For the past quarter century, I have been trying to become a top-flight theoretician by spending thousands of dollars doing chess research under the guidance of GM Lev Alburt. This culminated in the book, the "Evans Gambit Revolution" that was presented on line, and, when I supplied the ISBN, this surprised my critics.
Mark Ishee in, "Evans Gambit Games", supplied all the Evans Gambit games he could find. What was surprising is that when I counted all the wins and losses in the Evans over the past 150 years, White outscored Black by a 3:1 ratio. When I pointed this out to GM Joel Benjamin in Chess Life, he responded, "When was the last time you saw a Grandmaster lose on the Black side of the Evans Gambit?"
This was published, literally, only a few months before World Champion Garry Kasparov beat Anand with the Evans Gambit. When my book came out just as the Evans became popular again, Ken Smith was thrilled; that was why he devoted so much advertising space to my book.
As a favor to me, one of GM Alburt's most lucrative clients, Lev showed our analysis of the King's Gambit Accepted to World Champion Garry Kasparov and GM Max Dlugy when they were in New York. After about ten minutes of analysis they concluded that the opening was playable and gave the analysis 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 3.Qe2 Be7 4.Nf3 Bh4ch 5.Kd1 Be7 with an evaluation of unclear to equal.
For months, Lev and I had looked at the critical variation 3...d5! and I could find no equalizing tries for White. It is surprising to me that World Champion Kasparov didn't recommend it, particularly since it is a very attractive attacking continuation. Maybe he saw something in that line that Lev and I missed.
I got a few lessons from GM Sammy Reshevsky through the mail, but never met him in person.
In Chess Life, I have won the Best Question Contest in Larry Evans column twice, once for this move sequence: 4.Ng5 d5 5.exd5 Nxd5 6.O-O and once for an innovation in the Muzio Gambit.
My analysis has appeared in Chess Life many times including an innovation in the Poisoned Pawn Sicilian which was reviewed by GM Patrick Wolff.
The only GM who has reviewed my analysis outside Chess Life free of charge was GM Judit Polgar when she was 13 years old (she would send a smiley face on her postcards!). I guess she had time back them to get letters from her fans. She liked an innovation in the Richter-Rauzer I came up with because her signature move is g4 and it was the g4 move in one of the subvariations.
One of my innovations she might have used was based on my experience with the Wilkes-Barre when I recommended an early Qe8 in the King's Indian Defense. If memory serves, I think she played Qe8 in one KID and it turned out poorly.
When you've been in the business over 25 years, you accumulate a lot of experiences. Since I have devoted much of life to becoming a top theoretician, these experiences should not come as too much of a surprise.
There's one way to find out if a man is honest - ask him. If he says, "Yes," you know he is a crook. -- Groucho Marx