Jim West On Chess: Future President

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Future President

Who will be the next president of the United States?

BBC news broadcaster Humphrey Hawksley has written a novel The Third World War in which a future U.S. president finds that he is prevented from making a pre-emptive strike "until the final pieces of the chess game are in place ready for the end-game."

"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