Monday 25 May 2009

The Personal Touch

A number of years ago I purchased a set of notebooks containing the games from a number of important chess tournaments. The tournaments were Interzonals, Candidate Finals, US Championships, Hasting etc from around 1930 through to the 1950's. What was interesting about these books were that the games were entered in incredibly neat handwriting, one game per page. They also included hand written cross tables, and other ancillary information.
These days you could get all the information at the press of a button, but in those days this was the closest thing to a database a player might have. And while the tournaments selected were of the highest level, the transcriber of the games occasionally strayed to a lower level even including the following gem from 1959.

Mayfield - Trinks [B00]
Omaha ch Omaha ch, 1959

1.e4 g5 2.Nc3 f5 3.Qh5# 1-0

2 comments:

TrueFiendish said...

Black expended energy unnecessarily. 2...f6 would have done the trick more efficiently.

Anonymous said...

I can't resist saying LOL!