"June 8. For religious reasons, the eleventh round is scheduled for the ungodly hour of 10 a.m. Despite my written appeal, I am informed in classic bureaucratese that no exceptions can be made. Yet all sorts of exceptions have always been made for Reshevsky, one of whose opponents, Tatai, refuses to cooperate with some weird scheduling, convinced that Sammy is trying to give him a hard time. (Some chess masters venerate Morpheus more than Jehovah.)

My friendly antagonist, Czerniak, has played for the Palestine team in the Olympiad of 1935 in his native Poland. He is a rotund old fighter of massive sitzfleisch who has played the longest game on record - a twenty-hour, 191-move draw with Pilnik at Mar del Plata in 1943. The leading promoter of chess in Israel, he is still tough at 63, but I certainly expect to beat him as I have once before. What's more, I must.

Knowing he has faced the Sicilian a thousand times, I choose the modernistic defence known by the Yugoslavs as the Pirc, by the Russians as the Ufimtsev, and by Western Europeans as the Robatsch. On move 11, I think for a half-hour and plunge into tactical complications for strategic purposes - to destroy his pawn center. Shortly, I have two alternatives, and in my morning haze I choose the wrong one! Soon I find myself in an ending a pawn down, theoretically lost. But do I have to compound matters by losing a knight with my worst blunder of the year? I give up the ghost.

At 30 ply SF slightly prefers the straightforward 13.ef Rxe3 14.fg hg 15.f5 but thinks Czerniak's move is strong too.

Saidy's "wrong choice" presumably refers to 15...h6 allowing Nxf7 and Black is busted. SF's strong preference is to give up the exchange with 16....Rxe4 17.Nxe4 de 18.fg, but Black is worse in that case too. Capturing with the pawn at move 15 loses to Qb3.