A Forgotten Kaufmann Game by Olimpiu G. Urcan One of the chief difficulties of researching lesser lights in the field of chess biography is finding an adequate number of representative game scores. This proved a particularly challenging task when working together with the Vienna-based Dr. Peter Michael Braunwarth on Arthur Kaufmann: A Chess Biography (McFarland, 2012). Despite assiduous searches in Viennese archives, our volume recovered only 71 games played by Kaufmann throughout his chess career between the 1890s and 1930s. Considering Kaufmann's enigmatic life and his highly intermittent chess play in Vienna, that's a reasonably satisfactory number. However, disregarding many such … [Read more...]
That’s Entertainment
Lasker, Simultaneous Exhibitions, and the Languages of Chess Performance by John S. Hilbert Chess has been likened to many things, and perhaps most often to art. The “artist at the chessboard” image has been dragged forth often enough to warrant status as a venerable, if tiresome, cliché. Likening chess to sport has an equally long and listless pedigree. My favorite metaphor for the game is that of language: a language of the mind, requiring all the thought and effort involved in the learning of a foreign language, in order to speak it fluently, eloquently and forcefully across the board. Undoubtedly this metaphor has ancient roots as well. There are more recent examples of it, of … [Read more...]