Richard Taylor: Yudovich senior was the co-editor with A.Kotov of 'The Soviet School of Chess', Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1958. My father and I learnt chess together, I think I was about 10 or 11 when I was reading Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. It fascinated me, and the part where the Red Queen races across the large board, illustrated in the book by Tenniel (owned I think by my grandmother who was from England),
When my father came home from work one day -- he used to come past where I would read books for hours, reading my way through e.g. most of the novels of Dickens, Sherlock Holmes, and many other books as time went on...I asked him: "What is chess?" He didn't know. Then he came home with a book of the rules and we learned it. From there he got a lot of books, including Capablanca's games, Tal's games, the Petrosians,Rubinstein's, and other books, say of the openings and tactics. I learnt a lot from a basic book of forks and pins etc as well as Capablanca's 'Chess Fundamentals'. I think learning chess and that fascination with the characters in books and at clubs etc was the best time. There were not many people playing (compared to other activities such as soccer rugby cricket etc or even Bridge I suppose). Ortvin Sarapu was then the NZ Champion. We went to various tournaments.
Overall, as time went on I realised that I wasn't really very talented at chess...I had the odd moment. I stopped playing after (more or less) I saw that Fischer at 14 or so had become US Champion. I lost almost all interest. I returned to the game when I was 30 in 1978. Then played later again more seriously than between about 1982 to 2004 when I broke my leg and decided to play chess, I had bought a computer and was selling books on line and playing bullet.
I think thought that the early days when we were learning and even the pieces fascinated me, and in NZ it was a rather unpopular activity, and we had our own rating, it was better. Tournament games were 40 moves tor 2 and 1/2 hours. There were adjournments, there were far fewer niggling rules. One of NZ's best players of that time, Rodney Phillips, used to make his move, then pace around. Once at Cambridge (NZ) we were playing at a school and he would move then pace around a field. He still managed to win the tourney I think.
Anyway, those were the good old days...
Kibitzing
