Jim West On Chess: Games I Never Played

Friday, August 20, 2010

Games I Never Played

At 365Chess.com, many of the 66 games that are credited to James R. West were never played by me. Obviously, the 11 Philidors are mine. But I never played in tournaments at Plymouth, Monroe, Manila, or Foxwoods. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, "I didn't play half the games I played!"

"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