Here's a rather long and involved posting on the Cunningham that I had created for another forum a while back and which I'm reposting now for anyone who might be interested in such things: When I first started playing the King's Gambit...
Sheenagh Pugh is an award winning poet and novelist from Wales. She also teaches creative writing at the University of Glamorgan. Some of her published poetry books include: Prisoners of TransienceSelected Poems Folk MusicEarth stud...
Here are some combinations from Irving Chernev's "Combinations: The Heart of Chess." Black resigned after White's next move: Black resigned after White's 30th move in this deep combination: Click HERE for a fantastic combinatio...
Frank Melville Teed The latter part of the nineteeth century saw many fine chess players in the New York area. One of the best of these players was Frank Melville Teed. Teed was born in Westchester County, N. Y. during the last month o...
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Charles de Maurian, well known as Paul Morphy's childhood and life-long friend, developed very quickly as a chess player. He began learning the game from Morphy during the 1853-4 school year at Spring Hill College and was able to place first in ...
In my previous blog, Charles de Maurian, I gave an account of John Albert Galbreath. Jeremy Spinrad, a profuse writer on 19th century chess, apprised me of a telegraph match between Mississippi and New Orleans which included both Galbreath a...
Charles Amedée de Maurian died slighly over 100 years ago. I was reminded the other week (by none other than Dr. Jeremy Spinrad, best known in chess circles from his 3 years of contributions to "Chess Cafe" under the title "New Stories about O...
Today, especially on the Internet, fast games are probably more the rule than the exception. Most of the fast games played fall under the "Blitz" and "Bullet" or "Lightning" heading. Time clocks, particularly automatic ones such as chess se...
Some men and women are clearly champions and reach the pinnacle of their field in an almost predictable manner. Some are champion material, but the fates have conspired against them, keeping them from reaching the very top. Still others bec...
I know of Elena Donaldson mainly for three reasons- she was a women's world championship contender(1986); she won the U.S. Women's Chess Championship 3 times: 1990, 1993 (shared) and 1994; she defected from the USSR in 1988 to marry John Do...
Here are some photos of various chess masters and their spouses: We'll start with one of the wives (he was married and divorced twice) of the 19th century Dutch polymath - and for our purposes, chess historian - Antonius van der Linde. I couldn...
Anthony Edward Santasiere - This name evokes images of the New York chess scene during the 1920, 30s and 40s: Frank Marshall, Edward Lasker, Albert Pinkus, Fred Reinfeld, Sammy Reshevsky, Abe Kupchik, Isaac Kashdan, I.A. Horowitz, Herbert Seidm...
A long, long time ago... in September of 1706 in Amsterdam to be exact, a man named Mr. Caze dated his manuscript on chess, "Instruction pour ce livre d'échecs : contenant les diverses manieres de jouer le gambit," in a letter of introducti...
Paul Morphy, the pinnacle of the Romantic Age of Chess, was an artist who, in the true spirit of Romanticism, considered the combination the apex of Chess. Like all very good players, he was able to effect combinations much more often against we...
I started playing chess 960 about a half year ago. I played about 2 dozen games, then sort of drifted away from it. Yesterday, I played my first game in about 4 months. I try to play at 5/0 controls when I can, and this game was no differ...
1672 reprint of Barbier's version of ""The famous game of chesse-play" One of the earliest English-language classifications of mates is found in the 1614 book by Arthur Saul, entitled: "The famous game of chesse-play truely dis...
Mary Weiser Bain Part I When the next women's championship rolled around in 1951, Mary Bain finally won, thanks in part to a bitter 107 draw against Gresser who had the advantage of 3 pawns and a Bishop to Bain's two pawns and a Kni...
Mary Weiser Bain always seemed to have gotten lost in the shadows of Mona May Karff and Gisela Gresser. But this pioneer of women's chess in the United States played no less a role. While Gresser was home-grown, Mary Bain was born in Hung...
In 1897 Lawrence & Bullen of London published a book of 39 essays by H. G. Well entitled, "Certain Personal Matters." Essay number 30's topic was Chess. This clipping is not from "Certain Personal Matters" but illustrates that, althoug...
After around 600 blog entries, things get somewhat muddled, murky and lost. I have written extensively on Paul Morphy, the subject of my attention for a dozen or more years, both here and on my chess site. I wanted to put some cohesion into ...
This highly insightful and lively article was published in "The Press," a London journal, in 1858, and excerpted from Max Lange's "Paul Morphy: A Sketch from the Chess World." "The chess world (for chess wo...
