- your experiences in a pet opening (or one
which has become a pet hate!)
- chess curiosities. A few years ago I wrote
a series of articles in CHESS magazine
entitled What Has Chess Ever Done For
Us. Included were several curiosities
such as the top women chess players who
have married several chess players (not
all at once of course) and the game with
five exchange sacrifices (Orton-Hindle,
rapidplay).
If you set your mind to it, I’m sure that you
can think of more topics for chess articles.
Choosing games
We can find lots of excuses for publishing
games, other people’s or our own. En
Passant has seen series on bullet and blitz
games played on the internet, and famous
‘micro-games’ (very short) from the past.
The only problem with such ideas (for
me, at least) is that they are not relevant to
us as Norfolk chessplayers. On the other
hand, one player wrote a fascinating series
containing several of his own annotated
games whose outcome (and/or quality)
was affected by time trouble. Most of his
opponents were among the readership of
En Passant.
Some people think that publishing
and annotating their own wins is bigheaded or a put-down to the losers. I can
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understand and appreciate such modesty
and considerateness, but it isn’t really
necessary. After all, if a game is worth
publishing, then the opponent has done
something worthwhile and is a full partner
in the creation of a little bit of art. We
publish games of which we are proud, or
which have some merit to them. That tends
automatically to exclude games in which
several pieces were blundered away.
You may be concerned that you have
played no games of sufficient quality to
merit publication, but if you are graded 60
and beat someone graded above you then
you are likely to have played well enough
for anyone graded under 100 to appreciate
greatly, and for the rest of us to at least
give a nod to. Most importantly, all of En
Passant’s readers will understand what’s
going on, which is something that cannot
be said of all of the games that see the light
of day there!
If you have a game which was good in
parts but spoiled by a blunder, then use
the ‘Episode’ method - simply start from a
diagram, missing out early embarrassments
and/or state that “White (or Black) went on
to win” to eliminate later embarrassments!
Even a brief article with one short episode
is worthwhile, and you can flesh out a brief
episode with annotations, or use several
episodes, to make a full-length article.
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Peter Clarke – the Modest Master
Peter Clarke was a gentle, quiet man,
and one of England’s top players in the
1960s. He was several times West of
England Champion, and beat me in the
championship twice, with four draws (so
I came out ahead on my reckoning: four
draws to me, two wins to him!).
A gentleman named James Pratt decided
Norfolk Open Champion
to write a booklet about him and asked me
whether I could dig up any of Peter’s games.
As it happened, I had a collection of reports
from the West of England Championship
Congress (a copy of which went to every
competitor in the congress) and for several
years I actually wrote the report myself. I
was therefore able to provide James with
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