Since I would not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me (emily d.) OTB

      Since there was no OTB this month, I borrowed an idea from Sim, and decided to bring you my one  and only true postal game.                                                                                                                           Back in the days when I was single and had more money than brains and talent... Come to think of it .. even when I was dead broke I had more money than brains and talent... but I digress. I was finally free  of debt for the first time in my adult life. And reading in the back of ChessLife, I discovered that Samuel Reshevsky was offering to play postal matches against anyone... anyone, that is, that was willing to pay $100 and provide him with all the needed postcards (that’s right .. Real postcards) that he would need to send the return moves.                                                                                                                        

The Game, as I called it in the small book I wrote about it while I played, began in September of 1990 and ended in January of 1992. Since I had no real talent or knowledge of chess, I would have to as I always did, use brute force calculations. But since there was no time limit to the moves .. I was able to brute force calculate my brains out.                                                                                                          

There was quite a lot to discover about myself reading through those old pages: I fell in and out of love with three different women that had little to no real interest in me and two other women were    apparently chasing after me that I had little to no interest in. Thus keeping my life in balance.               

My wife and son were more than a decade away in my future but oddly enough I found that I had        prognosticated about their “being out there” waiting.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Pages and pages of “if he goes there I go there” litter the little book like doggy urine posts in the park. Rarely did I sniff out the correct move in advance. I knew, of course, while I sweated and strained over every move, good old Sammy was up in New York somewhere glancing at my move on the card I’d sent, scribbling down his next move and promptly forgetting about my existence. For me it was like  Sisyphus with each move.. struggling to get to the top and GM Reshevsky doubtless thought I was      more like a sissy-puss to play.                                                                                                                     

 

Herein, then, is THE GAME

 

 

 

 

 

 

my good friend from Australia,  Rob-cat,  has offered me the following analysis including a          continuation that I had not conceived  at the time.                                                                                   

 

 

 

All that I know is that everything I looked at had a hook in it that I could not swallow.  With my limited skills back then, I could not imagine going forward or any other path.  For a "nothing"  like me to attain to a draw against a world renown GM was more than I ever might have deemed possible.  I am humbly grateful to this grand old man of chess, GM Reshevsky for the time I spent with him OTB   postally and the long term pride and hope this game gave me in chess.  God rest his crusty old soul.