Taylor Kingston writes:

"GM Keene, as usual, is under-researched, even about himself. His
offenses against historical accuracy are many and well known. For his
elucidation, I repeat the first installment of a thread begun some time
ago, "Keene on Chessic Omniscience"


Well, it seems to me that Taylor Kingston has forgotten the
Millions-of-words Defense: the saving line first essayed by Larry Parr
around 1983, but later co-opted by others such as Larry Evans and
Raymond Keene. The key point is that the glaring weakness of the
kingside is defensible (despite gaping holes) by means of pointing out
the huge number of moves, or rather words, which an author has written
over time. With such a vast number of words, it is inevitable that a
few gremlins will "creep in".

In view of the iron-clad "logic" of this Defense, I am forced to
agree with Keene regarding his overall hysterical accuracy. In any
event, other "great" chess writers are no better: take Eric Schiller,
for example.

TK's points one through five have already been dealt with elsewhere.
One reviewer of my review thought TK had lapsed into Greek or pig
Latin, claiming "illiterati" had slipped into an otherwise entirely
English language posting, but I'm not convinced. This is akin to
claiming that, in the middle of a particular game, one player switches
from modern algebraic into the old, archaic notation, like so:

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bb5 P-QR3
4. Ba4

--

In part two (which I have only begun to read), there appears to be
much quibbling as to which of these two "world's leading authorities"
(read: overblown egos) has/had access to the oldest game involving the
so-called hypermodern strategy. Each of them -- Keene and Kingston --
reach back further and further in attempts to demonstrate a database
superiority of some sort. IMO, this is a pointless task, as everyone
knows that Eric Schiller is -- hands down -- the world's leading
authority on megabases and data dumps. It matters not how big their
egos may be, they simply can't compete (with the best) here.


Keene offers:

"TK misses the point. I wasn't trying to find the earliest reference,
which
is in fact Staunton's game, but simply showing that a well known 1883
game had reached the Nimzo basic position, which GMs of that era...".


Here, the world's leading authority (apart from Taylor Kingston, that
is) on chess appears to "forget" that there was no such title as "GMs"
in the era to which he refers.
Heck, one of his own books, Warriors of the Mind -- often criticised by
Edward Winter for "demoting" greats like Alekhine to also-ran staus --
probably has players like Staunton at or around the modern IM level,
reserving GM status for players like Lasker and Capablanca. That is,
unless one takes a top-down approach, assumming that there have always
been a few grandmasters, no matter how weak, but that there are far
more today for reasons unknown. My understanding was that this was not
the approach taken in Keene and Divinski's book, however. These guys
put Kasparov out in front by millions of points. Okay, hundreds of
points.

Further arguments occur regarding an error in the first edition of
Keene's book on Nimzowitch, with TK lashing out at an error which Keene
apparently has a legitimate defense for, as he had (quite reasonably)
relied upon Dumont's work on Capablanca. It's not Keene's fault that
this work has since been superceeded (by Edward Winter, #).

--

This is really odd. Keene & the dunderheads have managed to trick
the so-called ratpackers into discussing one of Keene's better works,
instead of focusing on the prior subject -- Keene's recent slop.
Slippery as an eel.


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