Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Bobby Fischer Goes To War
What I'm currently reading: a great book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow.
I was at Scout camp as the endgame of the (first) Fischer-Spassky match was wrapping up. I remembered our high school chess club so crowded I couldn't get a game until the second wave of buses left the parking lot 40 minutes after dismissal. Numbers didn't help our team, though. My sophomore year, we saw defections from a disspirited squad that went 2-11. One win came when our opponent accidentally rescheduled a postponed match with the county champs the day our match was set. So we faced off against the junior high team in their district. We got our other win when our opponents didn't show up.
I was tired of losing, so I devoured two excellent books from the local library. Irving Chernev's Logical Chess Move By Move. As the title suggests, it takes you through whole games, explaining each move as it was made. The other was by Edward Lasker, which gave me over 600 pages of quizzes. (Choose the best move, if A. then turn to page 234; if B. then go to 242 -- can't recall the type of book this is called.) The books helped, but I didn't begin to understand chess till I began playing in tournaments at the end of 10th grade. Personally, I vowed that next year would be different, and I convinced my friends to join me in the weekend events at the chess club.
We had a great underdog experience that next year. We started 0-2-1 before winning seven straight matches to finish off the regular season. We won three playoff matches to meet the eventual state champs in the final. We lost, but that finish, plus tying for third in the state scholastic gave us a heady experience of success. We repeated our state finish my senior year, and the county league title also eluded our school -- until years after I graduated. Any chessplayers in the bloggerhood?
