My Degrees

Mathematicians have been known to note a certain type of relationship, their Erdös numbers and for movie stars there are degrees of Kevin Bacon. We may define a similar number for chess players – the number of steps we need to go through to find a player who played us who played somebody (or chain of somebodies) who played the target. My Bobby Fisher number is two, as is my Alexander Alekhine number, since I have played chess players who played each of them. Via Fisher and Alekhine and a few others, I have second or third degree connections with most of the other twentieth century World Chess Champions.

This, of course, doesn’t make me any less of a fish = weakie chess player.

While playing in some kind of (bridge?) tournament when I was in the Army, I met another soldier who played chess, and we decided to form a chess team. He turned out to be a very strong player (a former national junior champion), and was acquainted with our mutual contemporary, Fisher. I think that they had been to some international junior tournaments together. He used to say “I beat Bobby Fisher once” – pausing before adding – “at miniature golf.” He was my link to Fisher.

Since he was a psychologist, I often discussed Fisher’s pathology (already evident in those nine or ten years pre-world championship) with him.

Reading about Fisher lately, I thought back on him and decided to look him up on the internet. It turned out that he had been a psychology professor for some thirty years, so I suspect he might have had more to add to the story – unfortunately, the source in which I encountered that information turned out to be his obituary. Like Fisher, and an increasing number of my contemporaries, he has passed beyond this particular vale.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

Uneasy Lies The Head

Book Review: Anaximander By Carlo Rovelli