CHESS CURIOSITIES

Loss in three moves! The 1959 US Open Championship can only be remembered for one game and one player. While 'fools mate' has been known for many years, it takes a player of real skill and dedication to pull it off within a tournament. For this, Trinka must be applauded.

White: Masefield
Black: Trinka

1: e4 g5
2: Nc3 f5
3: Qh5 mate

A loss on Move 3!

---

Judit Polgar of Hungary was the youngest player of either sex to win International Master status at age 12 years and one month in 1989. Judit was also the youngest female to attain International Grandmaster status, at age 15 years and 150 days, on December 20, 1991.

---

Bobby Fischer of the US was 15 years, 6 months, and 1 day old when he became the youngest male International Grandmaster. Hungarian Peter Leko, broke Fischer's record in 1994 by becoming a Grandmaster at age 14.

---

Etienne Bacrot of Kasparov vs. The World fame earned his Grandmaster title in March, 1997 at age 14 years and 2 months with his last-round victory at a tournament near Paris.

---

The first match played by telegraph occurred in 1844 between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.

---

George Koltanowski entered the Guinness Book of Records and Ripley's "Believe It Or Not" after his exhibition on September 20, 1937 in Edinburgh, Scotland, in which he played 34 simultaneous games blindfolded in 13.5 hours, winning 24 and drawing 10 of them. In 1960, Mr. Koltanowski played 56 consecutive games blindfolded, winning 50 and drawing 6 of them. A co-founder of the US Chess Federation and World Chess Federation, he is the oldest living International Grandmaster at the age of 96. Mr. Koltanowski is the author of 30 chess books and has authored the Chess Problem feature in the San Francisco Chronicle every day since May, 1947 - even during newspaper strikes.

---

Vlastimil Hort of Czechoslovakia put on an amazing exhibition of simultaneous chess in Iceland in April, 1977 when he played 550 opponents, 201 simultaneously, and lost only 10 games, in just over thirty hours. Hort went on to set the record for the most consecutive games played, in October, 1984 in Porz, Germany. He played 663 games in 32.5 hours, often playing more than 100 simultaneously. Averaging 30 moves per game, he won over 80% of the games.

---

Garry Kasparov took part in the first simultaneous exhibition by satellite in 1984, playing opponents in London and New York.

---

The first chessboard to consist of alternating light and dark squares appeared in Europe at the end of the 11th century.

---

The first chess tournament on record was held at the Royal Court in Madrid in 1575. Giulio Polerio and Giovanni Leonardo defeated Ruy Lopez and Alfonso Ceron in a series of matches arranged by King Phillip II. And yes, it was the same Ruy Lopez that gave his name to one of the game's more popular openings.

---

The first chess tournament held in the U.S. was the American Chess Congress, held in New York in 1857 and won by Paul Morphy.

---

The longest game on record took place in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on February 17, 1989 between Ivan Nikolic and Goran Arsovic. The game took more than 20 hours, with 269 moves, and it ended in a draw.

---

The longest move on record was made by Francisco R. Torres Trois, who took 2 hours and 20 minutes to make one move in a game against Luis M.C.P. Santos, in Vigo, Spain in 1980. Ironically, he had only two possible moves to consider. One wonders how Sr. Santos passed that time.

---

Garry Kasparov, of the former USSR, was 22 years and 210 days old when he beat Anatoly Karpov for the world championship of chess on November 9th, 1985, making him the youngest men's champion in history. However, the youngest world champion of all was Maya Chiburdanidze of the former USSR, who was 17 years old when she won the women's title in 1978.

---

Wilhelm Steinitz of Austria, and later the United States, defeated Johann Hermann Zuckertort in the first world championship of chess, in 1886. Chess was the second sport to have a world championship, after billiards (1873).

---

Wilhelm Steinitz was the oldest world champion of chess -- he was 58 years and 10 days old when he lost the title to Dr. Emanuel Lasker of Germany in 1894.

---

Dr. Emanuel Lasker held the World Chess Championship longer than anyone else: 26 years and 337 days.

---

The USA and USSR played the first international radio chess match on record in 1945, which was also the first international sporting event since the outbreak of World War II. It marked the debut of the USSR in international competition. Mayor LaGuardia of New York City made the opening move for the U.S., while Ambassador Averill Harriman officiated the match in Moscow.

---

"Game at Chess," written by Thomas Middleton and performed at the Globe Theater in 1624, was the first play which featured chess. It was a biting political satire, presenting important statesmen of the day as chess pieces, and it played to packed houses before being shut down due to political pressure. Middleton was arrested and jailed, and the actors were all fined for their participation.

---

The first tournament-level game between a chess computer and a person was at the Massachusetts Amateur Championship in 1967. MacHack VI, created at MIT, lost with a provisional rating of 1239, hardly good enough for a beginning club player.

---

In Auto Da Fe, a 1935 novel written by Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti, the main character is a man named Fischer who wants to be the chess champion of the world. Did Bobby read this book?

---

The first computer to be awarded the title of U.S. Chess Master (1983) was named BELLE. It was created by Ken Thompson and Joe Condon. BELLE had won the World Computer Chess Championship in 1980. Ken Thompson later developed the chess ratings system favored by Garry Kasparov's Professional Chess Association (PCA).

---

The first appearance of chess in a film was in THE WISHING RING, in 1914.

---

The first movie about chess was CHESS FEVER, made in Moscow in 1925, starring Jose Capablanca.

---

The first chess game played between outer space and earth occurred on June 9, 1970 by the crew of Soyez-9. The cosmonauts played against their ground crew on a chess set designed specifically for a weightless environment. The game ended in a draw.

---

In the Bob Spitz biography of Bob Dylan, there are several paragraphs describing how Dylan tried to psyche his opponents out by talking during games. He was known to do the same nervous leg shaking as in his performances. Dylan's manager reportedly paid Bobby Fischer so the singer could play chess with him.

---

Moving one square at a time, a Bishop may go from K1 to K7 in eight moves in 483 different ways.

---

The Fischer-Spassky chess match in 1972 was the most popular TV show ever aired on PBS.

---

Jose Capablanca's official title was Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary General from the Government of Cuba to the World at Large. Capablanca asked the mayor of Havana to clear a tournament room before he resigned his game to Marshall in 1913. In 1922, he played 103 opponents in a simul in Cleveland, winning all but one game, a draw. In his entire career, he was never checkmated.

---

In 1868, George Carr played chess with a friend five miles away using a telescope and semaphores. Then Edison and Bell came along and made it easier.

---

The world's largest private chess library, owned by Grandmaster Lothar Schmid, contains over 20,000 volumes.

---

We wish to thank the Edinburgh University Chess Club for its kind permission to use many of the items in this article. On the Club's excellent home page at /~chess/index01.html, there are lots of other cool things to discover. Make sure you visit and see for yourself!

---

---by Art Fazakas, writer for Kasparov vs. The World