YOU’LL NEVER FORGET HOW TO CHECKMATE
By GM Andy Soltis
NY Post
December 30, 2007 — CHESS PLAYERS who drop out of competitive chess – or who just stop playing casually on the Internet – are often tempted to get back in the game. But they’re afraid they’ll never play as well as they used to.
They should be cheered by Gata Kamsky’s return to tournaments after a nearly decade-long break. It shows that there are some qualities a player never loses.
The Brooklyn grandmaster was rusty when he entered the 2005 World Cup, but he was still one of the world’s best defenders and best calculators. “He defends stubbornly,” said Alexander Grischuk, who managed to oust Kamsky that year.
What a player does lose when he drops out of chess for a period is contact with the latest opening ideas. This doesn’t matter much at the amateur level, but it meant Kamsky was at a big disadvantage for the past two years.
Fortunately, in the 2007 World Cup he enlisted as his second Emil Sutovsky of Israel, one of the world’s top theoreticians, after Sutovsky was knocked out in a first-round upset.
And what about Gata’s controversial father, Rustam? Kamsky said they kept in constant touch by phone during the tournament and that his father gave him a lot of valuable advice.
Source: NY Post
Nice article by GM Soltis. Much better than the New York Times chess columnist. Maybe the Times should start looking for a GM to write their columns. Paging Joel Benjamin or any of the other GM chess columnists out there.
ny times is a heaping pile of cow dung liberial sick communist pukes all of them
I’m just glad the NYT has a chess column at all. There aren’t many out there, are there? Benjamin? He’s not much of a writer. A person doesn’t have to be a GM to write a good column. IM Jack Peters of the LA Times and David Sands of the Washington Times do a good job.
Well, the Times just hired another neo-con columnist for its op ed page (William Kristol), one of the rah rah let’s go to war in Iraq boys so I guess they are trying to play down their liberal roots.
I don’t know Peters or Sands but I don’t think much of what passes for a chess column in the New York Times these days. He’s not much of a chess player and not much of a writer.
The chess coverage in the NY Post has been excellent. I wouldn’t have expected that from a paper that runs huge typeset headlines.
I wonder how people feel about the Guardian’s chess coverage since Nigel Short’s departure.