Cleaner than handshakes

Important news before British Championship competitors shake hands today:

Scientists at Aberystwyth University in Wales have shown that a shake transfers more bacteria than other forms of hand-on-hand action.

They are calling for the widespread adoption of the fist bump instead.

Public Health England whimsically suggested a Victorian-age bow or curtsey would be even safer.

In the light of the news, championship organisers have asked competitors who expect to begin games with a handshake to arrive at their boards ten minutes earlier than normal in order to allow time to wash their hands afterwards.

Now wash your hands

[Image: © Mark Crowther]

Aberystwyth ISEs

Black to play

Howell - Williams, British Championship (4) 2014

Normally we’d be half way through at this point. This year we’re already approaching the closing stretch. Better get the ISEs in quick while I’ve still got a chance.

S&BCB’s own Justin Horton was paired against Yang-Fan Zhou in the first round. A tough welcome back to chess for EJH that. It’s a measure of Zhou's strength that you can consider his +4 =2 -1 and  current share of 4th place as under-performing. I’d actually thought he was a decent outside bet to win the Championship this year and if that’s not going to happen, well, I’d still back him to become England’s next Grandmaster.

Anyhoo, on move 21,

Black to play

Horton - Zhou, British Championship (1) 2014

Black played ... Nxb6 allowing White to win the exchange. I can’t say that I expected it, but after 22 Bxb6 Rxb6, 23 axb6 Qxb6, 24 Na2 e4, 25 fxe4 Nxe4, 26 Qf4 f5 Black’s bishop, queen and centralised knight looked rather impressive to me.

White to play

Howell - Williams was a rather different kettle of ISEs. A total mess from start to finish.

A great win for the Ginger GM, but Howell won his next three on the bounce. If he beats Hawkins today he might even be back in the lead - if only jointly - by the time you read this.

2014 ISE Count: 50

TISE Index

"I was very impressed by Horton, especially in view of his age"

So says the tournament report. Well, I am 49.

The bubonic plagiarist

Private Eye, issue 1371, 27 July 2014, page 7.

Meanwhile...

[see also]

[Thanks to Richard James and Pablo Byrne]

[Ray Keene plagiarism index]

[Ray Keene index]

Miss Easy Tactics! with Justin XVIII

[Our pedagogical series in which we look at a portion of a game I played recently in which some obvious tactic was overlooked. Readers are invited to practice their skill by seeing if they can spot what was missed.]

Fathallah-Horton, British Championhip (Aberystwyth) 2014. Round six. Position after 29. Nd3xc5.

Play now continued 29...dxc5 30. Bxc5 Rd8 31. Qc1 Bxc5+ 32. Rxc5 and eventually Black held on for a draw at move 45.

But in the above sequence, what did both players miss?

[Miss Easy Tactics! index]

Harman In My Head

Slate's Ben Rothenberg reports:

What's this about?

The gift shop at Wimbledon, which rests above the subterranean Wimbledon museum, sells towels, polo shirts, and even strawberry-shaped earrings. The shop also sells a yearbook, known as the Official Wimbledon Annual. The 2013 annual, a compendium of photos and writings from that year's tournament, featured a cover shot of Andy Murray kissing the championship trophy.

We need to know this why?

By the end of this year's tournament, which was contested from June 23 to July 6, the 2013 annual had been removed from the Wimbledon bookshelves. It has also been removed from Wimbledon’s online shop. The book should have disappeared from circulation long before that. Months earlier, as first reported today in the UK magazine Private Eye (the article is not currently available online), Wimbledon employees had learned that the author, Neil Harman, had plagiarized large swaths of the 2013 book.

And who is Mr Harman?

Harman, a correspondent for the Times of London, is a pre-eminent figure in the tennis press.

A correspondent for the Times of London.

DG XI: 'Doctor' Gillian McKeith

If you want to know how bad things are, you have to take a look at "Doctor’* Gillian McKeith. More precisely, you have to take a look at Doctor Ben Goldacre taking a look at 'Doctor'* Gillian McKeith.

... the form of McKeith’s pseudo-academic work is superficially correct ... but the substance is lacking.

Ben Goldacre, Bad Science, Harper Perennial (2009)

And this is the problem: when chessers write about chess and dementia it isn’t even that good.

A couple of weeks ago - DG IX: Guioco Piano - I mentioned that I’d recently stumbled across the existence of FIDE’s Social Action Chess Commission and a SACC report which included a section on chess and dementia. While the involvement of Doctor Robert Friedland, a bona fide researcher in the field, was welcome news, much less a cause for celebration was the way FIDE chose to report  the good Doctor’s work. 

The tragedy of FIDE’s Social Action Committee report is not so much that it plumbs the depths of standards reached by a pretend 'Doctor' off the tellybox. It’s that the report actually represents a step forward by the usual standards of our 'community'.

Jarmany In My Head

Horton-Jarmany, round 3, British Championship (Aberystwyth) 2014

Position after 27...Rf8-h8. White to play and to be disturbed.

I'm on nought out of three. I'm not happy. I messed up a super game: I'm not at all happy. But in fact I'm much unhappier than that.

White is winning, in the above position. (You might like to check that, because it's pertinent. It's not the whole point of the story, but it's pertinent.) He's winning, but he has just four to five minutes, plus thirty-second increments, to play the next fifteen moves. He has lost the thread a little - hence the time shortage - and has already missed at least one of the clear wins which he has used his time up looking for. But he is still winning.

But while he is thinking, his opponent suddenly addresses him: "you still have to keep score even if there's less than five minutes". This is, as most readers will know, completely against the rules, since it is forbidden to talk to an opponent. [Edit: but see comments.]

It is, moreover, particularly wrong to talk to an opponent when it is his move. And more than particularly wrong to talk to him while he is in time trouble.

They’re Already Off

Black to play

Wade - Keene, British Championships 1971

And here we go. Or rather, there we went.

It was four years ago that I started writing about the format of the British Chess Championship [Bigger and Better?; Wagging the Dog]. A year later [Mummy’s Little Prince and the Sheffield Rest Day] I wrote of the schedule - 11 round swiss, Monday to Saturday in week 1, Sunday rest day, Monday to Friday in week two - and how it had remained unchanged for several decades.

Well for this year, at least, things are different. OK, they’re different only so that there won’t be a clash with the Olympiad, but they’re different nonetheless. We can but hope that the enforced change  might open a few minds with regard to what might be possible hereafter.

Anyhoo, when I think about ISEs from past British Championships one by You Know Who from Blackpool immediately springs to mind. We’ve had it on the blog before, but that was four years ago, - RCP VII being published a few days after my thoughts on the poor state of the contemporary championship tournament - and defensive sacrifices have been few and far between so far in this series.

If nothing else, I’m sure Ray would appreciate the recycling of old material.

2014 ISE Count: 48

TISE Index

seaside

Brixton Byways: 8. Uncommon People

This Brixton Byways series continues, but with the focus shifted three miles away from Brixton to Streatham as we are now researching the origins of the Streatham half of Streatham and Brixton Chess Club - we have gone, temporarily, Streatham Sideways.

As we saw in the last episode, in 1886 the British Chess Magazine reported a body setting up as Streatham CC; but judging from the Streatham News in October 1893 another outfit was the one that really had lift off and could claim the name, and it had been launched in all likelihood in 1891. The News looked back on this club's successful season just gone of sixteen matches, and an internal club tournament of 120 games.

Who were the principal officers of this dynamic outfit? The standout, and uncommon, name is that of the Club President, Edward John Vavasour Earle, and we are going to have a good look at him next, even though it make this post more of a study of social types than chess games. We will also give William Morris Esq., Hon Sec., a brief once-over (no, not that William Morris, unfortunately). If we may say so, and if our readers will entertain the expression, Mr. Morris of the Streatham Chess Club had a rather chequered career.   

The last time

Black to play and kiss goodbye to two hundred nicker

Three hours after this piece publishes I should be boarding a train in Sheffield, to take me to Birmingham, where I'll change trains for for Aberystwyth and the 2014 British Chess Championship.

DG X: Making a Difference

Today I’m going to offer the chess world two rules that will improve the quality of debate about our game and dementia by several orders of magnitude.

1. Writers and publishers: don’t cite 'research’ or 'science’ or 'evidence’ without providing a full reference to that research;
2. Readers: dismiss out of hand anything and anyone that breaks Rule One.

To see how much of a difference it would make, I’m going to take a look at two pieces of writing. One, a manual used by staff in the NHS working with people who have been diagnosed with dementia; the other, an article which appeared on Chessbase.

The subject of both concerns the provision of cognitively stimulating exercises. In the circumstances, inviting readers to guess which one of the two is of negligible value seems a little out of place.

Ray Saves the Day

When you need a helping hand, chessically speaking, who are you going to call? Why, the chess correspondent of The Times of course.

I gather RDK has been covering exchange sacs over the last week or so.  ... Rxc3s in Sicilians, ... Rxf3s , Gazza’s Rxb7 against Shirov to name but a few. I was just about to get around to that last one, funnily enough.

White to play

Kasparov - Shirov, Horgen 1994

My favourite from Ray’s bunch is Benko - Keres, Los Angeles 1963. An ISE and a rook ending. What’s not to like?

2014 ISE Count: 49
TISE Index

Jazz Up Your Openings

This week we have been mostly listening to Jonathan Finlayson and Sicilian Defense on their recent album Moment and the Message...

by Pi Recordings

...well, a couple of weeks ago actually...as the background tracks for an exceedingly agréable fortnight's holiday in Brittany.

Print source

There's something of a kerfuffle been going on involving the difficulties some countries are experiencing in getting their competitors to Tromsø for the Olympiad.

In response the FIDE President has written an open letter to the Prime Minister of Norway. (Excerpt above.)

The Olympiad organisers have sent a response. (Excerpt below.)

As stated above, in spite (of) their goodwill, they are unable to solve the problem.

The Haldane Half

You'll recall that the weekend before last, Jonathan Rowson gave a simultaneous display in order to raise funds for Brandelhow Primary School in Putney. One of his opponents was Streatham and Brixton veteran Robin Haldane, inventor of the Haldane Hack.

Here's the game, which notes based on those Robin was kind enough to send us. Kind enough, and brave enough to do without computer assistance! All my additions are of the more cowardly sort.

White: Jonathan Rowson
Black: Robin Haldane

1. e4

Robin: "I was happy when White opened with the Ruy Lopez as I thought there would be more chance of a tactical game than if he had started 1. c4, 1. d4 or 1. Nf3."

1...e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. O-O Be7 6. Bxc6

Robin: "6. Bxc6 dxc6 7. Qe1 is a line that Les Pickett recommended in the 1970s in a long defunct magazine called Chessman Quarterly. It looks innocuous but forces Black on the defensive."

6...dxc6 7. Qe1 Nd7 8. b3 O-O 9. Bb2 Bd6 10. d3 Qe7 11. Nbd2 b5 12. a4 Bb7

DG IX: Giuoco Piano

It’s been a little while, so I’m going to restart the chess and dementia posts with a quick recap of what’s been going on since DG VIII: Celebrity. There’s been a fair bit, as it turns out and that’s not counting the proper dementia news that appeared in the press yesterday.

I’ve got three things today. Something (potentially) encouraging from FIDE, something from Chess Cafe that can be filed under 'More of the Usual Bollocks' and a little something that Richard James brought to my attention which is not entirely unconnected with the reason for the hiatus in the Doctor Garry series.

A bit previous

I found this interesting interview on Susan Polgar's website.

Not a phrase you'll often read on this website, but the interested party in this instance was none other than Leonard Barden and the interview, with Willy Iclicki, is indeed interesting, for a few reasons.

One of them is that despite having been billed on July 4 as an exclusive interview

precisely the same exclusive interview seems to have appeared on Chessdom on July 3.

Miraculously the Polgar version contains the same typing error as its Chessdom predecessor (note the missing full stop above and below)

and yet the Polgar site neglects to mention where it pinched the interview from.

But talking about dubious practice in the chess world, the subject of the exclusive interview is the ECU elections, in which Iclicki is a member of Zurab Azmaiparashvili's team.

ISEs: From the Books IV

Black to play

Spassky - Petrosian (11), World Championship 1969

I was so fascinated by Petrosian’s art in this area that in a rather short time I started sacrificing exchanges whenever I had the chance. My Olympiad team-mates met my new habit with pronounced skepticism, in spite of my excellent results both in practical play and analysis. Some of them considered it nothing more than an eccentricity, though an excusable one, given my youth.

Mihail Marin, Learn from the Legends(Quality Chess, 2006)

Up until now, I’ve usual mentioned Marin’s Learn from the Legends in connection with its first chapter: Rubinstein’s Rook Endings. Today’s ISE comes from his chapter on Petrosian.

Mr P must be the most famous of all ISE-ists.  There’s his ... Re6 at Zurich, of course, and we had him in this series not so long ago (Psychological Caution). I seriously doubt whether it would be possible to find anything written on ISEs in the last forty years that doesn’t mention Petrosian’s name. Marin has a whole chapter dedicated to him.

I’d pick out Petrosian - Nunn from Hastings in the late 70s ...

16 b3

...  but I’m trying to give fianchetto ISEs a rest. So instead today we’ve got a game from Petrosian’s rematch with Spassky. Plenty of time to think about this ISE. It’s on for a long long time.

2014 ISE Count: 47

TISE Index

Brixton Byways: 7. Streatham News!

So far in Brixton Byways (adding, in parenthesis and in case anyone is reaching for the wrong end of the stick, that this is an unofficial history and is not commissioned by, written on behalf of, or is representing, Streatham and Brixton Chess Club - though the author is a member of the club - thus, as always with posts on the independent S&B Chess Blog, the authorial buck stops with the author himself) we have been dogging the footsteps of Brixton CC, one half of the modern-day Streatham and Brixton partnership forged in 1946. As we have seen the Brixton CC half goes back to the 1870s; but a separate Streatham club was established in 1918 just as WW1 finished.

Yes, the ancestor of the today's club, that which brought the Streatham bit to the party, was a creature of the C20th: a verity that has entered into S&BCC folklore, recounted by the godfathers of the club when telling, re-telling and embellishing, the legends of the misty past to the young pretenders, who in their turn recount it to the next generation...why it even said so in the local newspaper:

As reproduced in Knightmare! in 1977

There. "Founded in 1918."

But how wrong we may have all been.

As a species we are not large like the Whale

What initiative would that be?

Tell us more.

Settling old accounts

New In Chess 2014#4, page 9.

The latter above intrigued me when I read it in the last New In Chess - and not just me, either, judging from a comment on the blog last week. I've asked before but not yet had any response. So does anybody have any clue what this is about?

[Nigel Short index]

Ins and outs

Simon Barnes has been sacked! It's a shame: he was the favourite sports correspondent of at least one contributor to this blog.

There's some controversy over his dismissal, but whatever the ins and outs of Barnes' disappearance from the Times, the reader of this blog is bound to ask - how come somebody like Barnes gets sacked while somebody like our favourite chess correspondent doesn't?

A Tweet suggests:

[Ray Keene index]

ISEs: From the Books III

Black to play

Karpov - Andersson, Milan 1975

I could stay with Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy for the rest of the year probably, but it’s time to move on. Today’s ISE comes from the similarly named Grandmaster Chess Strategy: Kaufeld & Kern’s book on the games of Ulf Andersson (New In Chess, 2013).

Rook takes bishop on e3 seems to be a fairly common way for Black to give up an exchange. Often it happens when Black has a fianchettoed king’s bishop and he wants to get rid of its opposite number. When Bishops are too Strong and Euwe - Kotov from Zurich ’53 are examples of the theme.

Euwe-Kotov 1953

Black to play

No fianchetto in Karpov - Andersson, the first game in Kaufeld and Kern’s chapter 'The Positional Exchange Sacrifice’, although the point of limiting White’s ability to play against a strong dark-squared bishop still seems to apply.

2014 ISE Count: 45
TISE Index

King Queen Zebra

We're taking a break from our Brixton Byways this weekend, but if you're at a loose end on Sunday morning you might like to take a stroll across Clapham (or take a number 37) to Putney in time for 11am or so.

Why might you do such a thing? Because Brandelhow Primary School (Brandlehow Road, Putney, enter from Skelgill Road) is holding a school fête with cup cakes available at four for a quid. And aside from the edibles they're hosting a simultaneous display to be given by three-times British champion and author of Chess for Zebras, Dr Jonathan Rowson.

Neutrality

I'm not proposing to write much about the FIDE Presidential election - just thinking about it brings on a wave of nausea - but there were a couple of things about the ECF statement supporting Kasparov that I have just sufficient enthusiasm to spend five minutes on.

Most of the statement is unexceptional enough - what it says against Kirsan is substantially true, what it says in favour of Kasparov is often nonsense, but that's pretty much par for the course, and as I say, I really don't have the heart to go through the document ticking off what I agree with and
taking issue with what I don't.

However, this little passage intrigued me.

Now I'm a little curious as to how the statement was actually written and by whom. (It's hard to put one's finger on it, but there's something strange about the English in places, such as the lapse into the present tense in the sentence before the passage above.) But that's not particularly important. What I was really wondering about was this "political neutrality" which is apparently "expected by the FIDE Statutes" and is so important to the ECF.

I ask because there is surely no more politically-engaged figure in the entire world of international chess than Garry Kasparov.

Stop me if you've heard this one before

Scandal in Afghan chess!

A chess federation's president replaced because he supported the wrong side in FIDE politics!

Whoever heard of such a thing?

#chess180: Game On

I’m taking a temporary break from the Chess and dementia posts this week, to announce that Project Chess 180 is very much Game On.

ISEs: From the Books II

White to play

Seirawan - Kozul, Wijk aan Zee 1991

Yasser’s got something truly absurd for us today. Swap queens, 'lose' the exchange and then just carry on playing.

I can kind of see the point - Black’s bishop ends up with no diagonals, the rooks have no files - but White’s pieces don’t seem to be doing anything either. Well, what do I know? Seirawan wins anyway, although he (and Watson: I found this position in Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy) thinks White can do even better a little while along the line with 25 Rf1.

Brixton Byways: 6. Men of Might

They Might or they Might Not: but hopefully all will be revealed as we continue to lay bare Brixton Chess Club's early history. Last time we featured John Sargent and his 28 moves of fame in 1891, and in this episode we continue through the final decade of the 19th century, at the end of which our time-line will more or less hit the buffers - but leaving a few tasty bits left to savour for a few episodes beyond.

So far we have watched Endeavour CC gradually evolve into Brixton CC; noted, in spite of a murmuring of nay-sayers, the let's-just-get-on-with-it birth of the Surrey County Chess Association; and the emergence, after a more protracted gestation, of the London League (about which there is still a bit more to say). We have also plotted the progressive migration, ever further south, of Brixton CC HQ eventually to the Bon Marché Restaurant, at 240-250 Ferndale Road around 1890; and also identified a surprising number chess associations in the Brixton area apart from Endeavour/Brixton, including one other (the Effra Chess Club) that, curiously, shared a few years earlier the very same venue as Brixton CC at 322 Brixton Road. 

In this episode we will continue to mine this rich - and sometimes confused - seam of chess club history as we dig deep into the 1890s.

A morality play

Reading yesterday's post, our more attentive readers will surely have spotted that in one place - if perhaps only one - Ray's notes to Keene-Janetschek are lengthier on chessgames.com than they were on the Spectator: the note to Black's tenth.

Spectator

chessgames.com

So naturally I wondered whether the longer passage was new to chessgames.com. It isn't, though.

It doesn't appear in the Spectator version because it had already appeared in that magazine - the week before, 24 October 1998, when Ray had annotated the Nimzowitsch-Rubinstein game it refers to. The version on chessgames.com is a shorter rendering of the final passage here.

And here are Ray's Spectator notes in full.

A direct transposition

If you've ever strolled through Ray's stash of chessgames.com annotations you may have enjoyed his pasting of Karl Janetschek at the 1975 Barcelona Zonal.

Vintage Ray on the board and off, his notes ("White's juggernaut continuing its advance", "an ingenuity born of despair") reminiscent of how he used to do it in his heyday.

Mind you, perhaps they are how Ray used to do it in his heyday, since the notes are anything but recent.

DG VIII: Celebrity

... consider Tom Cruise’s genuinely terrifying sense of intellectual rectitude. 'You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do ... You’re glib. You don’t even know what Ritalin is ... You don’t know and I do.

These people are not curious: they are credulous. They exhibit a quite stunning lack of curiosity, yet they are given to declaring themselves - entertainers - the authority on complex matters of which they have the most tenuous grasp at best. 

Marina Hyde, Celebrity (Harvill Secker, 2009)

I’ve been rereading Celebrity of late. Rediscovering that while there aren’t many things in life that give you regular LOLs whilst simultaneously making you thoroughly miserable, Marina Hyde’s wonderful book is certainly one of them.

"Has the world really come to tolerating this?" you ask yourself page after page. Read of Bono badgering people to 'do more' on Africa whilst simultaneously limiting his government’s ability so to do by having his money become Dutch for tax purposes, read about Jude Law’s 'mission' to bring peace to Afghanistan, read abut Tom Cruise banging on about whatever the chuffing heck he was banging on about and you’ll decide (a) that it has and (b) the aforementioned world can jolly well go eff itself.

Ah, but Life Imitates Chess, don’t you know?

So let’s replace Tom Cruise with Garry Kasparov and switch in 'chess players' for 'entertainers'. What do we have now? Cut the line about Ritalin and I’d say we’re left with a pretty good summary of where the chess world is regarding the chess-dementia 'debate'. Where we actually are rather than where we should be, obviously.

Ves and Vlad

Black to play

Topalov - Kramnik, Norway 2014

When’s not a good time to play an exchange sacrifice that doesn’t work out? When you’re playing your arch enemy, that’s when.

2014 ISE Count: 42

TISE Index

Trust is not the word

Following on from yesterday's post, Nette Robinson's event later this month is advertised on the website of the English Chess Federation.

Nothing strange about that. There is, however, something extremely strange about the second part of the item.

This is - amazingly - an advert for a Ray Keene event, in support of his personal charity-cum-dining society*. On the website of the English Chess Federation.

As readers probably don't need reminding, Ray Keene is not a member of the Federation. He has not been a member of the organisation for two decades. This is because he was obliged to leave the Federation when he was accused of defrauding that organisation of a sizeable sum of money.

Ray Keene has never made any proper explanation of his actions. Nor has he returned the money.

So tell me - what other organisation would be dozy enough to offer free advertising to an individual who had left them in such murky and discreditable circumstances?

None that I can think of.

Is Phil Ehr able to offer us an explanation?

[* See for instance parts 8-9 of this piece]

[Ray Keene index]

Nette and Tom (and Diana Makes Three)

We've talked about Nette Robinson's chess art before on the blog, and now there's a bit more to say in view of her article in this June's Chess and her forthcoming exhibition, from 23 to 28 June at Art Galleries Europe, London W1S 1PL. It also gives us a chance to catch up on our other favourite chess-in-artist Tom Hackney (also discussed here, here and here). Both of them turn the moves on the board into art on the wall, and we can take this opportunity to compare and contrast - not so much how they look, but what's going on...that is to say, on their canvasses, and why. Tom, by the way, is on the short list for the John Moore's Painting Prize 2014, exhibiting at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, and we'll have a look at his entry below (and wish him luck). And there's a third chess-in-artist to check out as well: Diana Mihajlova.

Research is vital

As regular and recent readers of this blog will know, two particular interests of ours are plagiarism and dodgy chess/dementia research.

Today we get to combine the two in looking at an article entitled Checkmating Alzheimer's Disease written by a gentleman named Michael Ciamarra. It appeared on Chessbase on 20 May last year.

I say "article" but perhaps I should say "articles" since the same piece, under the same title, had already appeared on the FIDE site on 14 May of the same year, not that the Chessbase article acknowledges that. Mind you, the FIDE piece doesn't tell you that it had already appeared on Alabama Local News, on May 9, with the slightly more cumbersome title of Mind sports could help older adults improve cognitive performance and reduce the risk of Alzheimer's.

Phew.

Still, what is of especial interest isn't how much these three articles resemble one another, but how much parts of them resembled other articles, by other people.

How very much.

DG VII: Doctor Coyle

Chess and dementia: a summary of where we’re at - or where chessers as a community should be at - courtesy of Joseph T. Coyle, M.D.

... participation in cognitively demanding leisure activities in late life may provide protection against dementia,

... 

Determining the relative contributions of genes that confer risk and environmental factors such as effortful mental activity to the pathogenesis of dementia remains an important but unrealized goal in research on dementia. In the meantime, seniors should be encouraged to read, play board games, and go ballroom dancing, because these activities, at the very least, enhance their quality of life, and they might just do more than that.

Use it or Lose It - Do Effortful Mental Activities Protect against Dementia? 

New England Journal of Medicine 2003; 348: 2489-2490

Chess and Dementia Index

DG VI: Doctor Susan

I knew that the Journal of Chess Research was coming. I’m indebted to EJH for the knowledge that one of things that Polgie’s magazine is intending to investigate is the issue of chess and Alzheimer’s Disease (Unlearned Journal).

Chess and dementia (Alzhiemer’s Disease is the most common form of dementia) is an important subject, but try to find out something about it and chances are you’ll end up misinformed. The internet being awash with just as much ignorance and nonsense on this particular topic as it is for everything else, anything which helps cut through the confusion is to be welcomed. It’s just a pity that Susan Polgar is herself one of the highest profile generators of that confusion.

Exhibit A of the Polgarian chess/dementia misinformation: the article that she reproduces on her website which has the headline, "Playing Chess Can Lower the Risk of Dementia by 74%" even though the claims turn out to be based on the Verghese research which actually concludes, " ... our findings do not establish a causal relation between participation in leisure activities and dementia ...."

Susan Polgar: once part of problem, and now - apparently - the solution. Well, if it gives us nothing else, the Journal of Chess Research has at least put to bed the claim that folks on the other side of the Atlantic don’t do irony.

ISEs: From the Books

Black to play

Panov - Simagin, Moscow 1943

Time to see if any of those chess books that I’ve acquired over the years can help me with my ISE quest. First up, Watson,’s Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy (Gambit, 1998).

I choose this one to say goodbye - for a while - to the fianchettoed bishop theme. An astonishing move coming up from Simagin. The exchange given up without getting a pawn in return or shattering White’s structure or anything else. Black just would rather have his bishop than the rook. Especially if he can get rid of White’s dark-squared bishop too.

The Soviet school set new boundaries for this kind of long-term exchange sacrifice, according to Watson. These days, he says, "even average players make such moves."  Hmmm.

Balance

Fast forward to 1.43 if your Norwegian is no better than mine.

[Nigel Short index]

[Via]

Brixton Byways: 5. Sargent Majors

We started our promenade along the pathways of Brixton chess club history with the 1870s, here and here; then spent two more episodes exploring the 1880s, here and here - and we have now reached the latter years of that decade. Somewhat royally we have allowed ourselves to pause in our progress so as to acknowledge favoured subjects, and indulge them should they take our fancy. We will continue so to do in this episode wherein we will finally reach the 1890s. Let's hope that we will be engaged by one or two diverting characters, and perhaps other curiosities, en route.

Once again, it's maybe helpful to scope the terrain in which Brixton played its chess, and it is time to put in place the London Chess League. Or try to...

Unlearned journal

We've been talking a lot about chess and research recently. So on the face of it there's every reason to welcome the appearance of a new academic journal, The Journal of Chess Research

which all being well, will be coming out early next month.

So who's responsible for bringing us this publication?

Oh dear.

DG V: In the news

The Washington Post 19/6/2003

Last week (DGIII: Dogs That Don’t Bark) we saw that the one piece of research which is commonly cited to justify claims that chess is an effective intervention to counter dementia actually contains no mention of chess whatsoever. Joe Verghese (and friends)’s article in the New England Journal of Medicine Leisure Activities and the Risk of Dementia in the Elderly, you will recall, talks merely of "playing board games and cards". This curious yet easily demonstrable fact notwithstanding, the journal article remains frequently cited as proof that playing chess reduces chances of dementia later in life.

How can that be? Short answer: it was in the news*. The Washington Post’s Mind Games May Trump Alzheimer’s piece being one example of the story that appeared in the press. What folk are referencing (if that’s not too grand a word in the circumstances, which it probably is) is not the Verghese research per se, but news reports about that research.

My original plan for this post was a lengthy explanation as to why relying on news media reports for accounts of scientific research is unwise, but, frankly, I can’t be arsed. I’m going to take it as read that we agree that material published in the press (or on tellybox news for that matter) sometimes contains mistakes because of the need to rush to meet deadlines, that sometimes mistakes are made because journalists don’t understand what they’re writing about and that sometimes errors of fact are printed because the journalists/papers have simply made stuff up.

Feel free to disagree with the standpoint if you wish, but if you do you might as well stop reading this post now. Which would be a shame because you’ll miss the good chuckle at the expense of the Daily Express which is coming in a moment.

Goldacre: could be a chesser for all I know

(although his lack of tolerance for bullshit suggests that he probably isn’t)

Ben Goldacre - medical Doctor/journalist/author - once wrote,

If you are simply presented with the conclusions of a piece of research, without being told what was measured, how and what was found - the evidence - then you are simply taking the researchers’ conclusions at face value …. 

Ben Goldacre, Bad Science (p. 238)

True enough. And if you are presented with those conclusions in a newspaper you are assuming that journos' summaries of what the researchers’ conclusions were can be taken on trust. Do we really need to have seen the discrepancy between the Washington Post and Verghese in the New England Journal of Medicine to know that they can’t?

Surely not.

Enough. On with the mocking of the Daily Bollocks Express and its fondness for shouty headlines about dementia. They don’t seem to have got around to chess yet. If only they'd consult Doctor Garry.