest. Naturally I am aware that such a definition is open to a great deal of his dispute but do think that it h...

Dear Geoff, Ola and Roger, Many thanks for replying. My letter originally appeared in BCM Vol 109 December 1989 552-3 and did not elicit any response. The second component in that letter was the following: An interesting methodological approach to the question of who was the greatest player of all t...

From the post 1840s onwards the international chess community has had a certain capacity for assessing the relative strength of the handful of players at the very top end of the ability range. Although the modern age has provided greater scope for the emergence and cultivation of chess genius, proba...

I suspect Blackburne's win at Berlin 1881, where he demolished a very strong field, might well rank as the best ever tournament display by a British born player. I am sure that Short's triumph over Karpov a hundred and ten years later must be the best ever match result by a British player and surely...

Dear Matt and Geoff, I cannot agree with your assessment of the standing of professional players in the nineteenth century and I would certainly not pay too much attention to the anecdote quoted in the New Orleans Times Democrat, which reads to me like the sort of warmed over collection of anecdotes...