MARK RUBERY CHESS WHITE TO PLAY AND WIN
There is little doubt today that the earlier one learns how to play chess the further and faster one can move through the ranks. However, in the era before computers this did not always hold true. Here is a sprinkling of some of the greatest players and those who gave them initial guidance:
■ Alexander Alekhine learnt at the age of 7 from his older brother.
■ Viswinathan Anand learnt the game of chess at age 6 and was taught by his mother. ■ Max Euwe learnt at the age of 9 from his parents.
■ Reuben Fine learnt chess at the age of 8 from his cousin.
■ Bobby Fischer learnt at the age of 8 from his older sister.
■ Robert Hubner learnt at the age of 5 from his father.
■ Anatoly Karpov learnt chess at the age of 4 at the Pioneers Palace.
■ Gary Kasparov learnt at age 5 from his father, who later died in a car crash.
■ Paul Keres learnt at the age of 4.
■ Paul Morphy was introduced to the game at age 8 by his father.
■ Hikaru Nakamura learnt how to play chess at the age of 7-and thereafter it was blitz on the Internet.
■ Vasily Smyslov learnt chess at the age of 6 from his father and from the chess books in his father’s library.
■ Boris Spassky learnt chess at the age of 5. ■ Capablanca claimed he learnt chess at the age of 4 by watching his father play chess against friends.
■ Emanuel Lasker learnt at age 11 from his elder brother.
■ Mikhail Tal learnt at the age of 8 by watching patients play chess at the hospital his father worked at.
■ Veselin Topalov learnt at age 9.
■ Amos Burn learnt at 16 the same age as Mikhail Chigorin (Who only started to play seriously at 24!
■ The English master, Joseph Blackburne, (and joint SA blindfold record holder) was 19 years old before he discovered chess from a book he had purchased.
■ The famous talent, Sultan Khan, only learnt the rules of international chess, having until then been only acquainted with Indian chess, at age 21. 6
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Chess can be very hard work if we take it seriously. All that opening analysis, all that endgame theory, all those current games to keep up with, all that money spent on books. The stress, the angst, the pain. You know what I mean. If we put as much time and effort into other studies as we put into chess, we’d all speak eight languages and have a lock on the unified field theory.
– Burt Hochberg