Jim West On Chess: Cheese or Chess Books?

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Cheese or Chess Books?

After reading this e-mail dated March 10th from Jon D'Souza-Eva of Oxford, I am uncertain whether "Danish cheese" or copies of My 61 Memorable Games were involved!

Hi Jim,

My name is Jon, I'm a chess player from Oxford in England. I noticed that your blog mentioned the hoax/scam book "My 61 Memorable Games". I just wanted to point out that Larry Evans didn't actually get to the bottom of this mystery.

It seems to me that the truth was much more mundane and that it was a simple scam by Ed Trice (of www.gothicchess.com - the one who claimed to be setting up a Fischer vs Karpov Gothic Chess match),....

The only alternative that I can think of is that Ed Labate made up all the e-mails on this page. I can't see anything to indicate that anyone apart from Trice (and possibly his sister-in-law in Canada) were involved.

Best wishes,
Jon

"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