Jim West On Chess: Get a Lawyer

Friday, November 23, 2007

Get a Lawyer

The title of today's post is my advice to Sam Sloan in his legal action versus Paul Truong and others. As Mark Twain once said, "A man who acts as his own attorney has a fool for a client."

Having played chess over the board against both Sloan and Truong, I am not sure which side to root for in this lawsuit.

The Mottershead report indicates that there is merit in Sloan's claim that Truong impersonated him on the Internet. But it looks as if Sloan's case may be dismissed due to technical errors in his complaint.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov