On Nov 12, 5:27 pm, Larry Tapper wrote:
On Nov 12, 4:40 pm, Taylor Kingston wrote:
...You know, this all really is so silly of you, Larry. GM Evans'
10/1996 article is a shoddy piece of work.
But that article was a masterpiece compared to the follow-up article
entitled "Case Closed!" published in the September 2001 Chess Life. I
imagine that our bitter disputants (TK and LP) both have copies ready
to hand --- I've mislaid mine.
You mention bitterness, Larry T., and sadly it is an apt word. Aside
from some satisfaction at (I hope) advancing research on what I
consider an important question in chess history, the main thing I've
gotten from the whole K-B business, insofar as it concerns GM Evans,
has been bitter disillusionment.
Like probably most Americans of my generation (I'm 58), I had always
held GM Evans in high esteem. Along with Fischer, Benko, and a few
others, he was one of my American chess heroes.
Even when my research into the Keres-Botvinnik case led me to change
my mind about the value of his 1996 article, I held Evans in respect,
and made sure that respect was expressed in my 1998 article, as anyone
who bothers actually to read what I wrote will see (
http://www.chesscafe.com/text/kb1.txt and
http://www.chesscafe.com/text/kb2.txt
). I even defended Evans against what I considered uncalled-for
attacks by Chess Life readers ("wild charges", "crackpot theory," "a
fire sale on paranoia" etc.) and said that he was raising important
issues.
Yet all that came back from Evans, and his mouthpiece Parr, was a
cascade of falsehoods, distortions, misquotations and
misrepresentations, including Evans' 1999 letter to Kingpin, utterly
false and misleading statements in Chess Life and (through Parr) a
continual smear campaign on rec.games.chess that (as we see here) is
still going on (see
http://www.chesscafe.com/text/skittles165.pdf for
some of the details).
I don't know if Evans habitually thinks and acts this way, or if he
is merely led into it by Parr. Either way, I could no longer regard
him as any sort of chess hero, and was left with a definitely bitter
aftertaste.