MARK RUBERY CHESS
The Russian/Dutch GM, Sergei Tiviakov is a player with a vivid imagination-an ideal element in a strong player’s armoury. This sometimes amusingly spills over into real life as when he returned from playing a tournament in Egypt. On viewing an image on one of his pictures taken with a digital camera at the pyramid of Chefren he declared the following:
‘This photograph of this creature, the asuri, a creature from a parallel world, invisible to the human eye, is the only picture of its kind in the world! Nobody else in human history has ever managed to capture this creature on a photograph inside one of the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Before, this creature has only been met inside the caves of Tibet and Himalayas, by the expedition of Professor Ernst Muldashev, well-known scientist/ophthalmologist, explorer.’
This photo evoked the following response from a website that deals with investigations into the paranormal.
‘No, the “creature” is not the obvious one with the glasses; that’s the chess-player. Look at the lower right, and you’ll see a tiny neon-orange shape and that he has captured a smeared image of the tiny pilot-light on the air conditioner. To register the entire image under the poor light conditions inside the tomb, the camera shutter stayed open, and during the long exposure (probably several seconds) the hand-held camera moved in a short jerk up and to the left, then back again. What would normally be a point-image of the neon light, has become a trail, a trace, of orange light…’
WHITE TO PLAY AND WIN
When a chess player has defeated all his opponents, when he has achieved the highest that can be achieved and has become world champion, he will inevitably come to face the evil spirit that says: ‘I’ve defeated all my opponents, I cannot reach any higher. so what’s next! ? What purpose has all this energy served?
Has there been a point in all this strenuous effort?’ All former world champions have experienced this, and each has reacted in his own way. Lasker abandoned the game, didn’t play for ten years and conceived his ‘machology, a philosophy of battle’ . Capablanca said chess was a nursery game that would be extinct in a few decades. He preferred dominoes. Alekhine took flight in liquor, and Euwe was so upset when he became world champion that he got rid of the title as quickly as possible. (J H Donner)