| Aug-03-04 | | tldr3: Bryon Nickoloff passed away today. Canada has lost one of it's outstanding players. There are many more of Bryon's games on chessbase.com check them out. One of my favorites was from the North Bay International... Shirov-Nickoloff 1/2-1/2 annotated by Bryon in En Passant around '94 or '95. Rest in Peace |
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| Aug-03-04 | | Lawrence: <tldr3>, can you or <Lawrence Day> give us any biography on Bryon Nickoloff? |
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| Aug-03-04 | | tldr3: Lawrence if you look on Bryons page, someone has written something. I think that IM L. Day should have some good stories. |
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Aug-03-04
 | | IMlday: Bryon's first tournament, as a little kid, was the 1971 CNE Open in Toronto.
During the 1972 Spassky-Fischer match he fell in love with chess and stopped going to school. Truancy officers eventually arrested him. When he was let out of 'reform school' the Judge told him to stay away from the chess club. How different from a country that supports prodigies, he later reflected.
By 1978 he was qualified by rating to the Canadian Closed and Olympic Team for Buenos Aires. He fell in love with a Mexican Woman's Team member and moved to Mexico for a couple of years where, as a foreigner, he got lots of futurity invitations and picked up 3 IM norms in a row. He had a narrow but deeply prepared opening repertoire.
We shared rooms at many tournaments,
including 86, 94 and 98 Olympiads; quite the adventure for me since I believe in the get 8-hours sleep school, while he felt the 'party all night' was just as effective. I lived conservatively and took risks on the board; he was very safe and defensive at the board but lived life 'on the edge', full of risk. Nevertheless, we were good friends and great rivals of approximately equal strength in the 1977-1999 period. Then he got seriously sick. He considered his best game was the Shirov chaos draw. Also that his peak strength was the Boston 1988 US Open where he was better or equal against several established GM's.
His final tournament was the 2004 Canadian Open at Kapuskasing where he had a solid IM result. We were thinking of sharing a room at the Guelph Pro-Am but fate had other ideas.Something brilliant and determined, yet wild and untamed, has gone from Canadian chess with his passing.
It is a sad moment, condolences to the family. |
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Aug-03-04
| | IMlday: Bryon's first tournament, as a little kid, was the 1971 CNE Open in Toronto.
During the 1972 Spassky-Fischer match he fell in love with chess and stopped going to school. Truancy officers eventually arrested him. When he was let out of 'reform school' the Judge told him to stay away from the chess club. How different from a country that supports prodigies, he later reflected.
By 1978 he was qualified by rating to the Canadian Closed and Olympic Team for Buenos Aires. He fell in love with a Mexican Woman's Team member and moved to Mexico for a couple of years where, as a foreigner, he got lots of futurity invitations and picked up 3 IM norms in a row. He had a narrow but deeply prepared opening repertoire.
We shared rooms at many tournaments,
including 86, 94 and 98 Olympiads; quite the adventure for me since I believe in the get 8-hours sleep school, while he felt the 'party all night' was just as effective. I lived conservatively and took risks on the board; he was very safe and defensive at the board but lived life 'on the edge', full of risk. Nevertheless, we were good friends and great rivals of approximately equal strength in the 1977-1999 period. Then he got seriously sick. He considered his best game was the Shirov chaos draw. Also that his peak strength was the Boston 1988 US Open where he was better or equal against several established GM's.
His final tournament was the 2004 Canadian Open at Kapuskasing where he had a solid IM result. We were thinking of sharing a room at the Guelph Pro-Am but fate had other ideas.Something brilliant and determined, yet wild and untamed, has gone from Canadian chess with his passing.
It is a sad moment, condolences to the family. |
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Jan-09-05
| | IMlday: It looks like a typo--The final move of this Nickoloff-Benjamin game must have been 43.Kxe4! winning easily. After 43.Nxe4? Black would play on for sure, with good drawing chances. |
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| Jan-10-05 | | Clubfoot: "Wild and untamed" is exactly what Bryon Nickoloff was to those who were lucky enough to make his acquaintance. He was the Stiv Bators of chess. I met him a handful of times and drank with him once or twice, which wasn't so easy on the old Botvinnik system, if you get what I mean. His chess vision was pure and intractable, and it is a great pity that his balls-out lifestyle approach may have prevented him from reaching GM heights beyond any Canadian before him. Nickoloff had a terrifying on-board intensity but was a thoughtful and engaging sort away from the board. Once in the midst of a sodden Toronto bar-hop in the mid-90's he told me what he searched for when he worked on his chess: "Truths" he said, and that was that. My favorite games are his fire-breathing scalp of GM Norwood with the Black pieces in '89 and the operatic 14-move combination against Friedman in '98, also playing Black. It was a beautiful tribute to Nickoloff on this page from IM Day. |
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| Jan-10-05 | | jdb22601: in that nickoloff-benjamin game it seems black blew it cuz after kf2 nh4+! kg3 rg5 f3 nxf3! black should win this position |
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| Jan-10-05 | | Shams: <Clubfoot> I don`t see that Friedman-Nickoloff game in the chessgames db. You have a link? |
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| Jan-10-05 | | Clubfoot: Friedman-Nickoloff is on Chessbase, but here's the copied PGN for now: [Event "Toronto op"]
[Site "Toronto"]
[Date "1998.05.14"]
[Round "2"]
[White "Friedman,Aviv"]
[Black "Nickoloff,Bryon"]
[Result "0-1"]
1.Nf3 d5 2.c4 e6 3.d4 Nf6 4.Nc3 Bb4 5.Bg5 dxc4 6.e4 c5 7.Bxc4 cxd4 8.Nxd4 Bxc3+ 9.bxc3 Qa5 10.Bb5+ Bd7 11.Bxf6 gxf6 12.Qb3 a6 13.Be2 Nc6 14.0-0 Qc7 15.Qa3 Rc8 16.Rad1 Na5 17.Qc1 e5 18.Nf5 Bxf5 19.exf5 Qxc3 20.Qh6 Ke7 21.Bh5 Qc4 22.Rc1 Qa4 23.Qg7 Qxa2 24.Ra1 Qc4 25.Rxa5 Rcg8 26.Qh6 Rxg2+ 27.Kxg2 Rg8+ 28.Bg6 Qg4+ 29.Kh1 Qf3+ 30.Kg1 hxg6 31.Re1 gxf5+ 32.Kf1 Qd3+
33.Re2 Qd1+ 34.Re1 Rg1+ 35.Kxg1 Qxe1+ 36.Kg2 Qxa5 37.h4 Qd5+ 38.f3 e4 39.h5 Qd3 40.fxe4 fxe4 41.Qc1 Qf3+ 42.Kg1 Qxh5 0-1 Enjoy... |
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Jan-10-05
| | IMlday: Aha! I shall apprehend this Friedman-Nickoloff 14-move combo game for the upcoming book "Nickoloff's Selected Games". He went to great lengths to keep his games with black out of circulation
for tournament preparation purposes.
Thanks clubfoot! :-)
<jdb22601> There seems to be a White pawn consistently on f2, so without move numbers it is impossible to tell what you are talking about. Hard to believe that a king-masher like GM Joel Benjamin would miss an obvious thrust, if it existed.Nick's truths about chess:
(a) with best play the starting position is a draw. The Ruy Lopez (best play) should be a draw.
(b) White's best first move is 1.d4 (after his 10 years tanking over it) (c) the KID and Dutch are unsound; Nimzo, QID and QGD are all playable (drawn). Scheveningen equalizes. Old Indian is unclear. |
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| Jan-10-05 | | euripides: <jdb, lmd> the line suggested is presumably 41...Nh4+ 42 Kg3 Rg5 43 f3 Nxf3. If 43 Kxh4 then 43....R4xg4+ or R5xg4. However, White has 43 f4 ! when I think he wins. |
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Feb-20-05
| | IMlday: Looks like 41.Kf3 was ?? since Nh4 42.Kg3 Rg5 43.f4 Rg6 44.Kxh4 Rxf4 45.Rg1 f5 is better for Black, probably winning. 41.Kg5! won easily enough for White. It's easy to blunder on move 41. After the tension of the time scramble ends at 40 there is a relaxation of concentration, or an impulse to make 'just one more move' before having a coffee, ciggy or or washroom break. Or perhaps it was a time scramble and the players didn't know they'd passed control? Anyway, Benjamin also misses his hidden resource! |
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Apr-22-07
 | | Phony Benoni: According to the tournament bulletin, White's last move was indeed 43.Kxe4; I have sent in a correction. Otherwise, the score given here agrees with that in the bulletin, which I hope is correct--I was one of the editors. The first time control ended at move 50, so the players were probably in time pressure during the final sequence. My own Nickoloff story from this tournament concerns the "Hospitality Suite", which was an open bar in one of the organizer's hotel rooms where titled players could congregate after the game to celebrate. One night, Nickoloff apparently got hospitable a little bit too early; he came to the board, made a couple of moves, and fell fast asleep. His opponent was all in favor of the nap continuing; unfortunately, Nickoloff was emitting hideous snoring noises. A couple of TDs gently dragged him outside the playing room and woke him up, whereupon he proceeded to win a 7-hour game with a delicate N+P ending. |
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Kibitzing
sac: 34.Rxf6