All the World, his wife and his pet canary, knows that there are three phases in a Chess game; the Opening, the Middle game and the End game. In this little game I was fairly lucky in that my quite neat trap for his Queen worked and I got her, a t...
Chess is a battle simulation game with an omnipotent King and a uniquely powerful Queen. At one point in the past the other pieces represented elephants, chariots, horsemen and foot soldiers. On the introduction of chess into the Wstern culture...
The first part of this game was uninspired with both myself and my opponent being very tentative in our moves. I (White) "went with the flow" and moved my King and Queen Pawns way up front; then did a "speculative sacrifice" of one of my precious ...
In chess the humble pawn is sometime on a 'mission impossible' - a forlorn hope of reaching the furthest rank and gaining instant promotion. The 'instant' part of the move is really important, along with the ability to choose to be promoted to a Q...
This all started over a game with a person from Bhutan who, apparently, didn't speak English and I definitely didn't speak Bhutanese. After a few moves of what I, mistakenly, thought was an 'unrated' game I thought I had blundered into either a 'L...
Otto Titusz Blathy's (1860-1939) was a brilliant Hungarian electrical engineer who was very well known in his day for creating really complex and difficult chess problems. In 1889 he created what is still believed to be the World's longest chess ...
(Apologies to Will Shakespeare.) In 1936 in America there was a chess game to which I didn't pay much attention as, some 3,548 miles away, I was in my cot, busy grizzling and cutting my baby teeth at the time. In this particular game, of which I ...
Well, it was the year 321BC - an easy date to remember. The Romans were half way through round two of a three round series ... this one the second Samnite war (which lasted about 30 years). They had fielded a force of 20,000 plus umpteen officers ...
In the year that Good Queen Lilibet came to the throne of England I was 16 and shared a 3-man study with Haggis and Pathrick (with a "haitch") at the Northern end of the School's Study Corridor. Being a Scholarship lad I hadn't much money and so w...
Socks in the Microwave. I'm just a short-sighted old fart with a bad memory who lives in the woods miles from anywhere civilised (That's what the title is short-hand for). But I have a friend 'Mark' (After Mark Twain who was six feet tall - we...
