Jim West On Chess: PCG in "Daily Telegraph"

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

PCG in "Daily Telegraph"

At first, I thought it was an April Fools joke, one day in advance. But on March 31st, the Daily Telegraph printed a 9-move loss in the Philidor Counter Gambit by a player with a USCF rating of 1428! Needless to say, his winning opponent was much higher rated at 1950. But the chess column makes no mention of their ratings. The game was played in the third round of the USATE 2008.

Black was overly concerned about Ng5, in playing 4...Be7 and 5...h6. The correct way to meet this threat is by 4...c6 and 5...Nf6, prepared to answer Ng5 by ...d5. White missed a quicker win by 9.Be6#.

"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