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Strangeness Involving Chess & Chess Players

Mighty_Emperor

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Chess cleared of satanic links

From correspondents in Moscow
27jan04

A RUSSIAN Orthodox archbishop has laid to rest a young parishoner's concern about chess and reassured her that the centuries-old game is not the work of the devil, Russian media reported Monday.

Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov and millions of other Russian chess champions and not-so-champions can sleep easier after Archbishop Vikenty of Yekaterinburg and Verkhneturyinsk in the Urals region dismissed a young woman's fears that chess was a "devilish game," the ITAR-TASS news agency said.

The archbishop assured his questioner that there was no religious ban on chess.

"Chess is a quiet, intelligent game that develops one's thinking. It is not a sin. The holy fathers prohibit the playing of games that arouse passions and excitement, and with them bewilderment, wrath and irritation," the agency quoted him as saying.

Among the games that engendered such unhealthy passions, the archbishop said, were computer games.

Chess, a game of strategy between white and black pieces sometimes seen as a metaphor for the struggle between good and evil, evolved from board games developed in antiquity, either in Persia or India, according to historians.

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,8505838%5E401,00.html
 
i read on the cookd and bombd forum that Ray Keen profesional chess bloke was called into help solve a murder in the early 90's... no other info...and a web serch gets lost in unreachable chess forums and missing pages...anyone know more?
 
Chess star father cleared of rape

A father has been found not guilty of raping his chess prodigy daughter.

Ian Gilbert, 48, was accused of assaulting Jessie Gilbert at the family home in Woldingham, Surrey, over a period of five years.

He told Guildford Crown Court how his daughter was "quite capable of planning ahead" and could have made up the claims after they had argued.

Jessie, 19, from Croydon, south London, fell to her death from a hotel window in the Czech Republic in July.

She had been competing in an international chess tournament at the time of her death.

Mr Gilbert, a Royal Bank of Scotland director, was accused of repeatedly raping Jessie between 1995 and 2000.

The jury also found him not guilty of two counts of rape and four counts of indecent assault on other people.

He now seeks to restore stability in his personal and professional life

Ian Gilbert's solicitor

Reading a short statement outside the court after the verdict, Mr Gilbert's solicitor Colin Reynolds said his client had "strenuously denied allegations" all along.

"He is grateful to the jury for their obvious careful consideration of all the evidence and for returning appropriate verdicts which reflect the truth.

"He would ask you to respect his privacy as he now seeks to restore stability in his personal and professional life."

Drug overdose

During the trial Mr Gilbert suggested Jessie may have deliberately drip-fed information about the alleged abuse to family and friends before she contacted police, in order to make her story more credible.

The court heard Jessica fell out with her father after a row about a laptop computer and there were other disagreements.

She told her mother that she had been raped after her father moved out of the family home. Her parents later divorced.

The court heard that Jessie got drunk and told her friends on two occasions that she was raped by her father.

On a night-out with friends she climbed a wall at Croydon's clock tower and threatened to jump off.

Another time, she took an overdose of paracetamol but survived.

Jessie's death came shortly before Mr Gilbert's trial was originally scheduled to start.

In court, Mr Gilbert said that allegations of rape were "disgusting" and that Jessie was playing a game of chess against him and was preparing a strategy for revenge.

Mr Gilbert's new wife Sally was present with him at the court.

I don't know if this is weird enough to be Fortean, but it's a strange, sad story.
 
Given the circumstances, I'm still not convinced about the argument made by the defence and the verdict-
 
Rrose_Selavy said:
Given the circumstances, I'm still not convinced about the argument made by the defence and the verdict-
Why, what evidence have you been presented with that they haven't?
 
It all smells pretty dirty to me too, and imo she wasn't the one with the calculated moves there, but that's just what my intuition is telling me.

It's so difficult to get a conviction in this kind of case that it doesn't surprise me that he's been found innocent, whether he actually was or not.

According to the version in today's metro, the girls mother is siding with her story, not his.
 
On the face of it, I find this a bit 'fishy' too. I've read a fair amount on this and if the girl has made it up as some kind of revenge thing, then "preparing a strategy for revenge" over what? A laptop?

She'd attempted suicide, had a history of self-harming, was being treated for depression, then appears to have committed suicide. If it was 'family rows' that caused this, then there's more to this than the family are saying.
 
ghostdog19 said:
Rrose_Selavy said:
Given the circumstances, I'm still not convinced about the argument made by the defence and the verdict-
Why, what evidence have you been presented with that they haven't?

Didn't I tell you, I was on the Jury?

Er no.. Pardon me for giving an opinion.
 
Even with the alleged victim present to give evidence, the prosecution would have a job proving rape, as there would be no forensic or documentary evidence. With her not there, it'd be impossible, whether or not it happened.

The father was also accused of assaulting other people but found not guilty. I'd like to hear more about that - surely those accusers aren't dead to?
 
escargot1 said:
The father was also accused of assaulting other people but found not guilty. I'd like to hear more about that - surely those accusers aren't dead to?

That's one of the things that puzzles me too. Did they argue with him over the use of a laptop too? Why would they have vendetta for him? It maybe that these claims were from the girl's friends; made-up to support her own claims in a weird show of confidence/support. On the other hand he could have been a rapist who assaulted numerous people in different ways.

It would be handy to know more about this, yes.
 
Ex-wife held over threat claims

A woman was held on suspicion of threatening to kill her ex-husband after he was acquitted of raping their daughter, chess prodigy Jessie Gilbert.


Jessie, 19, from Croydon, south London, fell to her death from a hotel window in the Czech Republic in July.

Ian Gilbert, a Royal Bank of Scotland director, was accused of repeatedly raping her between 1995 and 2000.

Police said Angela Gilbert, 53, was arrested at her home in Reigate but no charges are expected to be brought.

A Surrey Police spokesman said Mrs Gilbert was arrested late on Thursday after a third party reported her threat.

She was held for about 16 hours before the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to proceed with the case.

The police spokesman added Mrs Gilbert was under "enormous strain".

A jury at Guilford Crown Court found Mr Gilbert not guilty of all 11 counts against him, including six other charges of rape and indecent assault.

Story from BBC NEWS:

Published: 2006/12/16 13:18:13 GMT

© BBC MMVI
 
The teenage chess king taken by an exotic dancer
Tom Hennigan in São Paulo

A chess prodigy who ran away with an exotic dancer almost twice his age has returned home to a hero’s welcome after an amazing teenage adventure that took him to the hotspots of Brazil.

It all began when Emílio Córdova, a 15-year-old international master from Peru, was crowned South American chess champion in January after winning a tournament in the Argentine city of Córdoba.

Instead of returning to Lima he told relatives that he was heading to Brazil to compete in tournaments there in order to reach the rank of international grandmaster.

But, far from focusing on his grand master dreams, Emílio quickly became caught up in São Paulo’s pulsating but frequently sleazy nightlife.

He soon formed a relationship with a 29-year-old Brazilian single mother, Adriane Oliveira, dubbed the “bella brasileira” by the Peruvian media, with whom he reportedly fell in love.

Ms Oliveira works in Love Story, a club where young Emílio took to spending nights dancing.

To fund his Brazilian sojourn he told his family that he had fallen ill and needed them to wire out money to pay for medical expenses. He even sold his laptop computer which contained all his chess notes and training programmes.

As weeks turned into months EmÍlio’s family became worried about his absence, and the Peruvian media set out to Brazil to find out what had happened to their promising young chess genius.

Once they located him, Emílio insisted that he had not abandoned chess altogether but was just enjoying some much deserved fun.

“I play chess, study chess but this doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy myself,” he said. “I’m young and I want to do this. I have to live. To be locked up in my room all the time depresses me.”

After tracing his son his father set out to bring him back home. At first Emílio was adamant that he would not leave Brazil and the Peruvian Foreign Ministry had to ask the São Paulo police to prevent the boy leaving the city before his father arrived. Emílio now says that Ms Oliveira was just one of several girlfriends he had in São Paulo and that far from being a sex worker as portrayed in the Peruvian media she actually works for an NGO “dedicated to putting on shows and charity events like telethons”.

He blames his father for the media storm saying: “Private is private and personal life is personal life. But if my father decides to air it what can I do?”

Now he says that he is prepared to stay by his mother’s side. “I went a bit nuts, but it all came out fine,” he told reporters. But one sensation over, he caused another when he appeared in Lima’s arrivals hall sporting new blond highlights and blue contact lenses.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 511890.ece
 
Goes to show that, although you can control children for a certain time, sooner or later the real world gets to them, and you're rumbled.

Better to give them normal social skills and forget the child prodigy nonsense. ;)
 
An almost Fortean look at chess here:
She looked into his eyes, he made his move
By Adam Lusher , Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 11:20pm GMT 17/03/2007

Chess is, by reputation, a game for super-bright, socially dysfunctional nerds. Scratch the surface, however, and you'll uncover a world of seething passion, nightclub violence and exotic dancers

I came in search of Brazilian dancing girls, sex, violence and castling. So far, I have found only the castling. Before me, in the Golden Lane Community Hall, in central London, stretch 22 chess boards, 44 players, 12 bald patches and precisely one woman. The matches between Battersea 1 and East Ham, and Streatham 1 and Dulwich 1, are being played in the kind of silence familiar only to Trappist monks and assertive librarians. Strain your ears and you might hear the ticking of some players' timekeeping clocks. Some have come in suit and tie. Others, though, have slipped into something more comfortable, such as a cardigan. This looks deeply disappointing.

Recent events would lead a man to expect much more from an evening of chess. Emilio Cordova, 15, an international master from Peru, was crowned South American chess champion in January. The teenager celebrated by running away to Brazil and reappearing in the arms of Adriane Oliveira, a 29-year-old single mother from Sao Paulo.

Miss Oliveira was variously described as "an exotic dancer" (the commonly reported version) or "an NGO worker dedicated to putting on shows" (what Emilio told the world and his father).

Last week, Emilio returned home a Latin American hero. He had proved that chess was no longer a game for the socially maladjusted genius. Chess was sexy.

It just doesn't look that way in London. In the community hall, things have progressed to a bit of heavy pacing. Players make their move, then circle the hall in contemplation. "To the uninitiated," admits Brian Smith, 61, the honorary secretary of the London Chess League, "it is a bit like watching paint dry."

I tell him that he is sadly deficient in his knowledge of Brazilian NGOs. "There is a website where they have graded women players" he says, but he can't remember the address.

Time passes. Clocks tick, the cardigans shift in their seats, the laminate flooring creaks under the weight of the pacers.

Then Mr Smith remembers he does have that website address after all. I find the nearest computer. A whole new world appears before me: one inhabited by Maria Manakova, a 33-year-old grandmaster. She's there at number eight in the World Chess Beauty Contest, organised by Vladislav Tkachiev, a grandmaster from Kazakhstan. Maria doesn't seem to be playing chess. She seems to be in the bath, covered in foam.

Someone in the international chess community is unwise enough to provide her Moscow phone number. "Chess is very sexy game," breathes Miss Manakova, in heavily accented English. "When two people make moves, like in sex, like in love, they do some moves to win. Yes, not only he, but she, the woman. There are very close parallels between these two things: chess and sex. No, I don't mean sex. I mean the game of love.

"When I first played my ex-husband Miroslav Tosic - he is Yugoslav grandmaster - I made a move. I didn't go with my king to the corner, I went to the centre, and my ex-husband thought, 'Oh, she's so brave'. He fell in love with me immediately, because in this move was my character, my wish to be with him. Maybe I didn't want to show it, but maybe I wanted him to win a little bit. I surrendered myself to him. He liked that."

When Miss Manakova appeared on the cover of Chess Monthly in Britain, the magazine rapidly sold out. The mention of her name makes Alan Palmer, a Battersea 1 player, nearly break the silence. "There were a string of covers," the besuited, 62-year-old business consultant whispers fondly. "Chess beauties every other month. My wife started to question my interest in the magazine."

Miss Manakova confirms that there are now many "chess beauties". "Many parents, if their daughter is clever and beautiful, they try to put her into chess." Just ahead of her, at number seven in the beauty contest, is Arianne Caoili, 20, who achieved particular prominence at last year's World Chess Olympiad in Turin. While off duty, she was dancing with Levon Aronian, the Armenian world number three, at the Hiroshima Mon Amour nightclub. This attracted the displeasure of Danny Gormally, the British grandmaster, and very public dancefloor violence ensued.

In between modelling stints, Miss Caoili has become the first chess player to grace the final of the prime-time Australian television show Dancing With the Stars. Back in Durham, Mr Gormally, 30, has recovered his gentle affability to confirm: "Chess is an art form, some combinations of moves are beautiful. People who are attracted to chess are attracted to aesthetics, beautiful things, beautiful women."

"Some women players dress to kill, in low-cut tops," he adds happily. "It can be very offputting. But you get used to it." :D

And this is just the players. FIDE, the world chess federation, doesn't seem to do stuffed shirts in blazers. The president since 1995 has been Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who is also president of the former Soviet state of Kalmykia. He was elected Kalmuk president in 1993 on a ticket of a free mobile phone for every shepherd.

Then he announced details of his encounter with aliens: "They gave me a tour of their spaceship. I felt very comfortable with them." He has also ruled on the controversy about whether chess came from 5th-century India, or Persia, or China in the 5th century BC. "Look, the chessboard has 64 squares and our cells are made of 64 pieces. All this shows that chess comes either from God or from UFOs."

Some mutter about Mr Ilyumzhinov's effect on a game long saddled with a reputation for eccentricity. Wilhelm Steinitz, who became the sport's first official world champion in 1886, ended up telling the asylum doctors he could move chess pieces using just electrical impulses from his brain.

One of Britain's foremost grandmasters admits that, while "the majority are very level-headed", "about 10 or 15 per cent are unstable. I'm not too sure what some would do if they weren't chess players. I shudder to think." He asks to remain anonymous.

The world of chess is changing, insists Malcolm Pein, The Sunday Telegraph's chess correspondent and himself an international master. "We are seeing a de-nerdification of the game," he says. "Celebrities like Madonna are playing. It's huge in primary schools, because it is viewed as assisting children's development, and it is also cheap compared with running other activities.

"Tesco reported selling 35,000 chess sets one Christmas. I'm pretty confident that there are more chess sets out there than cricket bats. Look at the UK Chess Challenge: it started in 1996 with 23,000 children from 700 schools. It now attracts 74,000 entries from more than 2,000 schools."

The internet has also made it incredibly easy for players of all levels and all ages to find a similar opponent. "The big tournaments are broadcast live on the internet and attract audiences in the hundreds of thousands," says Pein. "Chess has a much broader social base now."

And, as if to prove his point, once the post-match analysis starts in the bar, the 'Trappist monks' of Battersea, East Ham, Streatham and Dulwich reveal a different side to their game. Emil Todorow, 54, Battersea's shaggy-haired, cricket-playing Bulgarian, leans his bear-like frame against the bar conspiratorially. "Behind the veneer of this polished behaviour," he growls, "You see that when a game of chess is lost, suddenly the veneer is lost, too. You have just raw, naked nature."

The lone woman, Dulwich's Jovanka Houska, 26, an international master and one of Britain's leading female players, smiles: "Chess is not as dull as it seems. I have played a transsexual before, and \u2026" She smiles enigmatically. "It's actually a sexy game. It's the clash of wills, the intellectual battle, the power struggle between a man and a woman. That's quite romantic."

Mr Smith is also happy, and stirred by the turn our conversation has taken. No London Chess League player has run away with a Brazilian exotic dancer, confirms the retired IT worker. "Not yet. But it sounds like a good way for a pensioner to go." :D
http://tinyurl.com/23n27j
 
What I want to know is where women like this were when I was 15.

And the first person who cracks "not even born yet" is going to be in real trouble. <ggg>
 
Gosh.

<Kondoru is lousy at chess, nor pretty, but she still looks like a teen.>
 
Teenaged boys of my generation used to endlessly dream about having sex with the pretty English teacher.

Today they actual do it.

So what's left to dream about?
 
Someone has started chess boxing. Where two opponents will box and then play chess in between. Probably invented by the same people as ski shooting.
 
Xanatico said:
Someone has started chess boxing. Where two opponents will box and then play chess in between. Probably invented by the same people as ski shooting.

Reminds me of the Australian Rules Chess sketch on the Rory Bremner Show. I think you can guess how that one goes.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
Teenaged boys of my generation used to endlessly dream about having sex with the pretty English teacher.

Today they actual do it.

So what's left to dream about?

Sex with the pretty English teacher, the hot gym teacher and maybe the cool looking girl fron the cafeteria, all of them at the same time. Dreaming is just more complicated in this day and age.
 
I think that one at a time would have been more my speed, even at that age.
 
It's becoming more and more common and striking closer to home. Within my own small circle of friends there's a woman whose mid-teens nephew was seduced by a female teacher (it made the papers). Within a few weeks of learning of that affair I was informed by an exceptionally trustworthy contact at another local high school that there was "strong evidence" that one of the female teachers "had slept around with male students quite a bit."
 
At my high-school there was a teacher who was known to have had a relationship with at least two students, and to have even lived with one of them. Why he was not fired I don´t know.
 
getting back to chess...

Mate check - women play worse against men
By Roger Dobson and Tom McTague
Published: 03 June 2007

Women make up only 1 per cent of chess Grandmasters. Yet according to a new study their under-performance is not down to lack of ability, but an awareness that they are expected to do badly. Researchers have shown that when women are under the illusion their opponent is female, they performed as well as the men. However their performance dropped by 50 per cent when they were aware they were playing a man. The researchers said women face accusations of "inferior ('girl's') play, but when they perform exceptionally well, their femininity is also often doubted".

They say the findings also suggest that women tend to approach chess games more cautiously and with less self-confidence, which may explain their worldwide under-representation and under-performance. "Women seem disadvantaged not because they are lacking cognitive or spatial abilities" but because of their mental approach to tournaments.

But Susan Lalic, the first British-born woman in the UK to attain the International Master status believes that there are physical differences between men and women that help explain the performance gap. "Women just aren't as obsessive about things in the same way as men," citing her experience in schools where girls match boys up to the age of 11 before diversifying their interests.

Pressed that this might explain women's under-representation but not their performance fluctuations against men, Lalic said: "I actually prefer playing against men because I'm usually more relaxed - I'm not really expected to win." Current UK women's number one Jovanka Houska agreed, claiming that "men feel they have to win", when they play women.

Asked whether this might incentivise men that little bit more, or indeed cause women to psychologically relax, Lalic was unsure saying that "this is a question women would answer differently", but she did think men "are better in the battle situation". In fact, the chess world's testosterone-fuelled side revealed itself recently when a nightclub brawl broke out between two chess Grandmasters, Danny Gormally and Levon Aronian over the so called "Anna Kournikova" of chess, Arianne Caoili. 8)

Houska offers an alternative to the nature versus nurture debate, as represented by Lalic and the Padova researchers. Houska argues that women's under-performance is because it was "only very recently that women... began to play chess and it was only in the Eighties that women were allowed to play alongside men in competitions. It could be that we need simply more time and more role models to encourage young girls to take up the game competitively."

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_b ... 609320.ece
 
Xanatico said:
At my high-school there was a teacher who was known to have had a relationship with at least two students, and to have even lived with one of them. Why he was not fired I don´t know.

About a month ago it even struck my own postage-stamp home town. A female high school teacher and a senior boy.

But they both had sense enough to wait until the boy turned 18 (it seems to have been his birthday present), so no crime was involved.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
But they both had sense enough to wait until the boy turned 18 (it seems to have been his birthday present), so no crime was involved.
Wish I'd had an 18th like that! :(
 
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