Nigel Short's World of Science

Good Lord, Nigel's on the telly.

And in the Telegraph.

And the Independent.

And the Guardian.

And the Vile.

And Time.

Twice.

And the Standard.*

Nigel does not think this is wholly fair. To some extent he's right - it's not hard to pick very large holes in any of these articles - though at the same time I'm not entirely sympathetic.

BORP? XXXII

White to play

Shaw - Hamdouchi, Gibraltar 2003

After last week’s detour to St Louis (We Need to Talk About Wesley) I’m still not quite ready to go back to reviewing Benjamin’s Liquidation on the Chessboard. A review which has morphed into a rambling dissertation on all chess books (most recently: On Lessons and Chapters), if I’m honest.

I feel the need to report that I have played my first king and pawn endgame of the year. It was not a lengthy affair - it lasted precisely half a move - but it was a pawn ending nonetheless.

Baby you can't drive my car

I am not an expert driver. There's all sorts of reasons why this might be so, but perhaps the best is that I scarcely drove at all in the twenty years after passing my test just out of my teens. A few weeks driving between Oxford and Didcot to a mercifully short-lived employment in 1995 and that's pretty much it.

These days I drive round Spain to pursue my living and I'm perfectly safe on the roads, but those twenty-odd years have had their effect. I don't like city driving (all right,nobody does) and I can't park a car to save my life. So when we need to reverse the car into our lock-up, my wife, a proper driver, does it. So as I don't crash it or anything.

Like I say, there's all sorts of reasons why this might be so, but nobody's ever suggested that it might simply be because of my gender.

Here's Nigel Short in New In Chess last month. There's a few things about the piece that might be worth coming back to, but the ending is perhaps the best bit.

My thanks to Jon Manley for reminding me of the following, which makes the point unsubtly, and yet probably more subtly than I would have.

I'd have settled on something like this.

[Nigel Short index]

This is not a folk song

About exactly a year ago the 2014 English Seniors Championship took place in Sunningdale Park, in Berkshire. It didn't go well.

Outsourced to the e2e4 organisation by the English Chess Federation, it attracted only a small entry. One consequence of this was that the generous prize fund advertised

was, when the time came to pay the prizes, considerably reduced.

This led to a considerable controversy. I won't go into it in detail since I imagine the print magazines must have covered it adequately at the time, but basically, complaints reached the ECF from players who believed that they should have received prizes which had not been paid. The organisers however responded that the reduction in prizes had been advertised and that the conditions of entry

specifically allowed for the amendment of prizes. The Federation's CEO, Phil Ehr, dismissed the complaints.

I don't myself propose to adjudicate on the dispute, here or anywhere else: what interests me here is not the disagreement between the players and the organisers, but the role played by the ECF in what, outsourced or not, was their competition - and regarding which there was evidently some disagreement within the ECF Board itself.

Why do I say so? Because in the middle of the controversy the Commercial Director, Bob Kane, resigned.

He later retracted his resignation, but nevertheless one could detect that not all had been entirely well. I couldn't find much about the matter in the ECF Board minutes so, on November 4 last year, I sent Phil Ehr, by email, a number of questions about the ill-fated tournament and the ECF's role within it.

What's the point?

Eye-catching passage in Stephen Moss's Guardian piece on Gaioz Nigalidze yesterday:

Raymond Keene, the English grandmaster and long-time Times chess columnist, tweeted yesterday when the Dubai story broke: “What’s the point of cheating at chess? The thrill of the game is mental stimulation. It must be exhausting having to pretend all the time.”

So he did, Stephen, so he did.

The piece goes on to say:

There have always been cheats and charlatans in the game.

So there have, Stephen, so there have.

[Ray Keene index]

We Need to Talk About Wesley

Black to play

Giri - So, Biel 2010

A few years ago I was playing this game during which my opponent started moving his pieces with one hand and pressing the clock with the other. The first time I let it go in case it was a one off. The second time I asked him not to do it again.

On being challenged the guy said that he didn’t know that he wasn’t allowed to use both of his hands. Frankly, I found that rather hard to believe. Partly because I knew for a fact that he’d been playing for years, but mostly because he’d said exactly the same thing when exactly the same thing happened when we'd played before.

Which brings us to Wesley So.

A Fictional Novelty

For us lesser mortals, not destined for chess superstardom or, as in my case, anything remotely like it, chess has to take its place in among competing compulsions. Writing a novel might be one: David Hodgson, the genial secretary of neighbouring Crystal Palace CC has just self-published his first - Can I Touch Your Face?

I bought a copy (details of how you can get yours at the end) and grabbed the chance to blog about our local chess-playing novelist, for which David generously spared his time to answer a few questions. Chess has a small part in his plot (it first appears on page 144), and that's where we start.

Bad advice

I don't know if you remember this from a few weeks ago.

It's an odd and intriguing claim for a variety of reasons, one of which is that the "British Olympic Chess Squad" is a non-existent entity - let's assume he means the Olympiad and that the squad he refers to is the English one - and another of which is that I haven't the faintest idea when he might have been any sort of advisor to such a squad.

Buzan obviously thinks he was, though, since he keeps on making the claim: you can find it in any number of other Buzan-related sources. Here, for instance, is Buzan Asia.

That one is members of the British Olympic Chess Team rather than the British Olympic Chess Squad, but let's assume that it's the same thing under a different, equally inaccurate name. What's the basis in reality of that claim?

I sent them an email to ask. (I kept it simple, which is why there's no querying of "British" or "Olympic" in the emails below.)

Dear Buzan Asia

I was reading your site this morning and I saw the following:

Tony Buzan is an adviser to the British Olympic Rowing Squad as well as to the members of the British Olympic Chess Team.

I am British, I play chess and I had never heard that Mr Buzan was an advisor to our chess team. Would it be possible to ask Mr Buzan when this was and whether it was an official post?

Yours

I didn't get a reply to this email, but no matter, since one virtue of the claim appearing all over the Buzan empire is that there is always somebody else you can ask.

Like Aulis Publishing for instance, whose site mentions the British Olympic Chess Team, rather than the "members" thereof.

So I also wrote to them.

Dear Aulis

I was reading your site this morning and I saw the following:

Tony is also an advisor to international Olympic coaches and athletes and to the British Olympic Rowing Squad as well as the British Olympic Chess Team.

I am British, I play chess and I had never heard that Mr Buzan was an advisor to our chess team. Would it be possible to ask Mr Buzan when this was and whether it was an official post?

Yours

And stone me if I didn't get a reply to this one.

Dear Justin,

Thank you for your enquiry.

We will ask Tony Buzan for more information about this post.

Kind regards,

David

Aulis Publishers, London

The horse's mouth! Regrettably though it has been two weeks and more, and the horse is yet to speak. Still, nil desperandum, there are other paths still open. Like perhaps the Buzan Centre in Australia:

The British Olympic chess squads, this time. I amended my email accordingly.

Dear Buzan Centre

I was reading your site this morning and I saw the following:

Tony is also an advisor to the international Olympic coaches and athletes and to the British Olympic Rowing squad, as well as the British Olympic chess squads.

I am British, I play chess and I had never heard that Mr Buzan was an advisor to our chess squads. Would it be possible to ask Mr Buzan when this was and whether it was an official post?

Yours

And again, I got a reply. It didn't refer my question to Tony Buzan this time. It referred the question to somebody else.

Can you guess who?

I do hope you'll take a "quick peak" at Jennifer's chapter before moving on to the question of what happened to the email which she forwarded to the address below.

The answer is, so far, nothing. Not a whisper. Not a sausage. Not a word.

This is curious, since the email address belongs to Tony Buzan's biographer, who must surely know the answer if anybody does.

Not that I have read the biography, though I'm given to understand it is no help in locating the answer to our question. But nevertheless its author is surely the man for the job.

So come on Ray, what about it? What role did Tony Buzan have giving what advice to which members of which Olympic squad or team?

I think we should be told.

[Ray Keene index]

On Lessons and Chapters

White to play

Carrying on with my review of Liquidation on the Chess Board (see also: Work Avoidance; Sixty Memorable Annotations #32; Sixty Memorable Annotations #31), today I’m going to answer An Ordinary Chessplayer’s question from the comments last time (A Good Book that May be Useless):-

Are you even sure Benjamin's book is meant as instruction?

A very reasonable question it is too. My short answer is,

Dunno.

A slightly longer response might be,

Dunno, but New in Chess (the publisher) think that it is.

If pushed to expand still further I’d go for,

Dunno, but New in Chess think that it is and if the author feels differently then it’s his fault that nobody knows.

Eventually I’d end up at,

Dunno, but New in Chess think that is and if the author feels differently then it’s his fault that nobody knows. Look at Jonathan Hawkins’ From Amateur to IM if you want a model for how an author can make his intentions absolutely clear.

Nunn that I'm aware of

It's an interesting question...

...but since you ask, did Dr Nunn actually ever become a professor? I wasn't under that impression.

Maybe he did. Maybe they'll tell us in the show. Do listen.

[Screenshot from yesterday, so the broadcast listed as "tomorrow" is actually tonight. I'm guessing it may also be on iPlayer for a while. Or download here.]

Attack Ships on Fire

I’ve ... seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

An uppity computer claiming mate in two when it isn’t. I watched Ginger coming over all International Arbiter in a game with Scary on a tour bus (which may or may not have been near the Tannhasuer Gate at the time). Glaring continuity errors lost in time like chess scenes edited out of a movie script.

Yes, sometimes Chess goes to the Movies. If it doesn’t always travel very well, one honourable exception is Blade Runner. The director’s cut of Ridley Scott's hugely marvellous film is released in cinemas for the first time from today and your author is rather delighted to have a ticket for the first screening at the British Film Institute on the Southbank.

If dystopian futures aren’t your thing but you want to go to the pictures (as we used to say when Batty and Deckard were first giving it large on rainy Los Angelesian rooftops), perhaps you’d prefer Dark Horse.

One-time Maori speed-chess champ, Genesis Potini, lives with a bi-polar disorder and must overcome prejudice and violence in the battle to save his struggling chess club, his family and ultimately, himself.

 it says here.

Chess but without the pollution, Voight-Kampff tests, or - presumably - murderous robots. You pays your money, you makes your choice.

Dark Horse is also out today.

Chess goes to the Movies Index

Dark Horse

Announcement

Following representations made by legal representatives engaged by Mr Raymond Keene OBE, the Streatham and Brixton Chess Blog would like to make the following announcement:

• We accept that all Mr Keene's business dealings have been entirely proper and above board, especially those relating to the Interzonal at Tunis in 1985, his contract with Mr Viktor Korchnoi in 1978, his activities relating to Brain Games, his hosting of events at the House of Lords and all such similar activities.
• We accept that Mr Keene is in fact a well-respected figure within the chess world and not at all the "tawdry" or "disreputable" figure that we have occasionally sought to paint him. He does not have a circle of cronies, especially not Mr CJ de Mooi or Mr Steve Giddins and nor does he misuse his chess columns to plug his friends, family and business partners.
• We accept that Mr Keene has at no point ever engaged in plagiarism and nor would he ever do so. Nor would he recycle old material without informing the reader. Except possibly now and then by accident.

We therefore withdraw all claims and allegations that we have made against him and offer a public apology for traducing his good name. We have in addition made a substantial donation to the Brain Trust.

A Good Book That May Well be Useless

49 Black resigns

Shirov - Timman, Wijk aan Zee 1996

If you’ve spent any time with endgame books recently, this position may well be familiar to you. You’ll find it all over the place. Partly because it’s an interesting position, both instructive and deceptive in its apparent simplicity. Mostly because Timman managed to do something even worse than making the worst move on the board. He resigned the game in a position which is not in fact lost.

Benjamin devotes two entire pages to Shirov - Timman. Around three-quarters of that he spends on the position in which the Dutchman threw in the towel, showing what could and should have happened. I don’t really consider myself qualified to pass judgement on the quality and accuracy of his analysis, but when compared with other sources - e.g. Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual or Muller and Lamprecht’s Secrets of Pawn Endings - Benjamin’s coverage can hardly be described as skimpy.

It is a comprehensive and detailed analysis of a position that bamboozled two chessers who were part of the world’s elite at the time the game was played. It is also a very clear example of Liquidation on the Chess Board’s fundamental flaw.

Brixton Byways 10: Howzat

In the last episode we found some helpful corroboration of the likely Year Zero of Streatham and Brixton Chess Club, viz 1871. This was the moment of stellar creation when, out of the void of the Stockwell, Kennington, Camberwell sector of the ever expanding chess universe, there appeared the nebulous form of the Endeavour Club of North Brixton. Over the following decades it tracked ever southward, touching down in the 1920s at the Half Moon Hotel by Brockwell Park, where the outer reaches of the eastern Brixton fade into the lower slopes of Herne Hill, with the upper crust of Dulwich just visible beyond. It had by then condensed into an entity referred to as Brixton CC.

As we noted in that episode, the club President, speaking at the 50th anniversary garden party in 1921 (reported in the British Chess Magazine of August in that year), told how Brixton CC had been making its mark on the Surrey chess scene in a way by which it would want to be remembered. For starters, it had won the County Championship several times. And now the club was now about to make its mark on the London scene. But, to add our own comment, in a way that it might have preferred to forget.

End of the Immortal

Ray's Times column for 28 February, or the opening two paragraphs anyway. The advertising material's a lot of fun but in fact the subject of today's piece is the Immortal Game, rather than the history of dining at Simpsons-in-the-Strand.

Notes are based on. "Based on", you may have guessed, is Ray's new get-round for using other people's notes to write his columns. Instead of just copying out notes from Kasparov's My Great Predecessors series with very slight changes, he just copies out notes from Kasparov's My Great Predecessors series with very slight changes and flicks in "based on". (Or if not from Kasparov then from elsewhere, as often as not something by his lapdog Steve Giddins.) I reckon most other people would be sacked for this, but Ray's not been sacked for a great deal worse.

Anyway, this is how Ray wrapped up his largely copied-out column:

neglecting to mention that his description of White's eighteenth is actually plagiarised from Euwe

rather than, ah, "based on" Kasparov.

But that's not the subject of today's piece either.

At the chessboard with Lucy Mangan

Guardian last Friday:

Whether you agreed with what was being said or not, there was the odd and welcome sense of being talked to as an adult by an adult – at least until Phillips interviewed Tony Blair, which was, as ever, like being addressed by a calculating machine trying to manoeuvre its way between irritating, human-shaped obstacles so that it can get to the chestful of cash on the other side of today’s chessboard.

Eh?

Work Avoidance

"Can Black draw with 53 ... Bxf3 54 Kxf3 h2 ?"

Joel Benjamin: Liquidation on the Chessboard

An interesting conversation about chess improvement broke out in the comments to 10 Types of Chesser III last week. I particularly liked the comment from An Ordinary Chess Player which ended with,

I'm pretty sure all the computer stuff is just a trap. I was reading an online review of ChessBase and the blogger was all glowing about how great it was going to be for his game, but a couple of years later his rating was still the same. I think most amateurs use the computer like the television and the smartphone: as a way to avoid work.

and began,

Rolf's basic idea is that you improve by testing yourself.

The conversation between AOC-P and Niall is well worth a read if you haven’t already seen it. "Rolf", by the way, is one Rolf Wetzell who apparently went from 2000 ish USCF to 2200 in his 50s. Impressive stuff.

Anyhoo, back to Benjamin’s book. I have certain reservations about the book - next week I will deal with my principal concern, in the meantime you can find a contribution from Tim Harding on the issue of typos and misprints in the comments to Sixty Memorable Annotations #32 - but one thing I like very much about Liquidation on the Chess Board is that every chapter ends with a series of exercises. The position at the head of today’s blog being one of seventeen puzzles to be found in the chapter on bishop versus knight endings.

I chose this problem partly because it sets us up for next week’s post and partly because it leads to a rather lovely and instructive (to me, at least) pawn endgame. Do spend a moment to think about it if you can. Alternatively, if you fancy a bit of work avoidance - and what is this blog for if not that? - then the solution as given in a video made by one of the players involved can be found below.

King and pawn Index

...and I am glad

Encountered by chance in a Sheffield remainder warehouse last month...

In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse

Clive James

[Little Book of Chess Plagiarism]

[Ray Keene plagiarism index]
[Ray Keene index]

On the Chequer'd Field Array'd

Interviewed on BBC Radio 3 on Wednesday 11th March: Hannah Kendall, one of "Five Under 35 - Contemporary British Women Composers" featured in Composer of the Week.

"On the Chequer'd Field Array'd" is "a piece for solo piano in three movements, the title is taken from the 1763 poem Caissa by Sir William Jones and depicts the three sections of a game of chess (the opening, middlegame and endgame); each taking inspiration from different sources".

The Great Chessboxing Swindle: Marsh Madness

Here's a load of old tosh (or most of it) from the Standard last week. It's about chessboxing. Chessboxing and the Standard - what chance does that give us?

10 Types of Chesser III

01 Those who don’t train;

10 Those who don’t train, but say that they do.

37 ... Rf5
Andersson - Brynell, Malmo 1994 

Nobody does any chess training. Not really.

OK, that’s not entirely true. My friend and (for the most part former) blogging colleague Tom Chivers did a tonne of work in the year before he wrote his Improve Your Chess series back in 2008, Jonathan Hawkins evidently didn’t go From Amateur to IM and beyond without putting his back in to it and that Matthew Webb chappie is grafting away Up North somewhere. Those three are pretty much it, though.

Fair enough. Chess training is bastard hard work and it’s not exactly difficult to find something more pleasant or less demanding (or both) to do. So what if that thing is less productive in the greater scheme of things? Much less productive. Much much less productive.

Like blogging for instance.

Brixton Byways: 9. Fast Forward and Backtrack

The series Brixton Byways set out to describe the ancient history of the Brixton bit of the Streatham and Brixton Chess Club combo, insofar as we have been able to reconstruct it. By episode 6 we had got to the end of the 19th century, just tipping into the 20th, and about as far as we then wanted to go, when the series morphed into the ancient history of the Streatham bit. Further surprises arrived: especially for current members of the Club (your blogger being one). It seems that Streatham CC went back further that anyone had supposed.

Now we return to Brixton again. Back, in fact, to where we started. But in order to backtrack we need to go forward and follow the club into the 1920s.

A bad smell

Take a look at the image attached to this tweet, from the Varsity Match that took place last weekend. I've written about that match before, but it rolls around once a year and once a year some obvious points require restating. So take a look at that image. What does it tell you about the Varsity Match? What does it tell you about the institutions involved?

Sixty Memorable Annotations

#32: Al-Rakib Abdulla - Nigel Short, Dhaka 1999

60 Rd8!?

Only a player with complete confidence in his understanding of pawn endings should consider this move

Joel Benjamin (Liquidation on the chess board, New in Chess 2015)

That sounds a bit like the Soltis quote. The one RdC tipped us in the comments box to Grandmaster Preparation: (King and pawn) Endgame Play. Except that Benjamin goes an awful lot further than

Never to trade down into a king and pawn ending unless you could safely bet your first-born child on the result. The reason is that K+P endgames are 90% *calculation*. No matter how much book theory you know, even a world class player can err badly.

via

In Liquidation on the chess board he suggests that trading down isn’t always a good idea even when you know for sure that the game should end in a draw.

"Football is a bit like chess..."

Football is a bit like chess: it's not just the piece being moved that matters, it's also the effect that move has on all the other pieces.

Mal Peet, who died last week.

We Are Not Amused X

It's been a long time coming: a pretext for another "We Are Not Amused" post - and I'm not referring only to yesterday's Chess Queen reference by Jonathan. The last WANA was just about two years ago, provoked by a faux pas from a prestigious London gallery in its display of Duchampian chess-art. Now it is the Evening Standard - London's free evening paper dished out so liberally on weekdays at the capital's tube stations etc - that has caught the eye.

As free-sheets go, the Standard's reportage is not as superficial as some, and the paper is noteworthy for its well-informed arts reviews on a Thursday. A recent one (26th February) had a headline with a familiar ring to it, and it is that which has prompted today's Chess in Art post, reverting, exceptionally, to its old Saturday slot.

Definitely Got Something to do with chess XI

The queen, now the most potent piece on the board, surprisingly did not exist in the early days of chess in India, Persia and the Near East. She was born around 1000 AD in Europe, but by 1497, when Isabella of Castile ruled over Spain and much of the New World, she had come to rule the game.

Or so it says here.

... to do with chess Index

Minor point

I was vaguely following Giri-Domínguez Pérez from Tblisi when it suddenly seemed to me that there was something a bit unusual, or unfamiliar about the ending.

What it was, was that - from move 40 to move 56 - they were playing with four minor pieces on each side. No major pieces, but a full set of bishop and knights. Am I mistaken, or is that a balance we don't often see?

You get plenty of major piece endings, since it's the minor pieces that come out first and get swapped off, which they are always liable to be when there are in close conjunction with one another. But in order to reach a four-minor-piece ending (or a rookless and queenless middlegame, if you will) you need them to leave one another alone on a full board while a file or two opens up - and the rooks and queens to wipe one another out while their smaller counterparts miraculously survive.

It's my impression that this doesn't happen very often. Am I right? And what would happen if you tried to take on Ulf Andersson in a game of no-rooks-no-queens?

Back in the Saddle

[NB: Posted by Jonathan B, but written by Jack Rudd]

Unlikely as it may seem, the recent East Devon Congress was my first individual tournament for five months. All the others I might have played in during that time were ones I opted out of for one reason or another: Torquay clashed with the 4NCL, the London Classic and Gibraltar were events where I was on the other side of the desk, and Hastings proved less enticing than a holiday with my girlfriend in Sweden.

a good reason for missing chess tournaments

The omens going into the tournament weren't particularly good. I was in poor form against strong opposition (1½/6 in this season's 4NCL, 1½/3 in the Devon League, 1½/3 for Somerset), my depression was hitting me fairly hard, and last year's performance in this tournament was preying on my mind. I'd had 4/4 going into the last round, needing only a draw with white to win the tournament - and I suffered a horrendous crisis of confidence. I played a passive anti-Marshall line, went completely wrong, and crashed out in 20 moves.

So I went into this tournament with some trepidation, and gradually relaxed into it. My round one game against Meyrick Shaw gave me some early challenges to face, but I rose to them and won pretty convincingly. My two games on the Saturday were bizarre encounters where my opponents went wrong very early on, and I was on 3/3 going into the final day.

My round 4 game was against my fellow leader, Dominic Mackle. It was a topsy-turvy encounter, one in which I kept on missing his tactical ideas, and ended up in a piece-down ending... and yet somehow managed to draw it. It wasn't exactly high-quality chess, but it entertained the spectators, and left me and Dominic joint leaders going into the last round. Dominic would have white against Steve Dilleigh, I would have black against Alistair Hill.

So, in a situation where I needed to win with black, hoping to erase the scars of last year's final round, what approach did I take? Would I play something solid and try to squeeze something out? Would I play something sharp from the off and try to hit him with an attack?

1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 e6 3.c4 c5 4.d5

4...b5!!

Double exclamation marks there not for move quality, but for attitude. I could have approached the game as if it were one with everything at stake; instead, I played a crucial last-round game as if it were one with nothing at stake. Because that's what I needed to do; it got my mind out of the tournament and into the game, and I played with the freedom and expressivity my play demonstrates at its best:

I freely confess I was lucky in that my opponent had no real line against the Blumenfeld; what he chose is hardly theoretically critical. But I wasn't lucky that I gave myself the opportunity to find that out; I made a good call for the situation. I played the opening that Jack Rudd would play... and it won me the game and the tournament.

Meet the New Boss

Yesterday it was all about the Soviet Man. Today, meet the New Boss.

Anand/Gelfand

Nemtsov

Soviets

draw agreed

Yudasin - Osnos, Leningrad 1987

S&BC Blog favourite Nigel Short on Kasparov, circa 1993:-

He’s very Soviet … He’s very much a Soviet man … 

There was one Soviet grandmaster who explained to me what Soviet morality is. It’s very simple. To the Soviet man, "if I fuck your wife that’s good, but if you fuck my wife that’s bad."

Kasparov Short - The Inside Story (Grandmaster Video)

Not that you hear much of that sort of thing nowadays. Clearly if Oceania is mates with Eurasia then Oceania has always been mates with Eurasia. The mate of the moment representing absolute loveliness, it follows that any past or future disagreement with him must be impossible.

Anyhoo, last week (SMA#31) we had Viktor Korchnoi giving GM Joel Benjamin a ticking off viz-a-viz the "ABCs of chess". This week’s king and pawn action continues the theme. As it turns out, not all of them there Russians knew the basics. Although it will take a little bit of that Soviet mentality for us to discover that.

Once again with the 600 million

I think Brett Popplewell's Sportsnet piece on Eric Hansen actually came out last year, but I hadn't seen it until it was linked to on the English Chess Forum late last month.

Hard to miss was the following:

Some 600 million people play chess

They don't, of course.

[605 million index]