From Berkshire Hathaway's 1999 Letter to Shareholders, in anticipation of the annual meeting:

"Patrick Wolff, twice US chess champion, will again be in the mall playing blindfolded against all comers. He tells me that he has never tried to play more than four games simultaneously while handicapped this way but might try to bump that limit to five or six this year. If you're a chess fan, take Patrick on -- but be sure to check his blindfold before your first move...."

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/19...

Mr. Wolff is also mentioned in the 2000, 2001, 2003, and 2004 annual reports, in a similar capacity.

From the 2004 letter:

"In a tent outside of Borsheim’s, Patrick Wolff, twice U.S. chess champion, will take on all comers in groups of six – blindfolded. Additionally, we will have Bob Hamman and Sharon Osberg, two of the world’s top bridge experts, available to play with our shareholders on Sunday afternoon. They plan to keep their eyes open – but Bob never sorts his cards, even when playing for a national championship...."

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/20...

Mr. Buffett and his friend Bill Gates are both Bridge enthusiasts.

I actually owe a certain debt of gratitude to Warren Buffett and (perhaps an even greater debt of gratitude to his teacher) Benjamin Graham. By studying the "value investing" theories of these men many years ago, along with a number of other theorists, I was able to develop a system of ethical investing that has served me very well.

If you read the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters, you'll find some of the clearest, common sense writing on investing that is available anywhere, in my humble opinion! As for Benjamin Graham, his book "The Intelligent Investor" is probably the best place to start. Graham's "Securities Analysis" is the book for professionals.

(: ♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗ :)
http://www.bbbbbb.org/

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/le...

The annual reports are equally worthwhile:

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/an...

In my own investment career, I have often noticed parallels between investing and Chess. But as I think about it, I've noticed parallels between Chess and a great many things one experiences in life!

(: ♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗ :)

P.S. Comparing the market performance of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) and Walmart (WMT) to the performance of the S&P 500 ("_GSPC", the usual benchmark for professional investors) is certainly interesting:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&...

But note how the graph changes when Microsoft is thrown into the mix:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&...

I have to agree that Mr. Buffett has demonstrated his remarkable intelligence time and time again. His warning about trade deficits and also about "derivatives" ("financial weapons of mass destruction", pages 13-16: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/20... ) and the careless rules governing them would be good to heed.

Though not a Chessplayer (to my knowledge), Warren Buffett is widely known to be quite passionate about his favorite game: Bridge.

As I understand it, Dr. Emanuel Lasker also became a passionate Bridge-player later in life.

All rather interesting.

(: ♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗ :)

"We're going to have something in the way of a major nuclear event in this country [the U.S.] It will happen. Whether it will happen in 10 years or 10 minutes, or 50 years ... it's virtually a certainty."

The following from Slate, June 18, 2002 ( http://slate.msn.com/?id=2067112 )

Warren Buffett, who's made his billions guessing the future of the market, is offering a much scarier kind of forecast these days. The "Oracle of Omaha" has been using recent public appearances to predict new terrorist attacks on the United States. At Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting in May [2002], typically a confab of cone-head value investors terrorized by lofty price-to-earnings ratios, Buffett declared that detonation of a nuclear device in an American city—"$1 trillion nuclear event" in Manhattan, for example—was inevitable. "We're going to have something in the way of a major nuclear event in this country. It will happen. Whether it will happen in 10 years or 10 minutes, or 50 years ... it's virtually a certainty."

===

Of course, Mr. Buffett is not only considering this as a concerned citizen, but as a major player in the "super-catastrophe" or "super-cat" insurance industry. (Companies like Buffett's "General Re" provide insurance for insurers -- insurance against truly enormous catastrophes.)

Let's hope Mr. Buffett is wrong on this one.

♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗

http://www.wolffchess.com/

Actually, quite a few homepages of noted Grandmasters are listed at my own Phantasmagorical Chess site. Simply scroll down in the rightmost "toolbar" window to the "Grandmaster Websites & Homepages" section to see them:

http://www.bbbbbb.org/

(: ♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗ :)