Mr. Evans, though never quite in the uppermost echelon of world-championship candidates, was nevertheless among the strongest players in the world for decades, and was a frequent U.S. champion. He was also a prolific and beloved author, columnist, and analyst; I have several of his books on my chess shelf, and I had followed his regular contributions to Chess Life since I was a boy. (I even got to meet him once, at a tournament at New York’s McAlpin Hotel sometime back in the early 70s.)

You can read his New York Times obituary here, and his USCF obituary here — and you can look over a few of his games here.

The renowned chess teacher Bruce Pandolfini^† had this to say:

“After 1972, we lost so many great pieces of art,” said Mr. Pandolfini, the chess teacher, “hundreds of masterpieces he would have created if he had stayed a sane being. We feel the great loss. All chess players do.”

Indeed we do.

1. † One of the many blessings of living in Brooklyn all these years was that Pandolfini used to run the chess club at my son Nick’s school, giving Nick the opportunity to learn from one of the best for seven years or so.

I have no doubt that Kasparov is quite rightly seen as a dangerous opponent by Vladimir Putin. He is enormously intelligent, is obviously a brilliant and cunning strategist, and is idolized in Russia, where chess is roughly what baseball is to Americans. And while chess masters are many, world champions are few, and they are distinguished from merely great players by an almost inhuman will to win: to crush their opponents not just on the board, but in spirit as well — a trait of which Garik is perhaps the greatest exemplar since Fischer, or even Alekhine. Dr. Emmanuel Lasker — philosopher, mathematician, friend of Einstein, and above all one of the greatest champions of all time — saw chess as being, first and foremost, a struggle of wills. At the world-champion match level, where calculation and opening theory are already at the limit of human capability, it is the one with the superior will who triumphs. In Lasker’s day that was Lasker; in our time it was Kasparov. The man simply will not be intimidated, and I am confident that Putin knows that with the board in its current position, Kasparov will neither resign nor offer a draw.

Putin must play conservatively here; he knows the world is watching, and he knows that he must handle Kasparov with care, given his enormous popularity. Simply to have him eliminated would be a risky move indeed. But Garik will, as always, be quick to spot any point of weakness, and to apply pressure.

This game is not yet out of the opening. Read an account of Kasparov’s arrest here.

Kramnik lost the six-game match 4-2, with four draws and two losses. The match included an astonishing blunder by Kramnik in the second game: the reigning champion, with an even position at the 34th move, overlooked mate in one, and was immediately dispatched.

One tends to root for the human in these matches, but it’s futile, really; while the very best carbon-based players may still be able to get these programs to break an occasional sweat, that won’t be the case much longer. Rather than wallowing in John Henry-style bathos, we might as well just move on, I think, keeping in mind that it was, after all, we humans who built these contraptions in the first place.

Anyway, for the morbidly curious among you, I have found links to the six games, in interactive embedded-chessboard form. Here they are:

• Game 1
• Game 2
• Game 3
• Game 4
• Game 5
• Game 6

First I played over an outstanding game from the first round of the Nottingham tournament. It was the great Alekhine playing White against Salo Flohr, a player who hovered perennially just below world-championship level (and who had just placed first to Alekhine’s second at a tournament the previous month). The game is a French defense, and Alekhine plays with relentless determination and consummate skill, eventually winning the day. You can see the game below:

Now Alekhine, who by 1936 had lost his World Champion title and was feeling the ravages of both time and his dissipated life, mentions in his notes for this game that he made a mistake very early on, at move 4. He played 4. Bd2 (I have converted to algebraic notation here), and he tells us:

A “lapsus manus”. I intended to play 4. e5 and f4 as, for instance against Nimzovitch at San Remo 1930, but instead I made the move with the bishop first.

This must have been a very upsetting moment, I thought, for the ruthless and once-invincible Alekhine: paired against a truly formidable opponent, in Round 1 of the strongest tournament ever convened, at a time when he is fighting for his sagging career, he has already, at move 4, made a strategic error. I could only imagine how the blood must have run cold in his veins. But as we have seen, his indomitable will prevailed – a tremendous example of the mettle of one of the greatest masters of all time.

So, after playing over this excellent game, I turned to Reinfeld’s book, a most engaging anthology of chess essays and anecdotes (sadly, long out of print). As I leafed through the pages I came to a section called The Modern Masters, and in particular there was a page of old black-and-white photos of Alekhine, including the one below (forgive the poor quality; I just snapped it with my camera phone a minute ago):

I could see at once this was an older Alekhine, and turned to the notes at the back of the book to see where the picture was taken. Imagine my surprise to find that it was actually from Round 1 of the Nottingham tournament – the very game I had just been examining. And on closer inspection, I saw that the position on the board was just after 4 … dxe4 – the very move at which Alekhine had made his mistake!

In this photo Alekhine is pausing to light a cigarette, trying to appear calm, but you can see from the tension in his mouth and shoulders, and from his awkward posture, that he must have been utterly shocked and dismayed. This was an amazing find – in these two dusty old books I had stumbled upon a unique, multidimensional and psychologically profound glimpse of a 70-year-old moment, involving perhaps the greatest player who ever lived.

This is why I can’t stop buying books.

A chessboxing match is, like both chess and boxing, strictly one-on-one. The contestants alternate between pummeling one another in the ring and grappling at the chessboard. Here’s how it works:

In a chessboxing fight two opponents play alternating rounds of chess and boxing. The contest starts with a round of chess, followed by a boxing round, followed by another round of chess and so on. In every round of chess the FIDE rules for a ´Blitz game´ apply, in every boxing round the AIBA rules apply with the following extensions and modifications: In a contest there shall be 11 rounds, 6 rounds of chess, 5 rounds of boxing. A round of chess takes 4 minutes. Each competitor has 12 minutes on the chess timer. As soon as the time runs out the game is over.

A round of boxing takes 2 minutes. Between rounds there is a 1 minute pause, during which competitors change their gear. The contest is decided by: checkmate (chess round), exceeding the time limit (chess round), retirement of an opponent (chess or boxing round), KO (boxing round), or referee decision (boxing round). If the chess game ends in a stalement, the opponent with the higher score in boxing wins. If there is an equal score, the opponent with the black pieces wins.

There are some great opportunities here to feel really, really bad about yourself. Imagine this dispiriting scenario: in full view of a jeering audience, your opponent outplays you with a subtle five-move combination and you lose a piece, and then you get up in the ring and he knocks you flat on your ass.

It seems to me that these rules favor, in an asymmetrical pairing, the superior pugilist over the better chessplayer: if you are, say, Mike Tyson, going up against the neurasthenic chess genius Aron Nimzovitch, you slow-play the opening chess round (after all, the round is 4 minutes, and you have 12 on the clock), then pulverize him in the first round of boxing.

So if you are going to take this up you’d better be as handy with your fists as your forks.

Anyway, I was poking around online the other day and came across this outstandingly brilliant game by the great American grandmaster Walter Browne. When I was a teenager I used to come into New York with my friends to play in tournaments at the old McAlpin Hotel at Herald Square; Walter was always the one to watch. You could always tell where his board was by the crowd gathered round.

This is a beautiful game from one of those tournaments, way back in 1973. Enjoy.

Chess is one of those rare examples of something that is just right. It seems to me sometimes that there are certain human creations that resonate, somehow, as if they were positioned precisely in some sort of cosmic “sweet spot”. The adagio cantabile from Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique. Michaelangelo’s David. My friend David Wolfert’s vintage Stratocaster. Baseball. Steak for Two at Peter Luger’s.

I could go on for a while with those, but you get the point.

Chess seems perfectly tuned. Eight squares by eight. Add a rank or a file, and you ruin the sweet symmetry. Add both, and the resulting combinatorial explosion would turn a comprehensible microcosm into merely another confusing problem to solve. The transcendent beauty of the eight-by-eight arena in which chess is played is that it somehow boils down all of the essential aspects of human struggle into a model that we can fit in our minds all at once. At ten by ten, it just hasn’t been boiled enough.

Chess is simple. There are only six elements, and they have a tiny set of properties that a child can learn in a few hours. The “exit strategy” is simple enough to be expressed in seven words:

“Threaten the opponent’s King with unavoidable capture.”

Chess is unimaginably complex. The number of possible games has been estimated to be larger than the number of particles in the observable Universe. There is an antique saying:

“Chess is a sea in which the gnat may drink and the elehant may bathe.”

Chess has inspired men to feats of almost superhuman mental effort. In 1947, the Polish/Argentine grandmaster Miguel Najdorf played forty-five simultaneous blindfold games. I’ll repeat that: forty-five simultaneous blindfold games. He won twenty-five of them, drew four, and lost only two. Two.

There is also pleasure to be had from the physical and temporal context in which the game is played. Two people, usually friends, seat themselves at opposite sides of the board, knowing that for a brief interval the responsibilities and vicissitudes of the world are to be set aside. The contestants enter a realm of pure thought, sharing for this interval a commonly created theater of abstract intellectual struggle.

The equipment itself can be both a visual and tactile treat: my chessboard is a lovely ebony-and-maple artifact, and the large, hand-carved, weighted pieces occupy their squares with imposing gravitas, and offer a satisfying thump when moved.

It is not surprising that the game has endured for thousands of years, and is more popular now than ever. To quote the great Siegbert Tarrasch:

“Chess has the power to make men happy.”

Works for me!