On Nov 10, 9:55 am, samsloan wrote:
It is very well known that "Edward Winter" is obsessed with Raymond
Keene and has been attacking him incessantly since the late 1970s.

In the last decade or so Winter has added other names to his list of
people he attacks all the time. These include especially Larry Evans,
Eric Schiller and most recently Sam Sloan.

(I am honored to have my name added to such a distinguished list.)

I have put quotation marks around the name "Edward Winter" because
nobody knows who he is. Nobody has ever seen him. Detectives have even
staked out around the house in Switzerland where he supposedly
receives his mail and nobody has been able to find him there.

Taylor Kingston shares some remarkable similarities with Edward
Winter. Both are English. Both have the same enemies list. This has
led me to wonder that they might even be the same person.

Sam Sloan

My interpretation of the story about Stalin and Botvinnik is:

1. The first half (2/5) of the tournament was left alone, to see which
USSR player was strongest. Botvinnik won that race convincingly. At
the end, it was not entirely clear (absent Soviet collusion) that he
would win the tournament because the US player Reshevsky was not far
behind.

2. Then I find it entirely plausible that Stalin "selected" Botvinnik
as the Soviet "champion" and ordered all Soviet players to support his
victory, while striving to kneecap foreigners such as Reshevsky.

3. I also find it plausible that Botvinnik did not want to participate
in the scam and honorably declined. However I doubt this made any
difference to Stalin, who wanted a Soviet winner and clearly no other
one could be counted on to win; they were all behind Reshevsky. So
the orders to the other Soviets remained the same. It isn't Botvinnik
who threatened them, it was Stalin.

4. One cannot dismiss totally the possibility that Botvinnik invented
the story, knowing it was believable. Botvinnik's story can't be
proved with the given evidence. But all the chessplayers are little
pawns to a guy like Stalin, and I would expect him to orchestrate a
Soviet winner in exactly this way. So I believe the story as given
above.

5. So Botvinnik was ordered to win and the other Soviets were ordered
to lose to him, and they _all_ had to be afraid of Stalin.