On Apr 19, 12:25 pm, "David Kane" wrote:

Evans' first answer in this month's
"Ask GM Larry Evans!" column quotes
Botvinnik and refers to a book by Reuben
Fine- two players about as far away from
the modern chess world as one can imagine.
Not to say that "old" equates to "bad",
but in this case it is needlessly old, and
the points could be made in a more
entertaining fashion with modern players.

Evans' second answer in this month's
column is totally non-responsive. A player
asks for Black's best move in a position,
which Evans simply ignores, and instead
points out that Black made two mistakes
on the way to the queried position.

The third question is about what happens
when a game is started with the wrong
color. Evans quotes the rule. Yet, his
only color is the brilliant (?) lead-in
sentence "This happens occasionally."
In fact, I suspect it happens very,
very rarely at the level Evans himself
played, but it's not at all uncommon in huge
scholastic tournaments. But Evans
doesn't know that, or have anything
interesting to say about that, because
he has no contact with that part of
the chess world.

These are precisely the examples I was looking for.
(See an earlier post.)


Evans has certainly earned the right
to regurgitate his dated columns on wcn
if that's what floats his boat. But he
should be ashamed of himself for
feigning an ability to write an article
for scholastic chess players.

I recall a time when I was one of the coaches for
a scholastic team, and the head honcho kept trying
to recruit every strong player in the city, equating
strength with teaching ability. The good part is that
only one of the players he recruited taught the kids
poor strategy (he was quickly booted out), but the
bad part was that the best players were not
necessarily any good at teaching kids, and this
of course was the key!

IMO, it should not require a GM to write a column
for a scholastic publication, nor even an IM for that
matter. What we really need is a meritocracy, not
a GM-ocracy. :D

-- help bot