Chess Notes

Sergei Prokofiev and Chess

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. Grace Alekhine

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

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.