Snapshots: A Coincidence Diary

I gave chess lessons via Skype to a Mancunian girl, Bryony Eccleston. Her mother had requested I teach something about endings so, over the previous couple of lessons, I had been working with her on pawn endings. On April 29th 2020 I was trying to teach her about a rarely encountered tricky breakthrough in a pawn ending of the answering of...g5? with g4! by showing an example of it from a tournament game of 1978 in Kiev between GM Hans Ree and IM Lyubomir Ftacnik. Since I did not have my signed copy of Ree´s The Human Comedy of Chess in front of me, I had not arranged the pawns on the queenside precisely as they were in the actual game.  Ftacnik thought he was winning and played 56...g6-g5?? to be stunned by Ree's response of 57 g4!.  All other moves lost for white. But 57 g4! won.  After an hour´s thought, Ftacnik continued 57...hxg4 58 h5 Ke6 59 Kf2 Kf7 60 Kg3 Kg7 61 Kxg4 Kh6 62 Kf5 Kxh5 63 Kxf6 g4 64 e5 g3 65 e6 g2 66 e7 g1=Q 67 e8=Q+ Kh4 68 Qh8+ Kg3 69 Qg8+ Kg2 7...

On the morning of January 23rd 2020 I was running a couple of kilometres along the sea front near my house. This was a part of my training for several things and specifically for my health. I had decided, in the days still left, to hone my concerns down to just eight or so. e.g. Spanish, keyboard skills, etc, and several of these were far from "all or nothing" commitments but just "trimming" things to a level of respectability. The eighth and least important was getting my formal ELO rating back to 2500. It had peaked, in 2000, at 2529. I myself had won the British Championship in 1990 ahead of a world class field, achieved a world ranking of 100th in the 1980s and had plus scores against two players who had been ranked in the world top ten and against two others who played matches for the world championship. I had even received accolades of "genius" for one of my games: a victory over Miles. https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1097818&kpa...

On the evening of November 17th 2018 I happened to think about a slightly unusual ending of  rook´s pawn and a bishop (which does not control the corner square on which the pawn promotes) Vs knight´s pawn. Although the position is similar to one which arose in the game Timman Vs Mestel, London 1982, which Timman won and also to that which arose in the fifth game of the Korchnoi Vs Karpov, World Championship Match, Baguio City 1978, which Karpov clung on to draw, my machinations soon led me to realise that it was in fact also drawn. Here, by the way, is a game from two men who would later contend The Times 1993 World Championship Match. In the ending that arose at move 93 the position is actually won for the man with the bishop as the doubled knight´s pawn means that, after the defender is compelled to give it away, the resultant position will not be a stalemate -  https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1070432 The following day I competed in a Rapids event in the t...

On the afternoon of Saturday June 16th 2018 my mind wandered back to an afternoon in late 1991 when I and a schoolmate, Neil Cannon, had played backgammon together in a house owned by parents of a friend of his in Kimbolton Road, Bedford. Within the hour I received an e mail from Cannon himself. It was only the second e mail he had ever sent me, the previous one being in January 2017 in which he had said he was back in Bedford to visit his aging mum. He now said that he had spoken with my mother the previous evening when watching the Spain Vs Portugal World Cup soccer match on TV in the Charter House home where she was resident. His mother, he informed me, was also a resident there and on the same ward.  I had not known that. I e mailed him back re what I had just been thinking about. He responded with their names - ´ Chris & Jonny Potter.  We played chess & backgammon that afternoon. ´ As I myself had left Charter House Care Home on one occasion, I too had ...

On an afternoon in 2012 I found a scene, which I had seen some twenty years previously, popped into my head. It was  where Elton John https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elton_John held a pistol out towards Rowan Atkinson... which did not go off!  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_Atkinson   And so he had found himself forced to go “Bang!”  I presumed it to have been an antiquated  Secret Policeman´s Ball , but when I checked I found it to have been from a Hysteria show of 1991. The following afternoon Byron Jacobs https://players.chessbase.com/en/player/Jacobs_Byron%20A/115063 mentioned this very scene to me when we communicated at a social media site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl0HqlbX7dc