MARK RUBERY CHESS

The American author, GM Andy Soltis, gave an interview to the US Chess Trust from which a few extracts follow.

How old were you when you learned to play, and who were your biggest influences? AS:

I must have been about 10 when I learned. Today that would put me about four years behind the curve for aspiring players. I never had a chess lesson, a teacher, coach or trainer. I remember when I read a Paul Keres column in Chess Life, in 1972, in which he said the way to become a strong player is to work with a strong instructor. He added that this must have been the way young masters of the day got strong. He named Karpov, Tukmakov, Huebner and several others including Soltis. I just smiled.

When did you begin to suspect a lifelong love for the game was in the works, and what was it that attracted you to chess? AS:

I don’t know when I was hooked, or why for that matter. Maybe it was for the reason Botvinnik gave: Some people like to think and chess is the best way to satisfy the urge. I also liked the way you could discover new ideas, particularly in the openings, even though the game had been played for hundreds of years.

You are one of the most prolific writers in chess. If you had to choose one of your chess books as your favourite, which would it be? AS:

My favourite book is “Soviet Chess.” I had decided around 1993 that I should be taking more risks in my writing. I wanted to write books on subjects that had never been tackled before or in formats that were original. (I wrote an endgame book in the form of a Socratic dialogue between a grandmaster and a young amateur.)

Soviet chess was such a vast, ridiculously so, subject that it seemed right for me. I spent the first year just researching and translating (my high school Russian came in handy). Just correcting the page proofs and adding a “notes on sources” took me about 40 hours. That’s about four times what it took me to do entire pamphlets on openings when I was working for Ken Smith and Chess Digest.

Which is your favorite by another author?

AS: You never enjoy chess as much as when you were just starting out and everything about the game is new and magical. That’s why my favourite books were those I read when I was a three-digit player. Probably, Reinfeld’s “Hypermodern Chess,” a collection of Nimzovich games, was number one. In retrospect, it’s not a very good book. But it made a big impression on me at the time.

You are also the long time chess columnist for the New York Post. The newspaper business has undergone a radical transformation in recent years. How have you managed to survive all the cost cutting measures? AS:

I started as a copyboy at the Post in 1967, the days of “hot type” and typewriters and carbon paper, and became a reporter two years later. One of the editors suggested doing a column in October 1972, right after the Fischer-Spassky match, and I’ve been doing it ever since. Actually, a chess column is a solid, cost-effective feature. Unless you can play over an entire game in your head, a reader who buys a copy will take it home with him, to play the game over on a board. That’s an ideal situation for a newspaper: Getting the paper into a home because it means more people will read it.