If You Could Go to Dinner with Any Chess Player, Who'd You Pick?

Hm, there was a Czech player, Luděk Pachman, he was grandmaster but also a professor and chess theoretician, so I would have loved to have a conversation with him. 

None of them, they would be asking for too many forks.

Jerry Seinfeld, to ask him the truth about Kramer's "chess side"

I would like to have a very exquisite haute cuisine dinner at one of the finest restaurants in the world with Susan Polgar.  What the Polgar sisters accomplished is behond compare: they play in the men's league and the women's league and where very successful!  I met Susan once during a Canadian national tournament in Ottawa and she was very inspirational! She does a lot for chess and in particular to promote chess for girls and this is something that is very dear to my heart because, as you know, the chess scene is unfortunately male-dominated.  A more just and equitable society would foster equality for men and women...  Susan Polgar did play Bobby Fischer and many others - she would have many stories to tell.  A fascinating woman!

I'd love to have had dinner with Najdorf, but sadly he passed away in 1997. I had the great pleasure of meeting him (and playing him) at a simultaneous exhibition in the 1980s, where he regaled us with anecdotes and stories from his long life. But he never mentioned the terrible tragedy of his family history. Only later did I learn that he had lost his entire family - parents, brothers, wife and daughter - as well as all his friends - in the Polish Holocaust. He only escaped this fate himself because he happened to be abroad, playing chess in Argentina, when Poland was invaded at the outbreak of WW2. How do you rebuild your life, after a tragedy of this magnitude? I would love to know.

Fitting that his name has been immortalised by one of the most popular opening systems at all levels.

Ju Wenjun.

No one choose Ben Finegold? Terrible... Very suspicious choices... He'd be the best for sure. He'd be making jokes about forks and he's a vegetarian, although he's favourite Sicilian is the Sicilian pizza. 

Tal, Nakamura, or... maybe Maurice Ashley.

Tal was full of wit, Naka is outspoken, and Ashley is.... yeah.

I like being around witty people.

Maybe a prodigy, we could check the newest Sicilian Dragon mainline.

And who is Magnus Charles?

Judit Polgar

Second re:  Ben Finegold.


My concern is that he's a vegetarian, but beer is a vegetable, so I'd be okay.   I doubt we'd talk that much about Chess - me being an at-home viewer.   But I'd be interested in talking to him about the chess project he's doing in Atlanta, figure out if there's a way to assist, and otherwise just have a pleasant evening talking Simpsons, Futurama - possibly "The Critic" - and stuff.


We'd stick Arjun with the check.

Second choice:

Hell, Dan Rensch seems like a nice kid who'd be generally interesting.

Though, on second thought, I'd have to say my wife.  

And that answer has nothing to do with her standing over my shoulder at the moment.

I must say, lately I've been thinking about how interesting might the dinner be with the Czech grandmaster Věra Menčíková, she used to play in the 40's, eventually killed during Nazi bombings when in London. But she was an interesting one, and sadly quite forgotten 

 Vera Menchik, the first Women's World Champion (she also held the title the longest, even longer than the Georgians, Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze) who was born in Russia (her father was Czech; her mother was British) and who became a British citizen herself when she married Rufus Stevenson in 1937 and allowed her to play in the British Championship. is hardly forgotten.  She started playing in the 1920s and played high level chess all through the 1930s but during the war years (1940s) she hardly played at all.

Bill Gates (yes, he's a chess player) as long as it was a restaurant of my choosing 

Patti Smith, the author and singer. She once sang rock duets all night long with Bobby Fischer