This game might illustrate the deep drawback of not blowing up the d5-center with c6 (or of not having c6 in reserve): Black never gets vertical space for his Rs, nor for the Bb7. Even Nc5 has no targets: White just ignores it, and dogs the DSB in its hidey-hole. That's too many Black pieces failing at being pieces.

Ironically White played the wrong strategy. He should have exhanged the N on c5 gaining a passed pawn in stead of veering over to the King side. Also f4 was not the best.

But I think the psychological effect of his move to the King side led to a psychological wariness for Caruana leading to his error, 30. ... Bxh6 which is probably the losing move. He shouldn't have exchanged that B and allow the Q into h6.

'Tal and the hippopotamus' Tal vs Vasiukov, 1964

Writers seeing or finding things the players never saw or even considered was I think fairly common in the pre-computer days.

I won a brilliancy prize in 1978 and happened to eavesdrop on the judge explaining to another player why it won.

Engine evaluations don't mean nothing. But sometimes in complex positions the engine is too slow so I need a faster computer as well as a better engine. I have the free Komodo. But I always look at alternatives. In fact though after teh f4 move Komodo does revert. There is a fuzzy point in this game where it isn't clear why White lost. Spassky may have had a defense. Some players are brilliant in defense and attack and maybe in that game Spassky missed a defense.

Sometimes you have to go for it, risk opening up the opponent and take it to the opponent. The Ruy Lopez has some very complex and subtle variations though so it helps to use a good computer as well as human "intuition".

Perhaps they need a new program that uses human and computer methods...that somehow actually sees the board and eliminates calculating irrelevant moves....Or that focuses on the more human moves. Something like that. Susan Polgar I think it was also said they (the computers) need to explain why they play what they do play.

Good as they are the machines are still, in computer terms and possibly human brain terms in some ways (except for tactical procedures etc); they are relatively primitive. Well when I was young there was no television in NZ let alone computers, they were something in science fiction books!

He showed a wonderful variation that I had not seen nor had any intention of playing. If the judge, it was this lad Alastair F White had not been such a good and imaginative player himself I would not have won it.>

You should show your game on here!

I might have got the story a bit garbled I am doing a project where I go through the dewey decimal system taking books at random and taking more of those I would normally not like. I am up to the 500s and without looking yesterday I picked up 1) a book about elephants 2) a book about a park in Scotland where fungi are studies 3) a book about the stars etc in the Southern Hemisphere 4) a book about mathematics and there is a chapter on chess in it!

I had no idea. This sent me to another part of the library where I found Chess and Philosophy.

But the book about mathematics had the story of Tal in it.

My reason for this is an ongoing complex lit. art project (it is actually hard to categorize what I am doing: but I am sampling all kinds of writing in a more or less random way. Here I am doing my random sampling in a more systematic way and when I say get to rugby or Mills and Boon I will force myself to use more of the texts of such books but starting from 000 (computers! which paradoxically dont interest me much so I quoted more, the point being sometimes to make it look quite different from something say that is "poetic" and has strange codes and so on so I often break off mid sentence and quotes are chosen semi-randomly) and so I procede!

But chess is there, and I borrowed the book on maths and the one about philosophy (endorsed on the back by Jennifer Sharade). I allow myself to get out books that are more interesting to me and they are poetry, art poetics, literature some books about maths and science,some history etc and chess from time to time. But it is stimulating when I get books in areas I have never "been" so to speak...There was a scary book about a terrible jail in Australia and there was one a bout a rape at Yale...strange things...a few about oil production and the environment in Canada and so on....self-help, a book about how to breathe well,a bout vitamin D (I took part in a scientific study of vitamin D here myself)....all interesting.

G Chandler vs A White, 1980

No that was played about 2 years later. Alastair was the Best Judge of another tournament. I'll see if I can dig out my 78 game. I have submitted games in the past but only a few sneaked through. Most really are cheapo's.

Only once I know of me and Murray have been confused and that was here with the above game. I've been told one of my games is also under his name in a book. If it is the chances are I lost it! (can have that one).

Someone (it was not me) said I was Murrays dad and the subject of his 'How to Beat Your Dad at Chess'. (If so I fathered him when I was 9.)