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Origin Of Chess?

Bilderberger said:
As an example of Japan's current cultural inventions - I invite you to watch the slide show at the following address (you will need powerpoint). Just click on the screen to scroll through some of the greatest inventions ever - and all 100% Japanese.

http://www.hof-carmel.org.il/pnay/japaneseinventions.ppt
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a nice site, but again, the Japanese didnt invent bondage. They simply improved it so this dont count.


p.s. Have checked my local Waterstones - The Mechanical Turk is in stock for the 2 for 3 offer. Now just have to decide on the other two books after work and I shall give it a go.
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theres a very good biography of Wellington by 'That-Bloke-What-Did-The-BBC-Series-Whos-Name-Escapes-Me' and a Secret State book with a grey cover what Posh Bird has nicked

and you get to queue with hysterical schoolkids putting their name down for the new Harry Potter
 
Inverurie Jones said:
The Scots, on the other hand, invent new things all the time...and more of them per head of population than any other country.
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Tony Hancock explained this about forty years ago: it's the porridge that does it.
 
Originally posted by Bilderberger
It is often suggested that the relative success of males at the less physcial sports (snooker, darts, chess etc) relates to a heightened level of obsession found in males.

Maybe it's about having the opportunity to compete not in a team but directly with another man in a 'bucks-banging-heads' style.

Does the genius ability lead the individual to feel little empathy in the world - thus causing withdrawl and/or unusual behaviour?

Veering back towards the original subject of the thread, if you look at the great chess players of recent times, some of them were a bit nerdy and diffident whereas others like Kasparov (I'm not exactly in touch with the current chess scene) were much more flashy and extroverted.

In other words, I don't know either.

There's a good article here about The Greatest Program Ever Written - chess on a 1K ZX81 !!!
 
Inverurie Jones said:
The Scots, on the other hand, invent new things all the time...and more of them per head of population than any other country.
Just thought I'd mention it.
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To quote (from memory) McGlashin from the TV show 'Absolutely' :

"The Scottish invented everything!

Who invented the television? A scotsman!

Who invented electric light? A Scotsman!

The French! We invented the French! We even invented the English! We took all the poofs and perverts and said ' There you go! You lie down there, and that can be England!

Who invented the toilet?

An Englishman..... but it took a Scotsman to put a hole in it!"
 
didnt we invent the Scots? I'm sure I read somewhere....

yes we did. They were running around painted blue and stark naked, bless them

so William of Cumberland breezed up there with a few of the boys, and civilised them.

introduced them to money with the Queens head on, flushing toilets and garden sheds.

they been happy as Larry ever since
 
Shocking lack of knowledge displayed there about the '45 and the Jacobite cause...there were English Jacobites and Scottish Hannovarians too. The last war between our two countries as countries was a victory for us.
Of course, Cumberland was a viscious murdering bastard, even for those days, so you would do well not to utter his name lightly.
And it's the ancient Britons who painted themselves blue...
 
As a student, I was once involved in a game of postal chess with David Norwood. He was (still is?) an International Master and did commentary for the BBC during the Kasparov v Short title mis-match about 10 years ago.

Norwood became a cult figure due to his Northern bluntness (e.g. "Short is just playing rubbish - my gran could do better with her eyes closed") and so we challenged him to a game.

After hours spent making a giant board to monitor our moves - the game began. After just 4 moves each it became obvious that Norwood had put us in an irrecovably bad position. The inagraul Reading University Beers and Curry Club v Norwood match ended in a dismal retirement from the time wasting loafers.
 
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Depends entirely on your terms of reference. Did Norwood enjoy beer and curry following the match? I think not

The passing desire to re-learn chess has now passed. I’m trying to build a Zepplin instead
 
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What is your Zeppelin going to be made of - Lead?

(geddit - a lead Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin. Oh man, I'm so funny - it seriously hurts).

You're right - Norwood did not finish the match with a few cans of Hofmeister (v. cheap from the local Co-op) and a bad case of ring sting the next morning.
 
On the original subject of "The Origins of Chess" (which has menadered through Japense inventions, Russ Abbott, ring sting and now cat bombing Zeppelins) the current FT has a snippet in the Archaeology section on the discovery of a possible Roman chess piece.

Have found this site with further info.......

http://chess.about.com/library/weekly/aa092802a.htm
 
Bilderberger said:
(which has menadered through Japense inventions, Russ Abbott, ring sting and now cat bombing Zeppelins)
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just re-read the thread and it is a bit like those conversations at 2.00am in small country hotels when someone suggested sampling the malts :)

cant see the Roman connection, simply because Roman games I know of were very simple

6th century in northern India seems to be favourite, and it was around in 12th C Persia as 'The Shahs Game', thence West

but my gut instinct still says China, because they are the GamesMeisters and I cant think of another game that has originated in India, except maybe Polo, and the Brits had a hand in that one
 
ethelred said:
I cant think of another game that has originated in India, except maybe Polo, and the Brits had a hand in that one
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Kabaddi?

The successor to Sumo for the Channel 4 crazy international lunchtime sport slot over 10 years ago.

"kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabbadi, kabaddi, kabaddi.......ad nauseaum"

Do I win a single malt for that?
 
Bilderberger said:
Kabaddi?

The successor to Sumo for the Channel 4 crazy international lunchtime sport slot over 10 years ago.

"kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabbadi, kabaddi, kabaddi.......ad nauseaum"

Do I win a single malt for that?
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only when you explain what catastrophic life event led to your becoming familiar with C4 lunchtime output?
 
From what I remember about the history of chess.

Certainly we still use Persian words shah mata, and rukh.
Chess as played in mediaeval europe was a very diferent affair to the one we play now. Bishops moved diagonally but it was a 2 square jump move; in modern notation c1-e3 but not moving through the intervening square. The queen could only move one square in any direction, like the king, but of course could not be checked. Pawns (probably from the french Paon meaning footsoldier) only moved one square at a time.

These differences made chess a very slow game so various methods of speeding it up were tried. One of these the Short Assize where the pieces were put into advanced positions and the game played from there. Another was the Chess of the Mad Queen which was essentially the modern game. This is why pawns can take en passant (a white pawn on e5 if black moves one of his pawns d7-d5 or c7-c5 the white pawn can take e5-d6 or c6 e.p.)

Chess was also considered a game of luck rather than skill in fact there was even a version played with dice, though I have no idea how it worked. Certainly up until about 1970 chess could not legally be played in pubs because in law it was considered a game of chance unlike brag or crib which in law were games of skill ("The law is a Ass" Mr Bumble)

The best book on the subject of Mediaeval chess is still HJR Murray, A History of Chess. Oxford University Press, 1913. Currently in print from OUP. It also goes into the origins but I would place no reliance on that
 
ethelred said:
only when you explain what catastrophic life event led to your becoming familiar with C4 lunchtime output?
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No catastrophe - just youth. I actually meant to type "teatime" rather than lunchtime.

I used to watch Sumo when at school and sixth form (late 80's). Kabaddi started when I was still in sixth form. Both were great entertainment when eating my tea after a hard day's smoking behind the bike sheds and making nervous passes at young ladies.

The "spoken English" section of my English Language GCSE was a 10 minute talk on Sumo wrestling - involving a brief demonstration using very large pairs of pants (and no, I didn't go as far as to tuck the veg from my meat and two veg up on top of my pelvic shelf).
 
Chess and the Art of War

Seems like the most appropriate thread (although I was tempted to make it a new thread - so the mods can feel free to split this off).

Chess! What is it good for?

War, say researchers in Sweden and Australia. They are using the game to improve understanding of real battles, where you can't always see what your opponent is up to.

Emma Young
Thursday March 4, 2004
The Guardian

Some time around the seventh century, a new board game appears in India. Its pieces include a counsellor, elephants, chariots, infantrymen, horsemen and a king. Called chaturanga, it's the ancestor of modern chess - and a game of war. But if chess in all its variations has been used historically to illustrate battlefield tactics and probe new strategies, today nothing's changed. Teams at the Swedish national defence college in Stockholm and the defence science and technology organisation in Australia are studying the game afresh in an attempt to understand better how to gain military success. In Sweden, the researchers are using real players. In Australia, the team has run tens of thousands of virtual games - with some clear messages for their military sponsors.
On the face of it, the bloodless, low-tech game of chess might seem to bear little resemblance to modern warfare. "But it resembles real war in many respects," maintains Jan Kuylenstierna, one of the Swedish researchers. "Chess involves a struggle of will, and it contains what has been termed the essentials of fighting - to strike, to move and to protect." By studying chess and other adversarial abstract games such as checkers (draughts), researchers can strip away some of the confusion of the battlefield and identify the factors that are most important for winning, says Jason Scholz, who leads the Australian work. "The strength of this approach is our level of abstraction," Scholz says.

But neither group is studying standard games. By modifying key variables, such as the number of moves al lowed each turn, or whether one player can see all of the other's pieces, they are investigating the relative importance of a host of factors that translate to the battlefield, such as numerical superiority, a quick advance and the use of stealth.

"There's all sorts of anecdotal evidence that there are certain factors in warfare that are important, and people talk about having a strong operational tempo, and that kind of thing," says Greg Calbert, a mathematician on Scholz's team. "But even today there's debate over what really counts. How important is stealth over tempo, or tempo over numerical strength? That's what we wanted to find out." As well as informing fundamental military theory, this kind of information could have a big impact on how army procurement officers choose to spend their budget. There might be urgent calls for more tanks or better surveillance devices - when, in fact, to win the next war the money might be better spent on faster communications systems, for instance.

One major difference between chess and war is that chess does not contain what the military terms "information uncertainty". Unlike a battle commander, who may have incomplete intelligence about his opponent's level of weaponry or location of munitions depots, one chess player can always see the other's pieces, and note their every move. So Kuylenstierna and his colleagues asked players to compete with a board each and an opaque screen between them. A game leader transferred each player's moves to the other's board - but not always instantaneously. For instance, one game modification resulted in a player being prevented from seeing their opponent's latest two moves.

These games, and other variations on regular play, led the team to a clear conclusion: being stronger and having more "battlespace information" than your opponent are both less valuable when there is little information available overall to both sides - but the advantage of a fast pace remains. "The value of information superiority is strongly tempered by uncertainty, whereas the value of superior tempo is much less affected," says Kuylenstierna.

Uncertainty is often a problem in war. So in practical terms, launching a rapid attack might provide a better chance of winning than trying to gain more information about the battlefield situation, or ensuring that you have numerical strength over your opponent. "To what extent these findings have had any influence on decisions made by the Swedish military I dare not say - but they continue to sponsor our work," Kuylenstierna adds.

The Australian team had to write new software to allow virtual agents to play the tens of thousands of games needed for a powerful statistical analysis of the results. "We had to rewrite extensively the code for chess - and we worked really hard, believe me," Calbert says. As well as tempo, planning and strength, they looked at stealth (one agent had pieces invisible to its opponent), and the level of "networking" between an agent's pieces (involving the exchange of information on the "value" of the particular move, if any, that each piece could make).

And they also found that a fast tempo can be important, particularly in combination with "deep planning". Deep planning involved, at every move, each agent considering all their previous moves and their opponent's responses, and their responses to those responses, and using this to develop a "tree" of possible strategic paths they could follow to win. "A deeper planner is one who can search deeper into time, and has more possible end points," says Calbert. In general, deep planning plus a fast tempo was devastating - even if the opponent was numerically superior.

What's more, these findings held true whether the game was chess or checkers. And while the games might appear similar, the aims and strategies most likely to lead to success are quite different, says Scholz. He thinks that achieving the same insights from analyses of the two games suggests that his team has uncovered some general rules - rules that are likely to be applicable in other similar adversarial situations, such as war.

But what do the experts think? Retired Australian Air Vice Marshal Peter Nicholson agrees that fast tempo is a key to military success. "It's something that many military commanders have been doing instinctively for a long time," he says. "Napoleon was one of the first proponents of it in nation-state warfare. And the Mongols were another. Their rapidly moving small forces of armed horsemen completely threw conventional forces off balance."

Sun Tzu, author of the Art of War, had his own take on this: "An attack may lack ingenuity, but it must be delivered with supernatural speed," runs one translation.

There are a number of potential routes to raising battlespace tempo. A nation's military might invest in faster ships or in computer systems that can rapidly fuse new data and information from the field - leaving humans only with the job of making the decisions. "What the results encourage us to do is to look at some of the command and control decision processes and find the bottlenecks," Scholz says.

The Swedish and Australian approaches to game analysis each have their own strengths, says Kuylenstierna. While the Australians could look at many thousands of games, the Swedes used real people. But in writing the agent-playing software, Scholz's team did integrate techniques from a new area of maths called neurodynamic programming. This allowed the agents to learn as they played and, as a result, more accurately mimic real human game-playing behaviour.

Using the same new mathematical techniques, and building on the chess and checkers work, Scholz and his colleagues are now creating improved computer-based war games for use in military training. Good artificial intelligence has been lacking from most war games until now and they hope their work will provide more realistic characters and situations, and therefore not only better training but also an improved method for considering new strategies for real warfare. One important advance from the chess simulations is to allow multiple moves at the same time, as would happen in a battle.

Nicholson says he welcomes the new work, and considers the chess research one of the "tools in the armoury" for developing, testing and evaluating operational concepts and strategies. "It's not the panacea," he says. "It's one of several methods, which are all valuable and each have their place."

The Australian team are careful not to suggest that the results of their chess and checkers work should re-write the military theory books. "We've been working on this project for two years, whereas military commanders devote their lives to what they call the operational art," Calbert says. "That art certainly involves manoeuvres not just in the physical battlespace but in a social and political space as well - and those spaces are really intangible to scientists at the moment."

2,000 years of role playing games

China
The board game Go, known in China as weiqi, is a game of territory and encirclement, and has long been linked with warfare. Some of the earliest military references appear during the Dong Han dynasty, from AD25 to AD220. They describe weiqi as a game of war, and some modern scholars infer that the Chinese might at that time have been using it to model military strategies. Mao Zedong reportedly insisted his generals study weiqi - and there are rumours that today senior members of the Chinese military must be proficient at the game to progress through the highest ranks, says Jason Scholz of Australia's defence science and technology organisation.

Persia
The Persian game of Shatranj is believed to be adapted from the Indian chess-precursor Chaturanga (although there are some scholars who argue that Shatranj came first). Like the Indian version, the Persian game includes elephant pieces and horses, and Persian nobles were taught Shatranj as part of training in military strategy. It has even been suggested that pawns' ability to move two squares in their opening move in modern chess is a Persian modification, to better model a strategy in which foot soldiers with spears rushed ahead of the rest of the attacking army - but the true origins of military influences on chess, and the game itself, remain murky.

War in Iraq
The build-up to the war in Iraq coincided with the first results from the chess simulations run by Jason Scholz and his team. "We watched with great interest the dialogue between General [Tommy} Franks, who wanted to use more materiel, and Donald Rumsfeld who wanted a fast tempo and lighter units," Scholz says. Based on the chess results, which favoured a fast, decisive attack strategy, Scholz says his advice would have been to go along with the US defence secretary's ideas. "In the end, there was a compromise," he says. "But a relatively fast tempo did really gain a very decisive, rapid advantage in Iraq." However, trying to win a battle as quickly as possible might not always be the best strategy, he adds: "You can win a battle quickly but hearts and minds are not so easily won - and of course we do have continuing trouble in Iraq."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1161128,00.html
 
It is said that Timur e Lenk (Tamburlaine) taught himself world conquest through chess.

When, in the early 15th century, Timur took on and defeated Sultan Beyazid Yildirim at the battle of Ankara, it is related he disposed his forces, briefed his commanders and retired to his tent to play chess with his young son. Having anticipated Beyazid's moves, he felt his role was fulfilled.
 
re: chess and the art of war

some quotes:

"Chess is struggle, chess is battles"-Gary Kasparov

"Chess is a fight"-Emanuel Lasker

"Chess is a fighting game which is purely intellectual and excludes chance"-Richard Reti

"Chess is a game of war"-Anthony Saidy and Norman Lessing

"Chess is the art of battle..."-Savielly Tartakower

"Chess is the art of analysis"-Mikhail Botvinnik

"Chess is a sport. A violent sport."-Marcel Duchamp

"Chess is a powerful weapon of intellectual culture"-Slogan for 1924 All-Union Congress of Soviet Union

Of course, there are those who differ:

"Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever"-George Bernard Shaw :D

Robert E. Lee & General Pershing were both pretty good players. Napolean was very enthusiastic, but rotten chess player. And, I might add, a really sore loser.
 
I believe the first text on chess published in vernacular English used the game as a metaphor for life.

I recall the 'Mirror of Princes' books advised chess as an accomplishment and a refinement.
 
And running slightly off topic with the chess and war theme:

An international checkmate




BY WESLEY YANG
Wesley Yang is a writer in Jersey City, N.J.

March 7, 2004


BOBBY FISCHER GOES TO WAR: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Ecco, 342 pp, .95.

With the help of newly opened Soviet archives, we now know that the United States really was once swarming with Soviet spies. The new disclosures have also richly contributed to the annals of a certain kind of tragicomic farce. The fathomless absurdity of a Soviet state insecure enough to leave nothing outside the realm of surveillance is matched by the tragic obscenity of the lives it stunted.

The most interesting bits of "Bobby Fischer Goes to War," an account of the 1972 chess match pitting defending champion Russian Boris Spassky against the American prodigy contribute to this story. We glimpse the reigning world champion under the watchful eyes of KGB agents parsing his displays of ideological independence.

The catalog of his unorthodoxy is striking indeed: an outraged letter from a local pol recounts the scandal of Spassky complaining publicly about his low pay. Spassky refuses to sign a petition decrying the trial of Black Panther Angela Davis and makes loose comments like "The communists have destroyed nature." The apparatchiks tolerated this independence because he was the world champion: Others might have faced a prison sentence. Another Soviet grandmaster shut out in six games during Fischer's remarkable 20-match winning streak was hounded out of his livelihood by punitive officials.

The 1972 match was the most famous in history for reasons that authors David Edmonds and John Eidinow ably reconstruct. The Soviets had made an intramural contest of the world championship for two decades by subsidizing and grooming cadres of chess masters as assiduously as armies. In Fischer, they confronted, in one person, a rugged American individualist, one of the greatest chess talents ever and perhaps the game's most weirdly compelling personality. (Though not its craziest. This title would have to go to its first world champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, who grew convinced that he could beat God, "even if the Lord were granted a pawn and a move head start.")

Fischer was an ill-bred and impetuous Brooklyn boy raised by a single mother, an adherent of a cultish form of Christianity and a budding anti-Semite (the authors disclose that he had Jewish parentage on both sides) who would later flower into a full-fledged proselytizer for the "socialism of fools." He had the wild capriciousness that sporting audiences like to both revile and indulge in their bad boys. He threw temper tantrums that make John McEnroe look like a choirboy at evening vespers. This did not quite make him the "psychopath" that the authors rather invidiously call him early on, but he was plenty unpleasant.

The authors' account of Fischer's gamesmanship evokes his enervating belligerence rather too well: The beleaguered match officials' frazzled vexation becomes the reader's. Anticipating the antics of a later generation of spoiled athletes, Fischer holds out for more money and refuses to fly to Reykjavik for trumped-up reasons, threatening to scupper the match before it begins. Once at the match site, he issues continual ultimatums that he will leave unless the table, chairs, chess set, lighting and seating arrangements are adjusted to suit his whims. Asked whether there was anything else Fischer might object to, his henchman responded thus: "'I've been through it all,' he said. 'As far as I can see, the only thing left is the air.'"

As Spassky began to crack in the course of the 17 games comprising the match, the KGB sprang into action. Edmonds and Eidinow prove only that the secret police were on hand to pursue wild theories that Fischer's side had used parapsychology, electronic manipulation, hypnosis, drugs or biological warfare to send Spassky into the drifting torpor that evidently plagued him. The authors speculate that the KGB may have played an active role in planting rumors that Spassky had been the victim of a nefarious plot. To this day, Spassky and many of his associates suspect foul play.

Edmonds and Eidinow call the match a parable of the underlying tensions that would eventually undermine improved relations between the superpowers. What might have been an open and peaceful competition degenerated into a caper of conspiracy theories and secret police amid mutual distrust and recrimination. Much of this was attributable to Fischer's personal recklessness rather than ideological confrontation, but the symbolism is apt.

Alas, the emphasis on the context and subtext of the match works to the book's detriment. The basic premise that the "collision of personalities, of moral and legal obligations, of social and political beliefs" surrounding the match are themselves worthy of exhaustive study never quite justifies itself. We are told that certain individual games were full of "extraordinary brilliance," but remain outsiders to the perfunctorily narrated drama enacted on the chessboard.

We are thus never drawn into the basic momentum of competition that every good sports book provides. The world's most complex and intellectually demanding game is hard to represent; only stylistic brilliance can overcome this difficulty. Lacking this, we are left with a too comprehensive account of an individual temper tantrum and a collective bout of paranoia recollected in tranquillity.
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http://www.nynewsday.com/features/b...0,2883768.story?coll=nyc-bookreview-headlines
 
Time to move this thread out of check.

Ancient pawns: pieces from 5000-year-old board games?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... hC9mZJ4JBw
18:04 16 August 2013 by Colin Barras

Even in the Bronze Age there was more to life than work. Excavations at a burial site in south-east Turkey have revealed a set of 49 sculpted pieces that may once have been used in board games. They are among the oldest evidence of such games ever found.

Haluk Sa?lamtimur at Ege University in ?zmir, Turkey, and colleagues made the find during excavations of a 5000-year-old burial at the site of Ba?ur Höyük, according to Discovery News. The stone pieces, which were found gathered together in a cluster, show a bewildering array of shapes and styles. Some are carved into elaborate pigs and dogs, whereas simpler ones are pyramids and bullet-shaped.

Sa?lamtimur discussed the finds at the annual International Symposium of Excavations, Surveys and Archaeometry in the Turkish city of Mu?la. He thinks the pieces belong to some complicated chess-like game. His team now hopes to work out the strategies that the game must have involved.

Not so fast, says Ulrich Schädler, director of the Swiss Museum of Games in La Tour-de-Peilz. "Do the objects really all belong to one game? I would answer no," he told New Scientist. "We don't have the slightest trace of a board game using more than two different kinds of pieces before chess." Early forms of chess were not played until about 1500 years ago.

"We don't know much about board games of the Bronze Age," says Schädler.

Of the few that do survive – including the 5500-year-old Egyptian game of Senet and the 4500-year-old Royal Game of Ur that was played in Mesopotamia – most seem to have been relatively simple, involving racing around the board faster than the opponent.

Schädler thinks it is more likely that the Turkish playing pieces are associated with several of these simple games. "The pyramids resemble the dice of the Royal Game of Ur," he says.
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Perhaps the oldest known actual Chess Piece.

SAN DIEGO — A palm-sized sandstone object found in 1991 at an Early Islamic trading outpost in what’s now southern Jordan appears to be the oldest known chess piece.

This roughly 1,300-year-old rectangular piece of rock with two hornlike projections on top resembles several rooks, also known as castles, that have been found at other Islamic sites in the region. But those other rooks date to a century or more later, John Oleson, an archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada, said. He presented his analysis of the carved rock on November 21 at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research.

Simpler board games than chess go back roughly 4,000 years in Eurasia (SN: 11/16/18). Surviving written accounts indicate that chess originated in India at least 1,400 years ago, Oleson said. Merchants and diplomats probably carried the game westward. The suspected chess piece, excavated at Humayma, located on what was once a major trade route, dates to between 680 and 749, when an Islamic family owned and ran the site.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/carved-rock-found-jordan-may-be-oldest-known-chess-piece
 
7th century chess piece found in a field in Norfolk ..

achess001.jpg


1,400-year-old bronze knight from seventh-century chess set sells for £120,650 at auction | Daily Mail Online
 
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“I was playing chess with my friend and he said ‘Let’s make this more interesting’ … so we stopped playing chess.”

:hoff: Matt Kirshen

maximus otter
 
Not a big fan of chess but came across something today.

I used to buy old books very cheap to cut up for artwork. They are of course mostly still on my shelves unmutilated. :chuckle:

One 1943 tome, Railways Ships and Aeroplanes Illustrated, has a loose photo of two men playing chess. It's a little print, black and white, the sort people used to develop at home.

On the back someone has written 'LEFT ON PICTURE - BOTVINIK'.

Hadn't bothered with it but today I Googled 'Botvinik' and found that it's actually 'Botvinnik'. That's Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik who was a Russian electrical engineer and chess champion.

Perhaps a previous owner of the book came across Botvinnik, possibly during his 1936 visit to Nottingham, and snapped him having a quick game.

'Look - I played chess with Botvinnik!'

If anyone's interested I'll take a photo and post it.
 
escargot said:
Not a big fan of chess but came across something today.

I used to buy old books very cheap to cut up for artwork. They are of course mostly still on my shelves unmutilated. :chuckle:

One 1943 tome, Railways Ships and Aeroplanes Illustrated, has a loose photo of two men playing chess. It's a little print, black and white, the sort people used to develop at home.

On the back someone has written 'LEFT ON PICTURE - BOTVINIK'.

Hadn't bothered with it but today I Googled 'Botvinik' and found that it's actually 'Botvinnik'. That's Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik who was a Russian electrical engineer and chess champion.

Perhaps a previous owner of the book came across Botvinnik, possibly during his 1936 visit to Nottingham, and snapped him having a quick game.

'Look - I played chess with Botvinnik!'

If anyone's interested I'll take a photo and post it.
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Come on - of course we're interested!
 
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