Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Guess the dedication

Which chessplayer ended their dedication of a chess book with the following phrase?
....particularly Alexander Michael, with the assurance that I shall never play him so much as one game of chess.
(A bonus point for naming the book.)

11 comments:

Tom Chivers said...

Mm. No idea. Can we have a clue? You said 'which chessplayer'. Professional chessplayer? And the book, a specialist chess book?

Jonathan B said...

Nor me. I was going to ask for a clue too.

ejh said...

You want a clue? It's only been up about an hour!

Anonymous said...

I assume it's a chess player who doesn't wish to impose the rotten game of chess on his son.

Angus

Anonymous said...

I thought it was James Plaskett but I haven't yet been able to find the book.

ejh said...

You thought right. I'll let you find the book before revealing its (relatively unexciting) title...

Anonymous said...

Well, is it in a book I own or did I read it in a review or elsewhere?

According to Wikipedia Plaskett has written the following books:

The English Defence (with Raymond Keene and Jonathan Tisdall), 1987 ISBN 0-7134-1322-0
Playing To Win, 1988 ISBN 0-7134-5844-5
The Sicilian Taimanov, 1997 ISBN 1-901259-01-3
Sicilian Grand Prix Attack, 2000 ISBN 1-85744-291-1
Can You Be A Tactical Chess Genius?, 2002 ISBN 1-85744-259-8
The Scandinavian Defence, 2004 ISBN 0-7134-8911-1
Starting out: Attacking Play, 2004 ISBN 1-85744-367-5
The Queen's Bishop Attack Revealed, 2005 ISBN 0-7134-8970-7
Catastrophe in the Opening, 2005 ISBN 1-85744-390-x
Coincidences, 2000, ISBN 0-9509441-6-5

Alexander was born in 1996 so that rules out the first two (the second of which I have).

Of the others, I've checked out Can You Be A Tactical Chess Genius? (in my case the answer is no) which seems to have no dedication, and Coincidences, which is dedicated to the lovely Fiona. So it must be one of the others, most likely either the Sicilian Taimanov, which I certainly don't have, or the Sicilian Grand Prix Attack, which I may have somewhere but can't find at the moment.

Can I go 50-50? Do I get £250,000 if I get it right?

ejh said...

That's close enough, Richard, you deserve the answer. The book concerned was "Nice" Jim Plaskett's Sicilian Taimanov.

It's a shame he didn't promise never to write Coincidences instad.

Anonymous said...

Jim Paskett, yes..... "Nice" indeed!

I'll never forget the time he turned up for one of our opponents' team in a league match a few years ago.

We were a little surprised to see him......given that everyone else was graded about ECF 100-175 (!)

He arrived very late - no problem, he still thrashed our board 1. Jim didn't stay long and just disappeared in a foul mood.

Some of our players didn't realise he had left our club as they were so engrossed in their games and Jim didn't hang about for more than 10 secs after his game had finished!

My team a good laugh about it afterwards in the pub....not just at Jim but also at our board 1 for getting thrashed so quickly!

Jonathan B said...

I think I've mentioned this before but I was once at Golders Green when Plaskett was there.

He interupted my game about 15 minutes in (30 mins per player) because he wanted to play backgammon with my opponent.

Utter cunt.

Anonymous said...

Oh dear. Plaskett isn't exactly Mr Popular, it seems...... :-)

Is his interminable "Charles Ingram is innocent" rant still on the net, I wonder?