Jim West On Chess: Ed Kopiecki 1955-2019

Sunday, February 10, 2019

Ed Kopiecki 1955-2019

Candidate master Ed Kopiecki [pictured] has passed away, after four months in a coma from a heart attack in October.

Ed was my teammate in 2012 when we won the Marshall CC Amateur Team Championship.

In true Marshall Chess Club style, his favorite defense against the Ruy Lopez was the Marshall Attack.

"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