LONG TIME PALS HELP OUT!

Yesterday I made a request from readers to send me the games of Rashid Nezhmetdinov which I had placed on a diskette years ago. Long time friends Jim Perry and Andy Ansel promptly answered. I will be going through exercises tonight to drop them into my database system and end up with a new DB which will be put out on CD with a wrapper. I believe these had notes to them and at the time I had made them quite a number of games did not exist in ChessBase's Mega Database. So thanks to you guys.

CHECK YOUR PULSE

Bathroom reading material is always important to me as I hate to waste time (except for looking stuff up on the internet--often a monster time waster). Not always chess but this morning and yesterday I had grabbed Gary Lane's Batsford title, Find the Checkmate. Let me tell you why I enjoyed this book.

When you checkmate someone it is final. There is no jargon about "White goes on to win the endgame," or "Black has many ways to win, can you find one?" Those are useful real world chess questions but often are only definitive with extensive analysis. Even John Nunn has been known to throw "ringers" in his books as I have been caught by them. Just as you feel you have conquered Mt. Everest some sneaky little "gotcha" move shows up to make you start over.

In Lane's book one of the earlier chapters is on "mate in one." Invariably some player (sometimes very good ones) behaves like Ford's old slogan, "I have a better idea." Next thing you know, it's mate in one. There was one of 24 positions where I needed to extend my view to see the mate. The black Queen had to go clear to the other end of a file to mate on a diagonal and Johannessen did, to mate Beliavsky. Lots of well-known names, as I said earlier, bite the big banana.

There is a rating system included and the chapters become more difficult: mate in 2, mate in 3, etc. If you own a copy it is worth getting it out and surprising yourself. A fun read.

bob@thinkerspressinc.com