On 16-17 October 2025 we mentioned in Chess
Awards that Mr Sean Marsh, a British chess writer, had
posted a stream of false information and personal insults about
us. Chapter and verse are now provided, on an old matter which we
have not previously addressed in C.N.
It concerns article
23 in our Chess Explorations series for ChessBase, posted on
12 July 2009. See too our feature article Hype
in Chess.
The two versions differ in one respect: the ChessBase text omits
the following section:
Regarding titles for over-the-board play, authors and
publishers often lose all sense of proportion. The following
comes from the back cover of A World Champion’s Guide to
Chess by Susan Polgar and Paul Truong (New York, 2005):
There is much more. The front and back covers also describe
‘Grandmaster Susan Polgar’ as ‘Four-time Women’s World Chess
Champion’, ‘2004 Olympiad Gold Medalist’, ‘a living legend’ and
‘a four-time Women’s World Champion and the top-ranked woman
chess player in the United States’. Once the reader’s toes have
uncurled after that torrent, he may feel that it mainly springs
from vain indecorum rather than an attempt to deceive, but the
same can hardly be said of The Batsford Chess Encyclopedia
by Nathan Divinsky (London, 1990), i.e. the book itself and the
publisher’s puffery.
In Hype in Chess we explain why there are two versions:
The above article originally appeared at ChessBase.com, except
that here we have restored a section about Susan Polgar which
was deleted from the ChessBase version. Some individuals (such
as Raymond Keene, at chessgames.com on 13 July 2009) jumped to
the conclusion that we had been ‘censored’ by ChessBase, and
there was gossip about legal action having been threatened by
Susan Polgar.
Below is an account of what happened, written at the time and
confirmed by Mr Frederic Friedel of ChessBase. We envisaged
including it as a follow-up to C.N. 6212, but eventually decided
not to.
‘Legal threats’ and ‘censorship’ have been evoked on Internet
outlets, but here we give the facts.
The article, concerning hype in chess books, was posted on 12
July 2009 and, to repeat our words in C.N. 6212, it ‘gave
examples of various kinds, up to and including outright
mendacity’. One passage concerned A World Champion’s Guide
to Chess by Susan Polgar and Paul Truong (New York,
2005). We ridiculed (e.g. with the term ‘vain indecorum’) the
fact that the front and back covers were emblazoned with an
exceptionally long string of Mrs Polgar’s titles/achievements.
The following day, some 16 hours after the article was
posted, Frederic Friedel of ChessBase received a telephone
call from Mrs Polgar, who objected on three grounds: (a) the
statements about her in the book were written by the
publishers; (b) they were true; (c) our article, with a
Pinocchio thumbnail picture on the ChessBase homepage, would
be used against her in pending court cases in which her
opponents were portraying her as an habitual liar and
criminal.
Considering the circumstances exceptional, Mr Friedel decided
to remove our article temporarily while consulting us on how
to handle the matter.
From our own standpoint, the key considerations were as
follows:
i) our criticism, accurate and relevant to the issue of
hype, had focussed on the boasting on the covers of Mrs
Polgar’s book, as opposed to the issue of veracity;
ii) other cases discussed in the article were obviously far
more important, and it was they, and not the case of Mrs
Polgar, that had prompted/justified the Pinocchio thumbnail
picture;
iii) we were fully prepared to envisage, as Mr Friedel
suggested to us, some rewording of the Polgar section;
iv) however, in the interests of speed and simplicity our
own preference was to drop the Polgar section.
We therefore proposed deletion to Mr Friedel, who accepted
our suggestion. The article re-appeared on-line after a total
absence of half an hour or so.
In neither her telephone call nor a confirmatory e-mail
message to Mr Friedel did Mrs Polgar express the remotest
threat of legal action against anyone. At no point did Mr
Friedel suggest to us that the Polgar section of our article
should be cut out, and a further disappointment for those
hoping for bad blood is that our exchanges with Mr Friedel
were unfailingly amicable throughout.
Addition on 19 October 2025:
From Cuttings
(under the heading ‘Yet another invention’):
At chessgames.com on 13 July 2009 Raymond Keene stated:
‘i see today that chessbase censored winters comments about
susan polgar and took down what winter had written about
her-interesting!’
ChessBase has never censored anything written by us.
And so to Mr Marsh. Knowing nothing about the matter, on 14 July
2009 he posted on Marsh
Towers an article which is still there to this day:
We briefly annotate the article paragraph by paragraph:
Nobody was censored by anyone.
Mr Marsh should have preceded this with ‘Memo to self’ and
stopped there.
An ‘opinion’ with zero substantiation.
Another Marsh ‘Memo to self’ is called for.
It is ‘a dangerous and tricky business’ only for those who
purvey falsehoods.
Our ChessBase article was not censored.
‘A particularly biting set of comments against a World
Champion’: they could be considered the least ‘biting’ remarks
in the article, which is precisely why we willingly proposed
their deletion by ChessBase.
‘Hatred and prejudice’: another opinion with zero
substantiation, and another one that can easily be turned
against Mr Marsh.
‘Before certain parts were censored’: nothing was censored. One
part was deleted, at our suggestion.
‘Contained a much stronger attack on a World Champion’:
senseless because our original version had a text about Susan
Polgar whereas the revised version did not mention her at all.
‘The basic tone was to repeatedly call the champion a liar’:
false, as shown by the complete text above.
‘Probably due to a threat of legal action’: false.
By chance we have just been re-reading the October 2008 edition
of CHESS (Editor: Jimmy Adams. Executive Editor: Malcolm
Pein). Among the contents:
Pages 5-15: a report by Raymond Keene on the Staunton
Memorial tournament, which he had organized. Page 7 included,
without sources, a biographical feature on Staunton which was
a copy-paste from previous writings of his;
Page 16: a full-page letter (about 180 lines in three
columns) dated 19 May 2008 from Raymond Keene to Kate Hoey MP.
‘I am writing to you now to suggest that we should revive the
tradition of the annual London Grandmaster Tournament ...’ ‘My
preferred route would be to invite you to lunch at Simpsons in
the Strand ...’ An editorial note on page 15 stated that the
letter (copied to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson) had
received no reply, after three months;
Pages 17-18: a flattering report on the Staunton Memorial
tournament by Sean Marsh, ending with a banner advertisement
for Raymond Keene’s website;
Page 38: a 35-line article by Raymond Keene, ‘Chess versus
Alzheimer’s’;
Pages 47-52: ‘Sean Marsh interviews GM Raymond Keene OBE.’
Sycophancy (‘Your knowledge and experience of chess literature
is [sic] absolutely immense ...’), with not a single
probing/challenging question.
