wrote in message
oups.com...
ADVICE TO SUSAN

I would counsel Susan Polgar to attend to what
she does well. She is a chess grandmaster, a chess
teacher, a chess promoter. The idea that she would
spend a significant number of hours weekly as a member
of the USCF Executive Board makes no sense to me.

Susan Polgar's friend Paul Truong knows chess
(his rating is not faked) is tough as nails and
evidently is able to promote GM Polgar and the royal
game. He would be a fine Executive Board member, and
if I were a member, I would cast my vote for him --
along with Sam Sloan and Mike Goodall.

I can't imagine how GM Polgar would long survive
among the cut-throats on the Executive Board and in
the USCF committee system. Many of those on the
committees are the absolute dregs: dismal, dull,
dreary, depressing and deadly. They are HORRIBLE and
HIDEOUS creatures.

You know Larry,

I wrote with Joel Lautier /a lot/ when he headed ACP - and had some business
with him re the Paris Petersburg broadcast match.

I think you have said it!

Being a politico of chess is very different than playing chess and while
Joel was always dutiful I never gained the sense he liked the diversion from
his main love, which was playing the game.

First, there would be conflict of interest
problems. GM Polgar would have to surrender many
interesting chess and financial opportunities that she
deserves to have. Which ones? That will be for the
future to determine, but the pain will be there.

I can't really share confidences like this in the open, not that I know so
very much - but my guess is that she would simply sacrifice for USCF - which
is not to say I think this is a good idea - and in fact she might do rather
better for future chess players if she did not. A conundrum! And yes,
difficult decisions.

Secondly, there will be endless complaints to
the USCF Ethics Committee every time GM Polgar tries
to act like a ... chess teacher and a grandmaster,
which is, after all, what she happens to be!



Thirdly, there is the horror of several years of
gut-wrenching infighting. Enemies will be watching
and waiting for an opportunity to initiate legal
action. The courts are now part of the chess scene,
which sets us apart from the largely legally inactive
chess world of an earlier time.

This raises a rather larger issue of who is doing what at USCF - for myself
I have seen the successive rise of the Politicians at the expense of the
staff - [the meriotcracy, if you will, and as it was], and to accept this as
any modus vivendi is to act like old Rome, IMO. What did Gibbon say? An
excess of lawsuits and introversion brought the show to an end?

Paul Truong will evidently have the drive -- the
willpower -- to advance an agenda. I don't see that
GM Polgar is required also to be on the Board. She
obviously has very little understanding of the injury
she will be doing herself by getting elected to the
Executive Board.

yes - on /this/ board, with this degree of erosion of standards, the
challenges are maximimised

first, said the Polish critic

you eliminate those who /create/ standards
then you eliminate those who adhere to standards,
then you eliminate record of standards

Otherwise, she would be running for
the chess hills of Troitzky and Kubbel as well as
Kasparian and Korol'kov -- or to my favorite, Mark Liburkin.

Rght now -- this very moment -- is as good as
it will ever get in political terms for GM Polgar. As
in Iraq, what will come is guerrilla fighting and
countless IEDs along the political roadsides of the
United States Chess Federation.

That's our good old USCF, you know.

Well, that was a good if brief essay, or appraisal. The awful alternative is
that things will continue without sufficient soul - with no innate love of
the game being central to issues and very far from evident - and in fact,
such things as soul being seen as naive and laughable - rather like that old
room in Malta mentioned some time ago; would people even appreciate what it
is?

I can't seen S. Polgar ever abandoning what is central to chess which is a
passion in playing it, but I can see every damn problem you mention above as
being noise in competition to that.

Phil Innes