Chess Notes

Kasparov and his Predecessors

12318. Gambit and stalemate

‘Gambit’ may be used more loosely in non-chess contexts than ‘stalemate’, but both words require care. From page 83 of the Penguin 2002 edition of Troublesome Words by Bill Bryson:

‘gambit is often misused in either of two ways. First, it sometimes appears as “opening gambit”, which is redundant. Second, it is often employed to mean no more than a ploy or tactic. Properly, a gambit is an opening move that involves some strategic sacrifice or concession. All gambits are opening moves, but not all opening moves are gambits.’

And from page 189:

‘stalemate. “Senators Back Rise in Proposed Oil Tax as Stalemate Ends” (New York Times headline). Stalemates don’t end. A chess match [sic] that reaches stalemate is not awaiting a more decisive outcome; the stalemate is the outcome. “Standoff”, the word the writer probably had in mind, or “deadlock” would have been much better choices here.’

See Chess Gambits and Stalemate.

12319. Lupi on Alekhine’s final years

Frequent mention has been made of Francisco Lupi’s reminiscences of Alekhine, and here we add a PDF file of the Spanish version published on pages 38-39, 110-111 and 114 of the Argentinian magazine Leoplán, 4 September 1946.

Although Lupi’s writings were not quoted in Agonía de un Genio by Pablo Morán (Madrid, 1972), pages 3-8 and 275-280 of the English edition – A. Alekhine Agony of a Chess Genius edited and translated by Frank X. Mur (Jefferson, 1989) – incorporated the translations published under the title ‘The Broken King’ in the 1 September and 1 October 1946 issues of Chess World.

12320. Mrs Alekhine

From the Crítica archive (Argentina) three photographs have been provided by Olimpiu G. Urcan (Singapore):

Note on 21 August 2026:

This item was originally headed ‘Grace Alekhine’, but Willibald Müller (Munich, Germany) points out that they are pictures of Nadezhda Alekhine. See the further shots of her in Alexander Alekhine Miscellanea.

12321. Gymnasium of the Mind

As shown in Chess: the Gymnasium of the Mind, information is still lacking on why the phrase, found in print in 1803, has sometimes been attributed to Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924).

Dmitriy Komendenko (St Petersburg, Russia) draws attention to M.S. Kogan’s writings in the 1930s: two occurrences of the remark in relation to Lenin, though it was not attributed to him.

Firstly, page 15 of the 1/1937 issue of Шахматы в СССР:

‘Шахматы для него были не только игрой, но он находил в них своего рода “гимнастику ума”.’

A similar wording was on page 343 of Kogan’s book Очерки по истории шахмат в СССР (Moscow and Leningrad, 1938):

12322. The number of chessplayers

From page 87 of U.S.-China Strategic Relations and Competitive Sports edited by David Lai (Cham, 2022), in a chapter attributed to ‘D.S. Lyle, Department of Defense, US Army, Washington, DC, USA’:

‘... Edward Winter estimated that there are probably about 600 million chess players in the world and 30 million in the United States.’

The endnote link to our article How Many People Play Chess? should have alerted the writer to his, or its, error. For ‘estimated that’ read ‘ridiculed estimates that’.

12323. Chaim Janowski

From Alan McGowan (Waterloo, Canada):

‘This Łódź registration card shows Chaim Janowski, born on 15 June 1853 at the same place shown for his brother. The father’s name is given as Markiel, which appears related to the patronymic in Dawid Markelowicz Janowsky (C.N. 10863).

The document is number 218 within a series covering 1916-21 on the Szukaj w Archiwach website.’

We are also grateful to Mr McGowan for providing a set of detailed notes on the family, and they have been added to our Chaim Janowski section.

12324. An invitation to the three FIDE presidential candidates

The FIDE 2026 Veteran Support Program totals €37,000, shared among 17 people.

Please comment.

12325. Staunton’s ‘devilish bad games’ (C.N.s 2885, 10293 & 10353)

From Jerry Spinrad (Nashville, TN, USA):

‘Chess Archaeology just put out an earlier, and more convincing, report of the devilish bad games annotation in Morphy’s copy of the 1851 tournament book. This is in the New Orleans Sunday States column of 18 August 1895. Interestingly, all of Morphy’s penciled annotations in the book are given in the column. The book was lent to [Galbreath] by McConnell. Once again, we see that Buck was not just making stuff up about Morphy. I personally think he is a more credible source than he is usually given credit for, though he should not, of course, be blindly trusted.’

From newspapers.com we give the full column exactly as it appeared on page 16 of the New Orleans newspaper:

The sequence of items on the topic is given in Paul Morphy.

12326. Staunton’s ‘devilish bad games’ (C.N.s 2885, 10293, 10353 & 12325)

Following on from the previous item, we show in red Morphy’s handwritten additions to the title page of the London, 1851 tournament book according to John Galbreath in the New Orleans Sunday States chess column of 18 August 1895, page 16:

In accounts of this Morphy-Staunton episode the word ‘of’ is frequently absent before ‘some’.

As shown in C.N. 12325, John Galbreath stated that the flyleaf had ‘Paul Morphy Oct. 10th 1852’, but the date establishes nothing about when Morphy acquired the book, wrote on the title page, added marginalia to games or gave the book to James McConnell.

The volume’s availability in the United States was announced (among ‘New volumes just received’) on page 3 of the New-York Daily Times, 2 June 1852.

C.N. 10293 reported that, according to page 8 of Paul Morphy. His Later Life by C.A. Buck (Newport, 1902), Morphy (born on 22 June 1837) was aged 15 when he gave the book to McConnell. See also Buck’s text in C.N. 10353, from the Evening Gazette of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 29 December 1900, page 9. David Lawson’s monograph (page 42 of the hardback and pages 39-40 of the paperback) stated sourcelessly that Morphy acquired the book at the end of 1853 and ‘soon’ gave it to McConnell.

Once again, Lawson’s 1976 book provides a useful illustration of how the higher échelons of chess history writing have progressed over recent decades. If Paul Morphy The Pride and Sorrow of Chess, admirable in so many respects, were a new publication today, any competent appraisal would note the incomplete sourcing, yet we recall no such criticism of Lawson’s monograph in the 1970s, even from inimical reviewers.

12327. Morphy’s problem

Mate in two moves

This problem, composed by Paul Morphy when he was 12, was first published in the New York Clipper, 28 June 1856, page 78. To the information in our feature article Robert John McCrary (Columbia, SC, USA) adds:

‘It impresses me that Morphy’s problem was in the forefront of composition. In the 1840s there was a continuing debate about whether compositions (not always then called problems) should have only one key; should avoid unnecessary men; should not have checking keys; should contain novel or atypical ideas behind the key; should not use conditionals; and should feature short solutions. Morphy’s problem checks all those boxes in being consistent with the judging standards that were being developed for problem competitions (themselves a relative novelty).’

Our correspondent notes that it is often described as the first chess position solved by a modern computer; see, for instance, pages 26-28 of The Machine Plays Chess? by Alex G. Bell (Oxford, 1978).

It was customarily shown with play on the king’s side, and no mention of Morphy. Below is a report on page 5 of the Manchester Guardian, 15 November 1951:

Regarding the first paragraph, see our feature article on Alistair Cooke, as well as Chess and Computers.

A further question is when Morphy’s problem was first used as a simple illustration of Zugzwang – for which it can hardly be bettered.

12328. Dr Rubinfine

The text of C.N. 2299, also shown in Reuben Fine, Chess and Psychology:

Allard Hoogland (Doornspijk, the Netherlands) draws attention to a passage in a book on the alleged American spy Alger Hiss (1904-96). On page 128 of Laughing Last (Boston, 1977) Tony Hiss quoted his father as saying:

‘Dr Rubinfine [sic], my analyst, says I have a phobia against fear and don’t get afraid even when I should get afraid.’

Our correspondent asks whether Reuben Fine is meant.

Now, Brian Ridgely (Raleigh, NC, USA) suggests that the reference was almost certainly to the New York psychoanalyst Dr David L. Rubinfine, who married a patient, Elaine May.

The notice of his death on page 2 of Part II of the Los Angeles Times, 24 November 1982 had the spelling ‘Rubenfine’:

12329. I.A. Horowitz and Solitaire Chess

From Sean Robinson (Tacoma, WA, USA):

‘Did I.A. Horowitz (or Reinfeld) invent “Solitaire Chess"?

That match-the-masters scoring exercise, aimed at amateur enthusiasts, was a regular and popular feature in Horowitz’s Chess Review. It first appeared in the January 1942 edition, page 11, initially headlined as “Play the Masters” (the “Solitaire Chess” title took hold in January 1944). The first cited game was Kashdan-Rubinstein, Prague, 1931, derived from Hans Kmoch’s book on Rubinstein’s games.

Readers embraced the column, and in occasional letters they fussed when it failed to appear. The column continued for decades. In 1962, Horowitz published a book, a culled compendium featuring 62 games. After Chess Review merged with Chess Life in 1969, the column, credited to Horowitz, appeared sporadically for a time, through September 1970.

After that, the column ended. Illness and age overtook Horowitz, who died in 1973. The feature subsequently reappeared in Chess Life in June 1981, at first uncredited but then under the names of two authors, firstly Robert Snyder and then Allan Savage, continuing through the December 1983 issue. At that point, “Solitaire Chess” hibernated through the remainder of the 1980s. Bruce Pandolfini took charge of it in the August 1991 issue, and the column has continued to the present. Pandolfini published a compendium of his own in 2005.

Puzzle books are common in chess literature. Match-the-master books with complete scoring (a difficult editing enterprise) are less common. I am trying to understand whether Horowitz (or Reinfeld) deserves credit for the original idea. Both men were hucksters, but both clearly understood their readers.

Reinfeld published Chess by Yourself (Philadelphia, 1946), which deploys a more elaborate scoring system, but Solitaire Chess was established by that time in Chess Review. Leonard Barden’s excellent How Good is Your Chess? (London, 1957) is another example, but again, it came later. Bent Larsen’s Good Move Guide (Oxford, 1982) includes a chapter devoted to the exercise (Larsen mentions the difficulty of the scoring system). In the late 1980s and 1990s, iterations of CHESS ran columns by Daniel King (again, “How Good is Your Chess?”), which have been turned into amusing books.

Horowitz (a colorful but sometimes controversial figure) would make an interesting subject for a McFarland-style biography and game collection. He has been more derided than appreciated.’

Prompted by Mr Robinson’s contribution, we have prepared a general feature article, Israel Albert (Al) Horowitz.