The latest chess article from the FT in its "How To Spend It" weekend section is entitled "Aarti and Sohum Lohia are changing chess, one move at a time". They're not really changing chess, but it's still interesting to see how Sohum, the talented #2 junior player in the UK, expresses his views on chess and a description of his mother's crusading support of it.
The article touches on some modern scientific points about chess and its calming effect on the mind, as well as the nature of it as a mental sport. Unfortunately it also help perpetuate some of the typical fallacies of chess imagery in popular culture - the first photo in the article shows a somewhat abstract chess board set up properly, while the following ones, showing an antique set, have the board rotated 90 degrees from where it should be (with wrong color squares for the pieces). This includes shots of Sohum playing on it. I expect that was just for show for the journalist (understandable) and perhaps he didn't notice - but then again, especially strong players should really be aware of these things when sitting down at a chessboard.
Personally, I find nearly all articles about chess in non-specialist publications are lacking in accuracy about the game itself, and rarely reveal much of importance of the "chess aspects" of whatever is being written about, be it players or organisations or anything else.
ReplyDeleteI read a review of a recent film called "Intermezzo" which apparently has chess as a key point of the plot ( in relation to a character ) and was surprised to find that "intermezzo" was described as a common chess term.
It was being used to describe an "in-between move", which I thought is most commonly referred to as "zwischenzug". Maybe intermezzo is common in Italy, but hardly elsewhere.