On Sep 26, 6:02 am, "Chess One" wrote:

"in 1995, at age 81, he finished sixth in the U. S. Open."

The official crosstable shows he tied for 6th through 12th,
which is not quite the same as "finishing sixth".

When I raised the same issue about a certain bloke's finish at Nottingham, I
was assured that the official way of recording these things in the US these
days, is to say 6th.

Never rely on other imbeciles to tell you how to do
something -- it only leads to trouble! You must one
day learn to think for yourself, and so why not start
now and get it over with?

The key idea here is that saying he finished sixth
lends a false impression that he was the sixth best
player (in terms of this result, anyway); but of course
*you* would never want to deceive anybody, so you
give all the facts, like when talking to the FBI:

"No, officer, I didn't actually *see* Mr. Kortchnoi toss
Mr. Karpov out the window, but I overheard him threaten
to do it and when I looked back, Mr. Karpov had suddenly
disappeared from sight, while his antagonist had a big,
evil smile on his face. Unfortunately, we were only on
the first floor."


It was a
very good tourney for GM Denker, as he went from USCF
2322 all the way up to 2375! Note that (apart from Alex
Yermolinsky) this event was not exactly packed with
grandmasters; so where the heck were they? Was the
U.S. Closed championship huge that year? In any case,
at 81 years old, he smacked around several masters; this
reminds me of Jack Palance falling to the stage floor and

My daughter aged 16 was crew on a big wooden boat up there on Erie, a lake
boat built to fight the Brits

Those scum! The way they treated us, you would
think they owned us or something, like a colony.


and a couple of guests showed up, the Gov of
PA, plus a 'star'. Guests had to put on life jackets, and the star couldn't
quite figure his out, so #1 daughter went over and tied it for him, but he
tried to 'help'. "Put your f*** hands down, man!" she said to Jack Palance.
Which he did, quiet as a lamb. She had no idea who he was.

Ah, the apple does not fall far from the tree. Learned
how to talk from her old man, I see.



Anyway, 2375 is not too bad at age 81! My gosh! That's not too bad at all.

He no doubt left several masters scratching their heads
in wonder at how they could lose to such an old fellow.

Chess can be a strenuous game, and not only is it
tougher to recall things as you get older, but the clock
seems to speed up on you as well.


I went to chessgames.com and (finally) replayed the
correct moves of this game, where the note about
the King retreating to e7 actually made sense. On
that site, a note can be found in which some poster
borrowed intermittant comments by "Lev Albert and
Larry Parr" ("What villiage idiot...?"). Again, there is
no objectivity; my view is that Rybka could simply
take over in mid game and probably squeak out a
draw through a miraculous defense; but not when
the annotator talks as though Black does not even
get to move while White goes thrice in a row! LOL


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