Jim West On Chess: Promoting Organized Team Chess

Friday, July 12, 2013

Promoting Organized Team Chess

In January 2013, a comment by Rodney K. stated: "I believe there were a few posts on the Jim (James) West Chess Blog that denounced the notion of promoting organized team chess. I do not remember the substance of the opposition to organized team chess, but do not believe there could possibly be a sound argument against it."

As a member of the winning team at the USATE 1999 and a follower of the New Jersey Knockouts in the USCL, I am not opposed to organized team chess.

Could Rodney K. have been referring to my post of December 2007?

"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