Edward Winter
Bobby Fischer
We reproduce two C.N. items from 1989 concerning the publication Boys’ Life, which, in the second half of the 1960s, carried a chess column by Bobby Fischer. Firstly, C.N. 1816, on pages 10-17 of the January-February 1989 issue of Chess Notes:
A further item (C.N. 1893) was published on page 79 of the May-June 1989 issue of our magazine:
By way of illustration, below is a complete column from Boys’
Life (June 1968, page 22):
Luc Winants (Boirs, Belgium) informs us that virtually the complete run of the Fischer articles can now be consulted via Google Books. Our correspondent has assembled the relevant links on a webpage of the Fédération Echiquéenne Francophone de Belgique.
Update on 26 December 2016: the link no longer works.
Monaco, 1967 (Chess Life, June 1967, page 146)
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Dan Scoones (Port Coquitlam, BC, Canada) writes:
‘In your feature article on Fischer’s column in Boys’ Life, two obscure Soviet games are cited, Cherskikh-Cherepkov and Lipman-Zolotonos, and I have looked up the original sources, on page 342 of the 11/1965 issue of Shakhmatny Bulletin and on page 10 of the 4/1969 issue of Shakhmaty Riga.
Cherskikh-Cherepkov (Boys’ Life, June 1967) was played in the semi-final of the 1965 Trade Union Championship. I believe that the venue was Moscow but have not been able to confirm this.
K. Cherskikh (whose forename may have been Konstantin) finished near the bottom in the 35th USSR Championship at Kharkov in 1967, the large Swiss event won by Tal and Polugayevsky. In 1965 Alexander Cherepkov was already a well-known master, and the “sic” with reference to his surname is not required.
Lipman-Zolotonos (Boys’ Life, August 1969) was played in the 1968 DSO Team Championship in Riga. This event is incorrectly cited by a ChessBase database as the USSR Team Championship, but it is given correctly by RusBase. Vladimir Lipman was born in the Soviet Union in 1949 but seems to have emigrated to the United States sometime before 2002. His opponent, Leonid Zolotonos, is an obscure figure, and there are no games of his after 1973 in the standard databases. Despite the obscurity of the players, it is natural that Fischer would be interested in the game because it featured his own pet variation against the Sicilian Najdorf.’
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The full text of Fischer’s columns in Boys’ Life has been published in book form: Checkmate by Bobby Fischer (Milford, 2016).
See too: Articles about Bobby Fischer.
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Copyright: Edward Winter. All rights reserved.
