Talk:Gioachino Greco

message: Surely only one stub-tag should be used. It look confusing with the two that are now used. I am going to go ahead and remove the "italian biography" one and keep the "biography related chess" one, since it seems to be the most fitting.
--CygnusPius 12:38, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  OK, I read your comment. It's not true: Giuoco and Greco are not the same word. Giuoco Piano means 'quiet game'. JudahH 13:32, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: This article was rated Top. In my view it's only high, as a historical figure he's not so astounding, so have changed the rating accordingly. If you believe otherwise then change it again, but would be helpful to leave a reason. ChessCreator (talk) 15:39, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: For the period of chess history prior to Philidor, Greco is arguably the most important chess figure. Certainly what we know of early seventeenth century chess play is almost entirely due to his legacy.JStripes (talk) 17:45, 20 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  WikiProject Chess Importance 

message: Why is Greco mate not discussed?  This mate was named after him.  Here is one link i have provided that discusses Greco Mate —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.164.157.221 (talk) 15:29, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I removed your link farm spam. MMetro (talk) 19:02, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

text: Crazy as it might sound, link-farm-spam guy had a point... Greco's Mate is a real thing. Seems like it would be best to have a real Greco/NN example diagrammed... but I can't find one. Anyone know one offhand? Mack Robot (talk) 19:03, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Greco Mate? 

message: I remember that I read, a long time ago, about two twin chess problems of "mate in two", with a story around them based on Greco.
IIRC, the story was:
: Greco was playing with a very beautiful and mysterious woman, but after a long battle, he saw himself in a winning position, and announces mate in two.
: The woman then replies that that was impossible, because Greco had lost his queen, while she still had hers.
: And, using wizardry, the woman changes the color of Greco's white queen to black.
: Then Greco replies that even without that change, he still can mate in two.
: Then the woman changes to the Devil himself and vanishes.
Does anyone know where is the source for this? Albmont (talk) 13:55, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Greco x The Devil 

message: Move 5. O-O is impossible because the undeveloped Knight is at g1.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.149.184.22 (talk) 22:07, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: You caught that too, huh. When was that edit made? MMetro (talk) 19:01, 24 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Greco vs NN 1620 

message: The name would point to a Greek or Italo-Greek ancestry, is anything know about that? -- 217.190.216.15 (talk) 17:21, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: See the new “Name” section. I think it answers your question well. JStripes (talk) 12:58, 24 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Was Greco of Greek descent? 

message: The claim that Greco's games number 77 must be false. This number stem from Professor Hoffman's text (Hoffmann was a pseudonym for Angelo Lewis), which combined games with similar beginnings from earlier texts. Hoffmann, The Games of Greco (1900). Greco / Francis Beale, The Royall Game of Chesse-Play (1656) contains 94 numbered Gambetts, plus an example each of Fool's Mate and Scholar's Mate. William Lewis, The Games of Gioachino Greco (1819) contains 168 games. Some of these games were copied by Greco from earlier writers, but the number of his games must exceed the 77 figure.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.135.242.121 (talk) 02:11, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I think I wrote this unsigned comment. It accords well with something I wrote on my blog about the same time.JStripes (talk) 05:55, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of Games 

message: Averbakh attributes the study to Greco, dating it 1623, in his Chess Middlegames: Essential Knowledge but is there any confirmation of this? The English Greco translation here doesn't contain any endgames, but there are other reprints/translations out there which may confirm his authorship. MaxBrowne (talk) 06:14, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: This ending appears in the Orsini MS (1620) and the Lorraine MS (1621). See Monté, The Classical Era of Modern Chess (2014), 350.JStripes (talk) 17:58, 20 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Greco study 

message: The title of the article claims that his first name was Gioachino, but the first words retype it as Gioacchino. Wich one is correct? Kasparov, in his My Great Pedecessors, Part I, spells it as Gioacchino. Which one is correct?
I have seen many different spellings. Gioachino, Gioacchino, Gioachimo, Bioacchimo... Gioachino tends to show up the most, so that is what I believe we should use. This could be resolved by looking at his manuscripts, where he must have signed his name, but I can't find them. Mack Robot (talk) 02:25, 1 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Spellings weren't always consistent back then. I wouldn't use Kasparov as a source on historical matters, he wasn't always accurate. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 03:39, 1 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: This French edition has Gioachino. I suspect Gioacchino would be the standard spelling in modern Italian, I believe there have been minor changes in spelling practice since the 17th century (though less than you might expect). MaxBrowne2 (talk) 03:58, 1 January 2019 (UTC)

text: OK, I'm just finishing up an overhaul of this article... turns out Greco's manuscripts have a bunch of different spellings of Gioachino. (They're in the MS list in the article, if you want to peruse them.) We should go with Gioachino, because that's what most authors use. Mack Robot (talk) 03:48, 24 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gioachino or Gioacchino? 

message: The fortune that Greco had of 5000 Scudi (term used by Salvio (1634)--primary source) is sometimes translated crowns and sometimes scudi. Of course, scudi (plural of scudo) is an Italian currency and this fortune was acquired in France. He probably had livres (French coins), but I don't recall seeing  that expression in English language texts about Greco. Richard Eales, Chess: The History of a Game (1985), who is more careful than most, states only a "great sum" (87). Perhaps the article should state, "said to be the equivalent of 5000 crowns". I do not think it is standard convention to capitalize currencies.JStripes (talk) 13:29, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  5000 Crowns 

message: I believe we should have two or three games, illustrating the smothered mate (already included), Greco's Mate (not yet included), and one that's not so short and 'trappy'. (Too many people's impression these days, is that Greco was just a composer of 7-move traps. I used the one above in Talk for now.) If those can be done in two games, all the better.
And compositions, the wrong-rook pawn is probably the most well-known? But if someone runs into a second good one, that might be nice too.Mack Robot (talk) 04:45, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: According to Monté, there are 20 endings in Greco's MSS, but only four or five can be credited to him. Even these seem to simply build upon the ideas of others. The problem that you have now is Greco's most interesting and most original composition, it seems. But there are at least two others worthy of consideration. For instance, 8/8/8/4K3/8/8/3Q1p2/6k1 w is a Greco composition, but the idea is derived from this one by Salvio 1K6/2P5/1q6/2k5/8/8/8/8 w (Black wins). Another is the three pawn problem that I posted a week ago at http://chessskill.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-greco-composition.html. Monté suggests how this one developed from ideas going back to Francesch Vicent (possibly the source for what appears in Lucena's MSS), who may have introduced some ideas concerning three pawns vs. king in Ferrara in 1502, where he was tutor to one of the Borgias. Then Annibale Romei offered 1k6/1P6/8/P1P5/8/8/8/8 w (no White king), followed by one by Carrera. In any case, Greco's composition is original even if the ideas are derivative. Solving Greco's composition, however, had to wait for József Szén in 1836, who placed White's king on d1. This comment is essentially a compressed version of a post I'm planning to put on my blog in a couple of days. JStripes (talk) 18:51, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Games And Constructions 

message: There's a new sentence in the introduction here, 
"Willard Fiske asserted in Book of the First American Chess Congress (1959) that Greco was born in Morea, but no evidence supports this claim.[8]"
Do we even need this? It's one (probably-false) statement, from an author we don't otherwise use. This seems like it could be taken out by analogy to Quale's insufficient-weight reasoning with Cusentino.
::The whole paragraph discusses Greco's alleged Greek ancestry. While the history of Calabria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calabria makes clear that this is a possibility, it is possible that he is from a family that had emigrated to Calabria from Greece hundreds of years before he was born. Fiske is the most prominent writer who has suggested that Greco was from Greece, although there are others. I am not averse to seeing the whole paragraph deleted. But, then, the mystery of a famous tactic that originates in Greco's games, known as the "Greek Gift", is harder to comprehend. What is needed, it seems to me, is some sort of mention that Greco has sometimes been assumed to have had Greek ancestry, but no one has been able to confirm the claim. JStripes (talk) 16:55, 23 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fiske Claim? 

message: The Long_s will be unfamiliar to the majority of readers, having not been used since the 18th century. Should we use it when quoting old texts? I think it will just confuse modern readers, who might mistake it for an f. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 10:24, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure.  My first thought was in agreement with you, that using long s is a mistake.  But we keep the archaic spelling, so I don't know. Quale (talk) 01:29, 13 July 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: MOS:CONFORM is clear about this, don't use long s. "Normalize archaic glyphs and ligatures in English that are unnecessary to the meaning. Examples include æ→ae, œ→oe, ſ→s, and þe→the." MaxBrowne2 (talk) 23:40, 14 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use long s in quotes?