From: Bruce_Leverett@transarc.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.chess
Subject: Chess Chow, again
Date: 24 Jul 92 14:42:06 GMT

This is an appraisal of the April-May 1992 Chess Chow, a copy of which I
picked up at the World Open.  As Eric Schiller has observed, it's bad policy
to review things that you have paid for.  But after all the ballyhoo in this
newsgroup, I yielded to temptation.

The single issue price was $4.75.  This is comparable to an issue of Playboy,
so it had better be good.  Appropriately, I'll start by talking about
physical things.  The cover and paper are high quality.  This won't turn
brown with age, and it might even stand up to abuse, such as spilled food
and drinks.  The size is 48 pages.  This is less than Bargain City, Chess
Horizons, which gives you 64 pages every 2 months for less than the cost of
a haircut, but it is more than Inside Chess.

What is the point of this magazine?  A blurb on the back cover says,

   Tired of other magazines that frankly bore you?  Looking for a chess
   magazine that's actually *fun* to read? ... We're big (48 inside pages,
   bimonthly) and beautiful (original 3-color cover art) ... Discover the
   winning combination of analytical firepower and humor ...

Another ad that I remember seeing went something like, ``... tired of seeing
the games from Linares *again*?''  This rang a chord of sympathy in me since,
in addition to subscribing to Chess Life and Chess Horizons, and reading
the library's Inside Chess as often as possible, I am also seeing the games
from big tournaments on this newsgroup, thanks to some noble and industrious
newsgroup participants from Europe.  So I get four chances to go over the
games from Linares.  And that's without going in for Informants, NIC's, etc.

But this doesn't entirely answer the question.  A definition beginning with
``not'' is never wholly satisfactory.  So Chess Chow is NOT Inside Chess and
NOT Chess Life, NOT boring and NOT totally focussed on the supertournaments,
what is it then?  I won't try to answer this one, I'm only the reviewer.
After reading this one issue, even though it was already Volume II issue 3,
I got the impression that the magazine has not necessarily found its ultimate
purpose.

Now you must be wondering about what is on those 48.  Before I get too deeply
into poison pen, I'll give a complete list of titles and capsule summaries:

- From the desk of the Tech. Ed. -- summary of the contents of this issue,
  by IM Mark Ginsburg, the Technical Editor, whose name is familiar to
  participants in this newsgroup.

- Letters -- including a letter from Al Lawrence, the USCF Executive Director,
  defending the telephone solicitation so recently denounced in this newsgroup.

- Lost Weekend -- article by GM Joel Benjamin, the Chief Editor, about the
  Eastern Class Championships.

- Happy Birthday, Don Miguel! -- article by Benjamin about the Buenos Aires
  international.

- Fortune Cookies -- story and annotated game by GM Ferdinand Hellers from
  the 1987 NY Open.

- Agony -- regular column by GM Michael Wilder, featuring, what can I say,
  agony, and annotated games.

- Lissitsyn Meets the Latvian:  Twisty Transpositions -- Ginsburg assembles
  some comments from various sources about the Lissitsyn Gambit variation
  1 Nf3 f5 2 e4 fxe4 3 Ng5 e5 4 d4, which is a transposition to 1 e4 e5
  2 Nf3 f5 3 d4 fxe4 4 Ng5, from the Latvian Counter Gambit.

- The Marriage of Chess and Drugs:  The Sicilian Gambit -- a very short
  article that I will describe below.

- Seven Brutalizations -- IM Alex Sherzer gives seven of his wins with White
  against the Sicilian, annotated, with other humorous commentary.

- Q-Dragon, or What Happened to Gufeld's Knight? -- Analysis of a line in
  the dragon Sicilian starting from a game played under ICS; edited by
  Ginsburg.

- Browne in Motion -- two annotated games by GM Walter Browne from the
  People's Chess Tournament in Berkeley.

- It Rears its U:gly Head -- corrections and new material, edited by Ginsburg,
  in an ongoing series on a variation of the Exchange Gru:nfeld.

- Big News:  The U.S. Chess Center -- David Mehler describes the building
  and project in Washington, D.C.

- Openings Roundtable -- Ginsburg assembles and edits the discussion, from
  this newsgroup, of the Walter Goldman line of the Caro-Kann.

- Memory Lane -- Benjamin reminisces about the 1987 Szirak interzonal.

- Pattern Recognition -- Ginsburg presents an annotated game from Schachwoche
  in the Leningrad Dutch with 7 ... Qe8.

- Komic Korner -- inaugural of a new cartoon, ``Octopovich,'' by Lisabeth
  Levine.

- Swill: Amateur Hour -- (Swill is a regular column by Benjamin; Amateur
  Hour is the subtitle of this issue's column) Benjamin takes apart a
  question and commentary by Richard Moody.

- Trivia Quiz -- a trivia quiz (possibly a regular column?).

Let me start with some of the less important items.  ``From the desk of the
Tech. Ed.'' is so much wasted paper.  Fortunately it is only one column (one
half page) in length.  Ginsburg can hardly be blamed for following in the
footsteps of publishers of major national magazines, but for my money, chatty
puffery about this issue's contents could be omitted with no loss.  Then
there is the letter from Al Lawrence.  Letters to the Editor are naturally
not the proper subject of a review.  However, since it would be of some
interest to many participants in this newsgroup, I'll summarize it briefly.
Lawrence calls the telemarketing program a success, with ``thousands'' of
members signing up with Sprint, and with those members getting a valuable
service, Sprint making money, and the USCF getting a cut.  He blames the
complaints of bad phone tactics on (only) one member of the telephone crew,
who was duly stomped upon from the highest level (Lawrence himself) as soon as
his transgressions were known.  I leave my readers to judge for themselves the
level of truthfulness of this standard bureaucratic apologia.

The Trivia Quiz is an unfortunate choice.  Every single question
is of the type that you can't possibly answer unless you were there when it
happened.  Another Chess Chow reader in this newsgroup complained that the
magazine was too much the product of an in-group telling inside jokes.  I
didn't have that problem with most of this issue but the Trivia Quiz drove
me nuts.  It wouldn't be nearly so bad if the quiz format were dropped,
in favor of presenting the amusing anecdotes and quotations ``as is.''

But enough of blunders.  Most of the magazine is worth reading.  Let me
start with a short item.  ``Chess and Drugs'' starts with the contribution
of a reader, NM Allan Savage, who found a curious reference to chess in a
medical journal.  The Technical Editor, who was probably the responsible
party, then free-associates for a while, ending up with a photograph of
Jay Whitehead analyzing with various super-GM's at a tournament in 1984.
It is unlikely that you will see this kind of item in any other chess magazine
anywhere.  It's hard to say whether I approve or disapprove of this style of
humor.  When I finished reading this tidbit, my sense of the orderliness of
the universe had noticeably diminished.

Another short item is the cartoon feature.  It's highly unusual for a chess
magazine to have a regular cartoon that is worth reading.  ``Octopovich'' is
well drawn and cute, and (most unusual) seems to have been written by someone
conversant with tournament chess and even with the current ``scene.''
Unfortunately the inaugural strip gives the strong impression of an ethnic slur.After some well-publicized remarks, by Benjamin and others, expressing
dismay about the wave of Eastern European immigrant chess players, a cartoon
in which one such player is depicted (however humorously) as a cheater and
sandbagger could become a sore point.  We can only hope that the promise of
this cartoon will be fulfilled.

Not all of the articles fit into the editors' intention of producing a
humorous chess magazine.  A classic example is the pair of games by Walter
Browne.  Having read articles by Browne in Inside Chess and Chess Life for
many years, I conclude that Browne is Browne, no matter what magazine he
appears in.  His analysis is of sterling quality and the ink is hardly dry
on the scoresheets (or it was when the issue came out; this review is being
written in mid-July).  But the level of ``human interest'' is no greater or
less than one would expect in any other chess magazine.  Hellers, on the other
hand, tells a tale of chess superstition, valuable more for its cuteness than
for being newsworthy, since it happened five years ago.  Highest on the
hilarity scale is the article by Sherzer.  The heart of the article is seven
lightly annotated games from the last seven years, but these are sandwiched
between two completely irrelevant and sidesplitting monologues, one on why
Sherzer is going to be the big obstacle in Gata Kamsky's path to the World
Championship ("I am studying Dragon and Crane style Kung-Fu and have recently
received my gold belt....I hope the Kamskys pay particular attention to this
point") and the other giving predictions about their future Candidates Finals
match ("it will be between myself and Gata Kamsky....in the exotic locale of
Antarctica").

In spite of remarkable articles like this one, the character of a magazine is
not determined by the contributors, but by the editors (Benjamin and Ginsburg)
and the regular columnists (only Wilder in this issue).  And so I next consider
the articles and features by these luminaries.

Wilder's ``Agony'' column is an inspired concept.  Much of the conversation
between tournament chess players consists of agony:  ``I was winning, but
then I ...''  It sometimes seems that people are more eager to tell this kind
of story than to tell about their wins.  But what other magazine carries a
regular column devoted to agony?  In this column, reader Larry Tamarkin submits
an annotated game in which, of course, he loses, and one more class prize
eludes him.  Wilder then responds:  ``You must feel like a big pair of
buttocks.''  He then goes off on a tangent, giving one of his own losses,
with notes.  Wilder's notes are funny in a very heavy-handed, juvenile way.
Example:

    6...Bxc3
       "Cha-ching!"
    7.bxc3
       "Oops!  Next time I'll think twice before assuming that my opponent
        hung a piece."

Maybe Wilder is trying too hard.  The commentary by Tamarkin on his own game
was actually rather enjoyable, especially compared to this.  For an example of
a columnist who is funny, even for readers born before 1980, while keeping up
a high level of chess analysis, check out Rick Bauer, the games editor of
Chess Horizons.

Ginsburg's contributions are unique.  I wonder if he is responsible for the
itty-bitty maps of Europe and Canada in the masthead, or the little inset
cartoon in Hellers' article, or the ransom-note style of typography used in
some places, or the extra umlauts in the article on the Gru:nfeld, or any of
the other little touches of zaniness for the alert reader.  Who knows.  At
any rate his acknowledged contributions, besides the ones already reviewed,
are principally in the area of opening analysis.

An unusual feature, at least to me, was the attempt to be electronically
au courant.  The article on the Dragon Sicilian is taken wholesale from notes
sent by e-mail from his opponent, after a game they played on the Internet
Chess Server.  The article on the Caro-Kann is taken from the discussion on
this newsgroup.  The problem at this point is quality.  The discussion of the
Dragon Sicilian begins to look silly after Ginsburg's own post-mortem
suggestion of 22 ... Qa5, threatening mate in 2 and the win of White's queen.
The Caro-Kann discussion, which was never meant to be an investigation of the
cutting edge of theory, started with a modest inquiry by a B-player, and most
of the replies and counter-replies were composed in haste, sometimes even
without sight of a board.  This is characteristic of discussions in newsgroups.
Nevertheless Ginsburg is on the right track in trying to get publishable
material from network-land.

He should be more careful about citations.  In the Caro-Kann discussion, he
doesn't make it clear that the comments by Sherzer were inserted afterwards.
(The reader who doesn't know this will wonder why the other participants never
reply to Sherzer or acknowledge his presence.)  In the Leningrad Dutch article,
I don't know whether the material is just translations from Schachwoche, or
whether there is additional material by Ginsburg or by anybody else, or
generally who is the author.  These are not necessarily critical problems,
assuming no outright plagiarism is involved, but things can get unnecessarily
confusing.

Benjamin is the Chief Editor and his contributions deserve the most serious
critical scrutiny.  He has the potential to become one of the best commentators
on the American and international chess scenes.  But not all of his articles
in this issue come up to the same high standards.

This issue's Swill column has been criticized because the subject of Benjamin's
scrutiny is a fish, Richard Moody, a B-player, allegedly not worthy of the
skewering he gets.  This doesn't do justice to Moody.  Though his chess talents
may be mediocre, his volume and his attitude are noteworthy.  The column is
meaty and instructive.  I have to say, however, that the concept of a ``Swill''
column puzzles me.  As an amateur critic, I enjoy much more discussing things
that are good, than debunking things that are bad, because the good stuff is
(by definition) more fun to read and more substantial.  Benjamin, on the other
hand, is taking on the role strictly of a debunker.  It's intellectual
asceticism.

In the same vein, only worse, is the article about Szirak 1987.  It was
several pages of grousing, unrelieved by insight, chess content, or anything
else of substance.  (Maybe I'm being too harsh.  There is some attempt to work
in amusing anecdotes, such as stories of practical jokes the American players
played on each other.)  I have no reason to doubt Benjamin's description of
the substandard playing conditions, but after reading three whole pages of
this, what have I got?

The article about the Needham tournament is more like it.  It is very personal,
passing up the usual stuff about prizewinners, playing conditions, organizers,
etc. in favor of focusing on the author's experience and impressions.  This
can get boring in the hands of a less perceptive writer but it works here.
The following line caught my attention:

   ... I would have to work in the last round.  I got Yermolinsky ... and a
   loss would mean a substantial pay cut.  The intelligent thing to do would
   be to steer the game toward a draw.  However, I rarely get a chance to
   play a meaningful game against a strong player, and I was curious to see
   what would happen.

This is a succinct and frank explanation of the conflict between
professionalism and amateurism in sports, from the point of view of a person
who lives it.

The article about Buenos Aires is most welcome.  It is refreshing to see an
account of a tournament that is strong, but that doesn't have the same old
roster of World Cup-level super-GM's.  Appropriately, Benjamin gives enough
introduction so that the players are more than just names on a crosstable.

This brings us to Dennis Baker's observation, in his review for this newsgroup,
that Chess Chow introduces you to the East Coast big-tournament scene.  By
the time you have finished this magazine, you'll feel that people like
Benjamin, Ginsburg, Wilder and Sherzer are more than just names on a
crosstable.  For all its faults, this magazine gives a glimpse of the souls
of its creators.

Bruce Leverett
bwl@transarc.com