Media comments on chess

[Tristan Clayton]

Commenting on today's Malasian GP on BBC1:-

"It's like a game of chess, it's almost like you are sacrificing a pawn to get back a piece with another move"

David Croft on Sky's coverage of the Malaysian GP commented on it being a "high-speed game of chess".

[JustinHorton]

Also Profile at 17:40 today on Radio 4 is about Magnus Carlsen.

Here (I've not listened to it myself)

[Geoff Chandler]

I have. It's OK. Good.

But will they ever get around to descibing the lad in his own right.

He's young, handsome, magnetic, moody and a cross between..."a boxer and a 50's gangster." (EH?)

You will also be happy to hear Magnus is not Mozart, he is also a cross between Bach and Jimi Hendrix.
(Perhaps Magnus will release 'Voodoo Chile' in D Minor.)

"....His opponents can see what is coming but cannot do anything about it."
An often used desciption of Capablanca's game.

He will win the World Championship but only if he wants to and if you want
to breed a World Champion then bring up your kids the Norwegian way.
(apparently you let them run amok and make them eat alone in a big room with with a chess set.)

[PeterTurland]

Headline in the Telegraph 'North Korea: the chess match with a dim-wit continues.'

The thing that upsets me is, ever since I was born in 1949, seeing a colossal waste of human resources, in terms of armaments and armed forces.

Back in 2003, seeing people marching up the street, carrying placards saying 'Not in my name' what got me very angry was, I could not say that, because my son was in the Gulf on a minesweeper, with cruise missiles being fired over his head at Iraq from submarines behind him. So I started thinking seriously about what causes what? I have long liked the concept of a 'citizen', first promulgated in ancient Greece thousands of years ago, with the concept of the citizen, having rights and responsibilities, ok if you were a slave hard luck, but it was the first step to having a proper civilization. A cultural 'rule of law' if you like? The saddest thing is, this is not global, where we have an enormous waste of our and our planet's resources, with around a 5th of our species having an insufficient diet and unclean water, this would change if our planet was run a by democratically decided 'rule of law' the UN decides what is 'rule of law' and has the muscle to implement it .

We could have had a global rule of law back in 1991, when the Allies having thrown Saddam out of Kuwait, could have marched all the way to Baghdad captured Saddam and had him tried by due process of law, as a war criminal, I have read somewhere or other, both generals, De la Billière and Schwarzkopf wanted to do so, but were ordered not to by Colin Powell, who was obviously under orders from Bush the elder, what I would like to know is, who was Bush under orders from? It is possible had the Allies enshrined global rule of law then, Slobodan Milosevic would not have had carried out his acts of Genocide.

My dream is, instead of chess being used as a metaphor for people waving weapons of mass destruction around, it is used for real.
I would like a UN with real teeth, democratically run to enshrine human rights and responsibilities world wide, with one strict law that no longer does our species have the right to chop down rain forests, because Orangutans have the right of a homeland also.

Ok - now I can imagine you thinking where does chess come into the picture? Simple, all UN delegates must show a certain competence at chess, before they are allowed to be delegates, thus they must show a verifiable logic ability, before they are allowed to have a hand in running our planet's affairs.

Yeah, people will say it will lead to a slight lessening of individual countries sovereignty, but that small price would lead to an enormous lessening of the human misery, some of our billions of cousins have the misfortune to live under.

[Stewart Reuben]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... es_2_Beef/
is worth a viewing. You should be able to work out which chessplayer appears in the programme about 48+ minutes in.
You also see sets a couple of times.

[Eoin Devane]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... es_2_Beef/
is worth a viewing. You should be able to work out which chessplayer appears in the programme about 48+ minutes in.
You also see sets a couple of times.

I was watching this on BBC2 earlier and must say I had not been expecting to see a chess player appear!

[Eoin Devane]

Another unexpected appearance of a chess player, alerted to me by a post on Facebook yesterday, is the choice at number 5 on this list: http://www.cosmopolitan.co.uk/love-sex/ ... en-of-2013

[Colin Patterson]

Eoin - I'm pleased to hear you weren't just browsing these pages yourself!

Judging by entries 1-5, the overriding consideration of what makes a man handsome these days is the amount of elevation you can get on your hair. And so heartening to read that fans of the chess player will need to tune into their inner 'geek'.

[Eoin Devane]

Eoin - I'm pleased to hear you weren't just browsing these pages yourself!

Indeed Colin! That's precisely why I clarified that I was alerted to it by a post on Facebook.

[Stewart Reuben]

Just to inform you all that my (ADULT!) crime novel, Death of a Woman
Master, set in Nottingham, will be available for download from
Kindle/Amazon within the next 48 hours. The cost is a huge £1.00! But this
is just a trial to discover what interest there might be in Detective
novels set in the World of Chess. I have plots ready for several more in a
series to be called The Checkmate Murders. Though I would obviously like
to make a little money from this, my main hope is to sell the idea to TV
and raise the profile of chess in the UK. PLEASE download if you can.

My original MS has been tested by a number of friends, both chess players
and non-players, and I'm pleased to say that all the "reviews" were very
favourable

David Levens

[Geoff Chandler]

Good luck with this venture.

I was given one of these Kindle things for Christmas but was not too keen on it.
The main bug was I cannot swot flies with it or tear out pages to roll a fag.

But I will of course get it back from my daughter download and read ths.

Was reminded of a Mission Impossible episode called 'The Chess Game' from 1968.
This has a relevant up to date coincidence with the media and possible cheating.

The team build a chess computer and challenge the World Chess Champion Nicholas Groat
who is attempting to steal one million in gold.

The MI player has a deaf aid (radio reciever) and one of the female team
also present during the game has a hidden camera.

She send the moves via the camera back to the team operating the computer
who in turn send the computers reply to the their man playing Groat.

Groat losses and claims they are are cheating.

The game. Groat is White.

1.e4 e6 2.Nc3 d5 3.d4 Bb4 4.Qg4 dxe4 5.Nge2 Bxc3+ 6.Nxc3 Nc6 7.a3 Nxd4 8.Qxg7 Nxc2+ 9.Ke2 Qd3
That was 1968 and now 45 years later.......

[Andrew Bak]

Surprise Surprise, the North Korea situation has drawn comparisons with chess...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22088274

[PeterTurland]

I suspect chess goes deeper when we realize, chess has 64 squares, in terms of 64 being an incredibly important number in terms of the mathematics of genetics, perhaps it interacts on a different level than we are aware of?

[Mick Norris]

My original MS has been tested by a number of friends, both chess players
and non-players, and I'm pleased to say that all the "reviews" were very
favourable

David Levens

I would take that with a very large pinch of salt

[Sean Hewitt]

I just heard David Coulthard describe F1 tactics "like a game of chess where you sacrifice a pawn for some advantage that you get later on down the line"