Cape Argus

MARK RUBERY CHESS

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From: WEEKLY WORLD NEWS, MOSCOW—Doctors are blaming a rare electrical imbalance in the brain for the bizarre death of a chess player whose head literally exploded in the middle of a championsh­ip game! No one else was hurt in the fatal explosion but four players and three officials at the Moscow Candidate Masters Chess Championsh­ips were sprayed with blood and brain matter when Nikolai Titov’s head suddenly blew apart. Experts say he suffered from Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis or HCE.

He was deep in concentrat­ion with his eyes focused on the board, says Titov’s opponent, Vladimir Dobrynin. All of a sudden his hands flew to his temples and he screamed in pain. Everyone looked up from their games, startled by the noise. Then, as if someone had put a bomb in his cranium, his head popped like a firecracke­r.

Incredibly, Titiov’s is not the first case in which a person’s head has spontaneou­sly exploded. Five people are known to have died of HCE in the last 25 years. The most recent death occurred when European psychic Barbara Nicole’s skull burst. Miss Nicole’s story was reported by newspapers worldwide, including WWN.

HCE is an extremely rare physical imbalance, said Dr. Anatoly Martinenko, famed neurologis­t and expert on the human brain who did the autopsy on the brilliant chess expert. “It is a condition in which the circuits of the brain become overloaded by the body’s own electricit­y. The explosions happen during periods of intense mental activity when lots of current is surging through the brain. Victims are highly intelligen­t people with great powers of concentrat­ion. Both Miss Nicole and Mr. Titov were intense people who tended to keep those cerebral circuits overloaded. In a way it could be said they were literally too smart for their own good.”

WHITE TO MATE IN 6 MOVES

In 1999 in Spain a chess book was published called ‘Manual Ajedrecist­a’. The book is apparently badly written from a technical point of view and utilises a number of old- fashioned concepts. The following is translatio­n of an excerpt: ‘If a game has been begun with a piece missing and both players have made their fourth moves, it shall be obligatory to complete the game without being able to put the forgotten piece at its appropriat­e place.’; another nugget being ‘We must manage to castle as early as possible and always within the first eight moves, this being the ideal method.’

Perhaps it all makes it bit more sense when the author of this tome is revealed-one Garry Kaspartov, proving that fraud has even reached the chess publishing business.

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