Word: chess
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...stinks!" every time they made a move) I began to drop behind the other prodigies on the block. While they were plumbing the mystical depths of Reti's opening, I still thought the Sicilian Defense exotic. And my parents were no help--never providing a proper home environment for chess study...
...only when I reached junior high that I became aware of my ignorance. I made captain of the Simon Baruch Junior High School 104 chess team with ease, but when we began to participate in city-wide tournaments my bubble burst. In eleventh grade our team--me on first board and my friend Harry Chun on second--met down at the roomy old McAlpin Hotel on 34th St. and 8th Ave. in New York...
...Chess players are usually precocious small hairy people who never know what to do with their hands or knees. Unless chained down, a teen-aged tournament player will pinch his nails together, rock back and forth, and in the presence of other players, begin to mutter and giggle about opening variations and to tell juvenile jokes. As far as appearances went, we were golden. Our problem was that we weren't very good at chess...
...faces, or opening up a New York Times to its full expanse and holding it in front of my opponent's face, just to speed him up. But by the end of the first day, Harry and I were at the bottom of the pack, never to inch up. Chess tournaments can build a lot of character...
...everybody goes through that kind of awakening. Sammy Reshevsky was a master by age eight, and at the same age Bobby Fischer was astounding people by playing speed chess at the Brooklyn Chess Club. These lucky types are the subject of Harold C. Schonberg's latest book, "Grandmasters of Chess." Schonberg, the top music critic for The New York Times, a patzer and Pulitzer Prize winner, has written "Grandmasters" for a general audience, including failed patzers. It is an immensely entertaining book, lavishly illustrated with photographs and drawings. Schonberg traces the history of grandmaster chess, beginning with Philidor...