Predecessors VII: Reti-Bogoljubow 1924

Here's Ray Keene's Times column of 17 September 2011, which features the game Reti-Bogoljubow from the New York tournament of 1924. You have to scroll down a fair way to find the game, since it's tacked on to the end of an extended advertisement for his own excellence and a discussion of the inadequacies of one of his competitors.

There's not all that many notes, when you finally find them, and all of them are plagiarised. I'm sure you can guess where from.

In Part One (Everyman, 2004) of My Great Predecessors Reti-Bogoljubow is on pages 293 and 294.

It's a pretty short game (a miniature, indeed) but we are nevertheless looking foward to Ray delving

"far more deeply into the intricacies and explanations of important games".

Perhaps this game is not so important, then, as the intricacies into which Ray delves turn out to contitute exactly one line of analysis lasting exactly three half-moves.

Plagiarised analysis, of course.

1. Black's move six.

My Great Predecessors:

Ray:

And there you have it!

2. Black's move nine.

My Great Predecessors:

Ray:

Other than changing "this" for "the", every word comes from My Great Predecessors. This involves more recourse to originality than do most of Ray's notes in this column.

3. White's move twelve.

My Great Predecessors:

Ray:

Amusingly, in removing the bracket, Ray forgets to insert a capital letter where his sentence now starts, though he gets it right at the second attempt...

4. White's move fifteen.

My Great Predecessors:

Ray:

5. White's move seventeen.

My Great Predecessors:

Ray:

6. White's move nineteen.

My Great Predecessors:

Ray:

....and the third. Two out of three ain't bad.

7. White's concluding move.

My Great Predecessors:

Ray:

By this time you're thinking please, do something original, anything. And he does! "White now finds". Three whole words that aren't in the original. Bringing the grand total to four. (Or five, if you are generous enough to distinguish "Black" from "Black's" at White's seventeenth.)

This is pitiful in all sorts of ways, though none so pitiful than the fact that it is tolerated. But it seems to me that if I were going to mock other people for the apparent deficiencies in their columns, not only would I pick a less dreadful column as my platform for saying so, but I probably wouldn't pick an occasion when practically every word of mine was directly plagiarised.

Come to that, I don't know that it looks too clever, in retrospect, to crow over one's rivals being "blissfully unaware" and their "technological capacity" not having yet "entered the 21st century", when you yourself are blissfully unaware that that same 21st century technology is helping to reveal the immense extent of your plagiarism.

[Thanks to Jonathan] 

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