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For trivia buffs: I think Carlsen in 2011 became the first player in history to withdraw from the same championship cycle twice. …

Fischer wanted a return to earlier days in chess. Capa-Alekhine was an unlimited match to six wins. In some 19th century events, the rule was if the game was drawn, reset the pieces and play another. …

Well, let's take Random House off the table right away, as RHM Press was a division of RHM Associates of Delaware, Inc. which lists Sydney Fried as Publisher. The California Secretary of State system …

At one point it might have been provable (given a little different history Morphy might have survived to play Lasker, or at least Steinitz) but that train has left the station. …

One word answer: Money. 1) Tournaments cost a lot of money to organize. At the top end, with, say, less than a dozen players, the organizers are expected to pay for the player's expenses. That's a lo …

The Ratings of Chessplayers Past And Present by Arpad Elo tackles that question. It can be done, Elo does a little of it (before harping about his methodolgy, though, remember when he wrote that he ha …

If you're going to let chess players improve (substituting Carlsen of today for Kasparov of two decades ago) before this theoretical match, you'll have to let the computer's hardware and software impr …

If you don't mind approximate dates, 3-piece computer tablebase was solved in the 70's, 4-piece in the 80's and 5-piece in the late 80's. 6-piece took, I believe, until around 2005. 7-piece has been r …

Capablanca advocated for a 10x10 chess board. He was concerned that chess was getting played out, that there were far too many draws, so his response to that problem was to create two new pieces and p …

The King's Gambit has been "refuted" at several points in the past. Most have later been proven incorrect, IIRC only two lines at this point seem suspect. But that's not the point. The point is: how m …

The biggest obstacle to a project like this is players in any given time period are rated relative to the other players of that time period. This leads to two distortions of the mathematics that are n …

Algebra is more than simply a branch of mathematics. The central element of it is using symbols as abstractions, the way the notation uses letters and numbers to represent the squares, as opposed to …

One was independent of history, the other was not. … cynical view was that players would buy a book from the USCF and play in a tournament, their rating would go up, encouraging them to buy another book, etc.) and inflation was a real thing at some points in history …

While the 1974 match with Karpov was the last straw, it had been building for a decade or more. Korchnoi was never one to just blithely do what he was told, and he felt that Petrosian, especially, was …

"Substantial' is a subjective term, but if you like Informant-style annotations the Chess Stars' book (Volume 2 of the three volume set of Alekhine's games, ISBN 9548782235) has some detailed analyses …