THE DAY KASPAROV QUIT and other chess interviews

Author: Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam

New In Chess (2006)

344 pages

$24.95

Reviewed by Jeremy Silman

It’s pretty easy to figure out if you will or won’t enjoy this book. If you enjoy interviews of famous chess personalities, pick up THE DAY KASPAROV QUIT. If you find such things uninteresting, then pass and look for something on opening theory and tactics.

That was easy, wasn’t it? No, you want to know more? Are you telling me that mere interviews aren’t compelling enough to make you fork over $24.95? Fair enough. Let’s take a look at what lies within the pages of Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam’s latest book (he also penned LINARES! LINARES! and FINDING BOBBY FISCHER): Thirty chapters give us a veritable who’s who of names, comprised of Najdorf, Mecking, Leko, Kasparov (five interviews),  Anand, (two interviews),  Ivanchuk, Ilyumzhinov, Norwood, Hubner, Yermolinsky, Averbakh, Kramnik (four interviews), Taimanov,  Viktor Korchnoi, Petra Korchnoi,  Loek Van Wely, Bronstein, Azmaiparashvili, Shabalov, Judit Polgar, Kasimdzhanov, and Nakamura. The balance of older greats, modern veterans, young bucks, and one dictator is a nice one.

Of course, anyone can ask a few boring questions and stick them together in book form. But these are far more than mere Q & A sessions. Instead, Mr. Geuzendam paints intimate portraits of the individuals who he’s addressing, somehow or other gets them to open up and say what’s on their mind and, more often than not, encourages them to voice opinions that others simply weren’t able to drag out of them.

Here are a few examples:

Hubner on philology and the word logos as used in the Bible –

“This word has gone through a long development. I don’t know what it is supposed to mean here. I think that the person who used it was not too sure either. For he says: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’ Of course, that is self-contradictory. The World cannot be, a) with God, and b) be God. I think that because he didn’t know exactly what he was talking about, he tried to make his listeners drowsy by his rhetoric.”

Najdorf on why he stayed in Argentina –

“What could I do? I was in Buenos Aires without a word of Spanish and no money. I shared a room with Keres and we also hung out with Stahlberg from Sweden. Stahlberg stayed a while longer, but Keres decided to go back. I was here with no news about my family, who had been taken to the concentration camps. Then someone gave me an excellent idea. One of my specialties as a chess player was blindfold chess, so what if I did something really unique … like playing blindfold chess against 45 people simultaneously, for example. Such an extraordinary record was bound to filter through even to the concentration camps. In this way I could let my family know what I was okay and that after the war they should come to Argentina.”

[JS – sadly, Najdorf’s family didn’t make it out alive. He lost his wife, three-year-old daughter, his mother, and four younger brothers]

Norwood on making money –

“I made my grandmaster title when I was at university. Which is a great bonus. It meant that when I was a student I could make lots of money playing chess. Because in those days a grandmaster title actually earned you some money. But from when I left in 1991, it has just become impossible to make any money. A grandmaster like myself would perhaps get a thousand pounds for a tournament. I’d be lucky to get my own room.”

Petra Korchoni on being sentenced to 20 years –

“We were slaves. For the women it was not as hard as for the men. They had to work in the coalmines. We worked on railways, roads, in quarries hacking our rocks.”

Nakamura on chess books –

“I actually haven’t read a chess book in a long time. I haven’t really read much about the history. There are a lot of these top people who read about the previous World Champions, and those before that really got good. I haven’t done that. I have studied some of Fischer’s games and of course Kasparov’s games, which are probably the only two players I have studied.”

There is a tremendous amount to read in THE DAY KASPAROV QUIT, and everything proved extremely interesting to me. If you enjoy chess history and/or the thoughts of chess titans, then this book will give you enormous pleasure.