Original Solution

The above diagram (by T. P. Medley, 1950) is given in Eliyahu Fasher's(*) very amusing book, Shachmet le'Hana'atcha [Chess for Your Enjoyment], p. 112 of the 2nd (1980) edition. 

'White to move and mate in one.' 

The solution (printed upside down in the book):

'Anybody who couldn't solve it will get the money he paid for this book refunded.'

(*) Jeremy Gaige's indispensable Chess Personalia: A Biobibliography has 'Eliahu' Fasher instead. Both 'Eliyahu' and 'Eliahu' are reasonable Hebrew-to-English transliteration of the same Hebrew name (that of the prophet known in the KJV of the Bible as Elijah), but I believe the former is more phonetically accurate. 

Chess and Crime

Adrian Schwartz (extreme right) watching Moshe Czerniak play in the Israeli championship, 1965. Credit: Ad Ha'Ragli Ha'Acharon, by Yochanan Afek and Horacio Volman, p. 71. 

There are two cliches about chess players and crime: one, that they are devious and cunning, and therefore prone to commit complicated crimes nobody can solve. The fictional Sherlock Holmes famously tells Dr. Watson, 'Amberley excelled at chess -- one mark, Watson, of a scheming mind' (in The Adventure of the Retired Colourman). W. H. Wallace, as Edward Winter notes (check 'Chess and the Wallace Murder Case' in Winter's Chess Notes), was viewed with great suspicion for just this reason when his wife was murdered--despite the fact that he was a third-rate player. 

On the other hand, chess players are (for some reason) considered intelligent, so they are sometimes asked (or nominated themselves) to solve real-life murder mysteries. Hence Ray Keene claimed that he had helped solve a murder case using his deductive abilities to make sense of the widely-published clues (a map of some sort, presumably drawn by the perpetrator) in Mycroft Holmes-fashion. Like Sherlock's brother (in, e.g., The Bruce-Partington Plans), he allegedly solved the case sitting in his chair, using no more than his amazing powers of deduction. It should be added that Keene's claims were met with general skepticism. (See Chess Monthly, Nov. 1990, for his account.)

There are, however, exceptions. Sometimes chess players are criminal, and sometimes chess does help solve crimes in interesting ways. The case of Adrian Schwartz illustrates both. Schwartz, a promising young player, was eventually captured and convicted as a serial rapist a few years after this photo was taken. He is in prison to this day. [Update, 2012 -- he was recently released after serving his last sentence of 20 years.] 

Also, as Itzhak bar-Ziv told me, Schwartz, as a young man, went AWOL from the army. The army couldn't locate him for months, but Schwartz saw no reason why being a fugitive should bar him from playing in a tournament he qualified for. [Update, 2012: Avraham Kaldor notes it was an important local tournament, probably the national championship's quarter-final or the Lakser club's championship. Update 2022: it was the testing tournament for the youth chess championship in 1963. See Shachmat, April 1964, p. 9] The army put two and two together, and sent two MPs to nab him as he was playing. They almost did: he evaded them at the last moment after (Kaldor says) giving them both an unexpected shove as they held him and escaping. He remained at large for a few more months.

So, for once, chess did actually help solve a crime, or at least (almost) capture a criminal. 

Fischer and Czerniak

Moshe Cerniak (left) and Robert James "Bobby" Fischer in Natanya, Israel, 1968. From Ad Ha'ragli Ha'acharon, by Yochanan Afek and Horatio Volman, p.  71. 

The late Bobby Fischer was known, at the end of his days, for his paranoid antisemitism, despite the fact that he was -- technically -- Jewish (since he was born to a Jewish mother). It wasn't always that way. In 1968, Fischer had participated in a tournament in Natanya, Israel, where he met all the local players, including Czerniak, as in the photo above.

Many of those I interviewed participated in the event, as players or spectators. Nobody had the least complaint about Fischer's behavior. They all praised him as perfectly correct and fair, both to the players and to the organizers. The one complaint was that he was a loner who did not often participate in post-mortems and, in general, did not mingle with others (he came to play, not to socialize).

But all agreed that this was, of course, his prerogative, and he, at the time preoccupied with achieving the world championship, could hardly be expected to socialize with all those who wished to claim his attention. 

A Scientific Analysis of Chess + An Original Prize

From a humorous article by Prof. Isaac Bernbloom, at the time (1963) the head of the experimental biology department in the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel (originally published in Rehovot, the Institute's journal, reprinted in Sa'chmat, Yarchon Israeli le'Sachmat, year 2 no. 4 [Nov. 1963] p. 18:

'Medically, chess is a relaxant, since it prevents the person from working for hours on end. It is also an antidepressant, since it gives the person an excuse not to feel guilty for their laziness. It is a sport: one can sprain one's wrist when trying to castle in a difficult position.

'A chess player needs imagination, so as to find barely credible excuses for his wife as to why he's late for dinner again. He needs to be daring, in order to find the local chess club in a dangerous neighborhood in a strange city as a tourist. He needs agression, in order to keep kibitzing loudly in the club until someone takes pity on the disturbed players and asks him to play. Finally, he needs patience, in order to fight to the bitter end in a lost position, to his opponent's, and the observers', obvious displeasure.

'Finally, a problem which I composed recently:



'White to play and win. Anybody who sends me the correct solution will win an honorary appointment as the local club's annoying kibitzer.'

How do you Like the New Look?

Well, I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but I finally found some time to mess around with blogger and change the way the blog looks. Among other things, I added a poll (at the end) and a slideshow of chess pictures from flikr. I hope it is easier to read this way.

Chess and Eichmann

 Adolf Eichmann in SS Uniform. Credit: The holocaust research project,  http://tinyurl.com/7zl6jy


From Sa'chmat: Yarchon Israeli le'Shachmat, year 1 no. 2 (July 1962), p. 2:

'The government's legal counselor, Gideon Hausner [also the prosecutor in Adolf Eichmann's trial -- A.P.] said in a press conference that Eichmann, when in prison in Israel, received about 20 chess problems, "all of which, for some reason, ended in stalemate." The mystery was solved by our Argentinean master, Moshe Czerniak: "stalemate" in Spanish is ahogado, meaning "strangled"'.

Czerniak, the World's only Professional Amateur Chess Player

Moshe Czerniak in the Palestinian championship, 1936. Source: Ha'Sachmat, Jan. 1937, p. 28.

In the last post we talked about why Moshe Czerniak seemed so vain to some people. But it was just this that made him so charming to others. Czerniak, to his dying day, was an amateur at heart.

Professional chess players, out of necessity, adopt a severely objective view of their own games. They also conserve their strength by not playing too much with (actual or relative) patzers, except perhaps for pay during simultaneous displays. They usually attempt to keep a draw at hand first--especially as black--and often offer draws when there's still a lot to be done on the board, simply because they judge the position as objectively equal. They play positionally, trying to accumulate small advantages without taking unncessary risks. They play "for the crosstable", giving away draws when it preserves their place in the tournament.

Czerniak would have none of that. He always was sure his attack is brilliant and that he's winning. He would play with anyone at any time. He would always look for a win: his goal was the opponent's king, not "plus over equal" as white and equality as black. He would see a draw offer almost as an insult: not to himself so much, but to chess in general. ('If you are playing for draws--' he told his students, as Moshe Cna'an and Israel Shrentzel told me, '--why do you bother playing chess at all? Don't you like to play chess?') He played tactically, preferring the open, risky games, in search for the beautiful sacrifice and mating attack. He would always try to win, no matter what his place is in the tournament--even when a draw would assure him first place.

In short, Czerniak was an amateur at heart, a man who loved the game for its own sake, especially its exciting attacks and sacrifices, just like a ten-year-old who learned the moves last month. Czerniak kept this innocent love of the game all his life. Unlike the ten-year-old, he knew (of course) how to play for a draw or maximize small positional advantages. But he usually simply refused to do so, preferring the beautiful attack.

Czerniak was that rare type who gained knowledge of chess without losing his innocent love of it.

I am the Greatest!

Source: Ha'Sachmat, Sept. 1936, pp. 6-7. Click to enlarge.

Moshe Czerniak, Israel's "Mr. Chess", caused strong--and opposing--reactions among Israeli players. The majority (esp. the many students of the game he had) saw him not only as a chess legend, but also as a very nice person. Yet, a minority couldn't stand him and considered him a vain, arrogant man.

Why?

It was not inaccessibility: he had not a drop of haughtiness in him and was willing to play chess with anyone, anytime. It was not having a cold or aloof personality: he was a natural extrovert, an extremely friendly and charming man who made friends easily (unlike Yosef Porat, whom everybody respected as a perfect gentlemen and had not an enemy in the world, but few were close to.) It was not under-appreciation of his opponents: his writings are full of praise for them, even--perhaps especially--in games played against himself. It was not an attempt to portray himself as unbeatable: he published, as an editor, games he lost, including a loss to Sonja Graf (64 Mishbatzot [64 Squares], No. 5-6 (June-July) 1956, p. 99). For a professional player of Czerniak's generation, admitting in print he lost to a woman--even if she was the strongest, or second strongest (after Vera Menchik) female player in the world--was quite a brave act. What's more, he had no reason to think his readers in Israel would encounter the rather obscure game (Czerniak-Graf, Mar de Plata, 1942) unless he "confessed" it.

The problem was his annotations. Czerniak was quite objective about other people's games. But, as Moshe Cna'an (one of his students) told me, when he annotated his own games, all objectivity went out the window. His own games are full of excalmation marks and long annotations--both for himself and his opponent--while other games, including those by world champions, are given far less attention. Every game of his is a clash of chess titans, in which he defeats his powerful opponent with even more powerful brilliance.

I am exagerrating, but not by much, as checking his numerous published games shows. In the above photograph we see a wholly typical example. In game #3 (Abram Blass - Meir Rauch, 1-0), the winner gets two '!' & one '!!' (marked with a red dot) while the loser only gets one '?'. There are five text annotations. But in game #4 (Moshe Czerniak - Abram Blass, 1-0) the winner gets four '!' and one '!!' (marked with a green dot) and the loser another '!' (no '?'). There are 18 text annotations--one of the reasons the game takes up nearly three times as much space despite only being a few moves longer (40 vs. 31).

Other players--Howard Staunton, Alexander Alekhine, and Jose-Raul Capablanca, to name a few--were also accused (rightly or wrongly) by some of puffing themselves up with self-praise, and, in Stauton's case in particular, of praising their opponents only to make themselves look good. (See Edward Winter's amazing "chess notes", now online at www.chesshistory.com , and search for "anti-Stuanton"). Without claiming these accusations are necessarily true (I tend to agree with Winter's claim that describing the masters of the past as "crazy", "incredibly arrogant", "narcissistic", etc. is simply libel), there is no doubt that Capablanca, Alekhine, and Stuanton did think of themselves as the best players in the world. They were just that in their day, of course, so their views were certainly not "narcissistic" or "delusions of grandeur"; but nevertheless believing this about themselves was bound to be seen by some as bragging.

But Czerniak's case is that his self-praise was not like that at all. As noted above, apart from being personally a very nice man, he never considered himself unbeatable or superior to his opponents (let alone the best player in the world). He simply suffered from the common amateur malady of always thinking he's winning and that his moves are the best on the board. (As Cna'an, Shrenzel, and Yochanan Afek--to name a few of his "boys"--told me.) A natural extrovert, he saw no reason to hide his beliefs in print. Is it his fault, after all, that he plays well?!

Mystery Tournament

An Israel-made chess clock, ca. 1950. Photo Credit: Avital Pilpel, from an e-bay advertisement.

From Yosef Porat, Oman ha'Sachmat ["Yosef Porat, the Chess Master"] by Eliyahu Fasher and Yosef Porat, p. 29:

'A year later [in 1936-A.P.] the first championship of Palestine took place... it is true that, as the editor of La'Merchav's Chess column noted in 1956, he tried to get details about the tournament that took place in "Sheleg ha'Levanon" coffee house in 1929. But despite the fact that some of the contestants were still alive, neither the crosstable nor a single game score were found. Moves weren't written down and no chess clocks were used (they used hand watches)'.

Presumably, 'pressing the clock' meant pulling out the crown of one's watch and pushing in the opponent's. Not convenient in a time scramble! As no moves were recorded, the games were probably played with a "sudden death" time control (game in so many minutes), as there was no way to determine when the time control was reached.

My research found no record of this tournament anywhere except for Fasher's book (and La'Merchav original article). This is because, unfortunately, it took place in a vacuum: after the folding of the (short-lived) Emanuel Lasker chess club magazine in the mid-1920s, and before any chess columns began to appear in the early 1930s.

Can any reader enlighten us about it?