Jim West On Chess: "King's Gambit" by Hoffman

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

"King's Gambit" by Hoffman

On Saturday before round one at Hamilton, I had a conversation with chess blogger Atomic Patzer who highly recommends Paul Hoffman's new book King's Gambit.

By coincidence, on the same day that I posted a blog entry on Grob's Attack, Atomic Patzer read Hoffman's chapter on this opening!

"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