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| May-04-14 | | RedShield: I didn't get 6 and 9. Q4 is absurd. I'm not sure that the answers to Qs 5 and 7 are factually established beyond question. What did the contestant score? |
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May-04-14
 | | Sally Simpson: If I recall he got 4 wrong.
Fischers Dad, The Botvinnik opening, The game of the century mate number and where Ficher beat Keres. (I think I'm right.) As Fischer only played in one world title match Q4 was an odd.
(wonder how many here will get it wrong...."It was either Taimanov or Petrosian.") I've read about the two dead flies found in the chair many times, Kissinger I don't know if it happened but Kissinger was the answer. |
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| May-05-14 | | Granny O Doul: The two dead flies were found in the lighting fixture, btw. Not the chair. |
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May-05-14
| | Sally Simpson: What ever.
The lad answered 'two dead flies' and was given correct. Sounds like a typical off-beat Bill Hartston question. When I played in tournaments I always took along to dead flies and selotaped them to my chait to make me play better. |
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| May-05-14 | | TheFocus: Hmmm. The Dead Fly Defense.
Gonna have to remember that one. |
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| May-05-14 | | RedShield: <Sounds like a typical off-beat Bill Hartston question.> I didn't mean that Hartston had set these questions. He was talking about the dim and distant. On reflection, I'm not sure the veracity of the claim behind Q11 is certain either. |
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| May-05-14 | | RedShield: <Fischers Dad>
I'm astonished that a chess lover, let alone a Fischer 'specialist', wouldn't know this. It's been common knowledge for over a decade. |
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May-05-14
 | | keypusher: It's easy enough to guess what they're going for on #5, but I believe the flies were found in a light fixture. I guess they would say the fixture was inspected as part of the same search. I thought they did find a block of wood in Fischer's chair that wasn't in Spassky's, or maybe it was the other way around. With #7, I thought Kissinger only called him once, but again it's pretty easy to guess what they're going for. I knew all the others. |
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| May-05-14 | | TheFocus: I got all 11.
Shrugs. |
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| May-05-14 | | RedShield: Everything's bigger in America, even the liars. |
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May-05-14
| | keypusher: <RedShield: Everything's bigger in America, even the liars.> What kind of stupid git doesn't know the answers to nos. 6 and 9? |
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| May-05-14 | | RedShield: If you're not careful, I'm going to hunt you down, and put my foot up your jacksy. |
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May-12-14
 | | offramp: William Hartston is one of the best and funniest chess writers. But he also writes on many other subjects. Unfortunately whatever newspapers he writes for do not appear in the union section of the Venn diagram of newspapers I regularly buy. His chess books are always worth buying - but I don't know about his other books. |
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| Aug-05-14 | | zanzibar: Here's an interesting article about Hartston failing to make GM: http://streathambrixtonchess.blogsp... It includes these statement about English chess:
<JB: It doesn’t sound like not getting the title bothers you any.BH: No, no (laughs). It never did.
I never wanted to be a weak grandmaster. Ambitions tend to be counter productive. If you’re going to try to reach a particular level, I’ve always felt that when you get to that level you ought to see the next level as attainable. I think that this is one of the reasons that the British were so crap at chess for so long. Once you’d become the British Champion there was nowhere to go. There was such a big leap between British Champion and good international player that people were just stuck at the level. JB: By ‘crap for a long time’ you’re thinking of which era? The '60s? BH: Up to and including mine. (Laughs)
JB: There does seem to have been quite a change in the late '60s with yourself, Ray Keene, Andrew Whiteley and Mike Basman coming through. BH: I think we were the intermediate generation. There was the Penrose-Golombek-Alexander era which had no way of competing with the top Eastern Europeans and just got completely overtaken by them in the '50s and '60s. Then Keene and I, and Basman maybe, we introduced a sort of professionalism without being professional: professionalism in terms of attitude to the game. I think that sort of set the road to the next generation of Miles and Short, Stean maybe, just to completely overtake us.> And, for the record, Hartston says that Uhlmann never offered him a draw at Hastings 1972/73. |
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Aug-10-14
 | | perfidious: This supposition by Jonathan Bryant in the interview cited by <zanzibar> is interesting but probably not quite correct: <So that’s that. The story is just a myth after all. It seems, though, that had Hartston got that extra half-point he would have become a Grandmaster. Not at Hastings but after he’d collected a further two norms much later in his career.> Had Hartston indeed made the norm at the beginning of 1973, that performance would have only counted towards his pursuit of the title for three years under the regulations then in force, a situation very much unlike today, where norms made do not expire, so far as I know. |
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Oct-12-14
| | offramp: I was surprised to see him and his friend Josef on Channel 4's Gogglebox. |
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| May-10-15 | | TheFocus: <Chess is a contributor to net human unhappiness, since the pleasure of victory is greatly exceeded by the pain of defeat> - Bill Hartston. |
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| May-25-15 | | TheFocus: <For however magnificent his best games, however impressive his match victories, Spassky is destined to be remembered primarily one thing: He was the man who lost to Bobby Fischer> - William Hartston. |
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Nov-08-15
 | | MissScarlett: <Jeremy James, presenter of 'The Master Game' on BBC TV in the 1970s/80s, has died, aged 79> http://www.theguardian.com/media/20... |
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| Aug-12-16 | | TheFocus: Happy birthday, William Hartston. |
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| Dec-10-16 | | Paint My Dragon: Very nice half-hour history of the world championship, from Morphy to Kasparov. Written by Bill Hartston ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3P...
Commentary from Jeremy James - see <MissScarlett>'s post above. Especially enjoyable to hear a story from Bent Larsen. Many of his peers spoke of him as the most interesting companion and finest raconteur on the circuit. |
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Apr-16-23
 | | FSR: I remember when Hartston and Keene were in a race to see who would become the first English grandmaster and win the prize offered by James Slater. Their race was won by . . . Tony Miles! Who? Keene became a GM a few months later. Somehow Hartston never made it, much to my surprise. He did, however, become "the first person to stack the pieces from an entire chess set on top of a single white rook," which is almost as good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willi... |
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| May-14-23 | | ASchultz: I don't miss many of my chess books, but I do miss his How to Cheat at Chess. I note it's been referenced two times in the topic. The quiz at the end is great. Rot13: Lbh trg n obahf cbvag sbe ybbxvat ng gur nafjref orsber lbh svavfurq gur dhvm. |
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| May-15-23 | | Granny O Doul: Ab tbg gur yrggref gb fnl jung V srry. Sehfgengvat! |
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| Mar-23-24 | | mikealando: I was 28 years old in 1997 and the intense global interest in and news coverage of the Kasparov vs Deep Blue matches - even here in Nairobi, my home city in 1996 and in Kampala where I moved to work in 1997 - had me so intrigued about chess that I decided to learn it. After being shown the moves over the board by friends for a couple of weeks, I went out to buy a chess book. My first chess book was "Teach Yourself Chess" by Bill Hartston, a fabulous book for a beginner. I've been hooked to this day. |
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