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Phony Benoni
Member since Feb-10-06 · Last seen Jun-11-22
Greetings, O Seeker After Knowledge! You have arrived in Dearborn, Michigan (whether you like it or not), and are reading words of wisdom from a player rated 2938--plus or minus 1000 points.

However, I've retired from serious play--not that I ever took playing chess all that seriously. You only have to look at my games to see that. These days I pursue the simple pleasures of finding games that are bizarre or just plain funny. I'd rather enjoy a game than analyze it.

For the record, my name is David Moody. This probably means nothing to you unless you're a longtime player from Michigan, though it's possible that if you attended any US Opens from 1975-1999 we might have crossed paths. Lucky you.

If you know me at all, you'll realize that most of my remarks are meant to be humorous. I do this deliberately, so that if my analysis stinks to High Heaven I can always say that I was just joking.

As you can undoubtedly tell from my sparkling wit, I'm a librarian in my spare time. Even worse, I'm a cataloger, which means I keep log books for cattle. Also, I'm not one of those extroverts who sit at the Reference Desk and help you with research. Instead, I spend all day staring at a computer screen updating and maintaining information in the library's catalog. The general public thinks Reference Librarians are dull. Reference Librarians think Catalogers are dull.

My greatest achievement in chess, other than tricking you into reading this, was probably mating with king, bishop and knight against king in a tournament game. I have to admit that this happened after an adjournment, and that I booked up like crazy before resuming. By the way, the fact I have had adjourned games shows you I've been around too long.

My funniest moment occurred when I finally got a chance to pull off a smothered mate in actual play. You know, 1.Nf7+ Kg8 2.Nh6+ Kh8 3.Qg8+ Rxg8 4.Nf7#. When I played the climactic queen check my opponent looked at the board in shocked disbelief and said, "But that's not mate! I can take the queen!"

Finally, I must confess that I once played a positional move, back around 1982. I'll try not to let that happen again.

>> Click here to see Phony Benoni's game collections.

Chessgames.com Full Member

   Phony Benoni has kibitzed 18634 times to chessgames   [more...]
   Jun-11-22 M Blau vs Keres, 1959 (replies)
 
Phony Benoni: Not a good recommendation for the DERLD. Out of 59 moves, White makes only three in Black's half of the board. And two of those conist of 3.Bb5 and 6.Bxc6.
 
   Jun-11-22 chessgames.com chessforum (replies)
 
Phony Benoni: Er, it's back. Karpov vs Timman, 1988
 
   Jun-10-22 Orlo Milo Rolo
 
Phony Benoni: Marco!
 
   Jun-10-22 Lilienthal vs Bondarevsky, 1947
 
Phony Benoni: Another one for you King Hunters. Black's monarch travels fron g8 to b8, then takes the Great Circle Route back to h3 before calling it a day.
 
   Jun-10-22 GrahamClayton chessforum (replies)
 
Phony Benoni: <GrahamClayton> I've posted a question for you at L T Magee vs J Holland, 1948
 
   Jun-10-22 L T Magee vs E L Holland, 1948 (replies)
 
Phony Benoni: <GrahamClayton> The source you cite, <Chess Review, May 1948, p. 24>, gives Black's name as <E Holland> "Chess Life" (June 5, 1948, p. 1) has a table of results giving <E L Holland>. That form also appears in USCF rating supplements for a player fro ...
 
   Jun-09-22 Biographer Bistro (replies)
 
Phony Benoni: SkinnVer Here Among the Fold?
 
   Jun-09-22 Flohr vs Bondarevsky, 1947 (replies)
 
Phony Benoni: Black's bishop makes me think of Godzilla emerging from the depths of the ocean to wreak havoc. However, in the end it's his Two Little Friends who steal the show. Well, maybe not so litt.
 
   Jun-06-22 W Ritson-Morry vs G T Crown, 1947
 
Phony Benoni: it was the last round. Rison-Morry was mired in last place. These things happen.
 
   Jun-06-22 W Adams vs M Kagan, 1947
 
Phony Benoni: Some more informztion. The game was published in <Chess Review>, March 1948, p. 23. Black's name is given as "M Kagan", and the location as "Massachusetts". There is no other game data, but I think we can now safely assume Black is <Milton Kagan>. Earlier in the ...
 
(replies) indicates a reply to the comment.

Living in the Past

Kibitzer's Corner
< Earlier Kibitzing  · PAGE 449 OF 914 ·  Later Kibitzing>
Dec-07-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  jessicafischerqueen: Aha quite right, thank you. It's resubmitted. You'd even listed <Petrograd> in your introduction.
Dec-07-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  OhioChessFan: < A Santa Claus who disparaged a 3-year-old’s red plaid jacket and his favorite hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, was fired for his inappropriate comments, the Toronto Sun reported. >

http://aol.sportingnews.com/nhl/sto...

Dec-08-12  Blunderdome: So, here's something I didn't know about:

Game Collection: Game of the Day Pun Index (A-C)

Good thing we have ultra-dull catalogers! Seriously, I'm impressed by all the work. You add a lot of value to this site. It's great to be able to review GOTDs, POTDs, etc.

Dec-09-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  Phony Benoni: When asked to pick his Greatest Day in Baseball, this was the game Hall of Fame first-baseman George Sisler chose:

http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/...

Dec-09-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  OhioChessFan: Won a game against Walter Johnson. Couple of interesting points for me. Johnson batted 6th? And Lavan had 61 errors before September?
Dec-09-12  Jim Bartle: Did Sisler come up as a pitcher and get switched later?
Dec-09-12  playground player: <Ohio Chess Fan> 1915 was Sisler's rookie year. He was 4-4 as a pitcher, and didn't do a lot of pitching after that. For obvious reasons.
Dec-09-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  Phony Benoni: <OCF> Lavan wasn't that unusual (he wound up with 75 errors). For some reason, infielders in the Dead Ball Era made a lot of errors. Maybe the infields weren't manicured. Maybe the scorers were rougher on the fielders in those days. Whatever the reason, it helped to keep ERAs and batting averages down.

In 2012, the top number of errors for a shortstop was 27. Now, look at Honus Wagner, generally considered a great shortstop of the Dead Ball Era:

http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/...

If you scroll down to the fielding numbers, you see what would be an incredible and unacceptable amount of errors today. Over a 162 game season, Wagner would average nearly 60 errors a year.

It was a different time.

Dec-09-12  playground player: <Phony Benoni> In defense of ancient infielders like Honus Wagner, remember that the fielders' gloves were small and terribly inadequate by today's standards, and the infields themselves were nowheres near up to today's standards--they were rough terrain.

I've heard Ralph Kiner reminisce about just how good a fielder Wagner was, even as an old man.

Having played on some pretty awful ballfields myself, I know how easy it is to make an error when you can't predict what the ball is going to do as it rockets toward you.

Dec-09-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  Phony Benoni: <Blunderdome> Didn't mean to neglect thanking you. It's just that sometimes I get so busy that I forget to react like a human being.
Dec-09-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  jessicafischerqueen: Thank for those USSR Championships metacollections- the "Player Index" is brilliant and an enormous aid to my research for documentaries.

I have a question: I looked at this and I can't figure out if the missing games have been added?

Game Collection: USSR Championship 1937

<USSR Championship 1937
Compiled by suenteus po 147

Under Construction; 90 games submitted to the database via email on 7/15/09.>

Dec-09-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  jessicafischerqueen: Same thing for these two:

Game Collection: USSR Championship 1939

Game Collection: USSR Championship 1940

Will you tell me if the missing games have indeed been added to all three collections?

Also, has anyone heard from <Peter> lately?

Dec-09-12  Jim Bartle: Wow, Stafford really can block, like a fullback. Now he needs to hold on to the ball. No more Christmas presents.

It was pretty funny watching that 300-lb. lineman trying to do the Lambeau Leap. He needed help.

Dec-09-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  jessicafischerqueen: Right, I killed <USSR Championship 1940>, nice catch there.

It strikes me that it wouldn't take very long to just reconstruct the tournament, add in the missing game and an introduction, and then re-nominate it?

Obviously Peter would be credited with the original collection.

I hope the rest of Peter's nominated collections are as finished as Peter himself judged them to be.

Dec-09-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  jessicafischerqueen: Forum intro looks like this now:

User: USSR Championships

Dec-09-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  jessicafischerqueen: Kemeri (1937) introduction.

If you see any opportunities for improvement, be sure to let me know.

Dec-10-12  DummyPawn: I noticed a typo in the pun index: <Luke Tiewalter> is listed, when it should be <Luke Tiewalker>.
Dec-10-12  crawfb5: Those name corrections have been processed and even the leaderboard for New York Masters (1911) is updated, so maybe it <does> automatically reflect corrections. Thanks again for catching those.
Dec-10-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  Phony Benoni: <DummyPawn>. Thanks. Correction made.
Dec-11-12  nescio: David, It seems I have been away too long, for I had no idea what was going on here. However, I read your collections (Historical tournaments 1-4) and I think I understand now.

I see that Peter (whose username I always remembered as suetonius, but is a bit different) has started collections on the Hoogovens tournaments in Beverwijk. I wonder if he already submitted the games, for I can easily find them and submit them. I think they are complete from 1950 onwards, but from the 1940s there are many games missing, in fact probably lost.

PS. A few days ago I did a correction on the result of the game Robatsch-Donner, Havana 1965 and I see that this correction has already been implemented. I hope and trust that such corrections do not interfere with the project.

PPS. The introductions to your game collections seem to have a life of their own and are making it rather time-consuming to search for a specific collection, especially if the title begins with a letter in the latter half of the alphabet.

PPPS. If you feel like responding to this message yoy can of course do so here, but also at User: jww if you do not mind that i delete it after a while because it has nothing to do with the purpose of that forum.

Dec-11-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  jessicafischerqueen: <Phony Benoni> I'd like to be more specific about my recent apology to you. I'm sorry I messed up the country codes on the USSR Collections.

I've been going much too quickly in all editing actions, not checking closely enough, and also not waiting for answers to important questions such as country codes.

I should have waited for you to answer my question about the USSR Championships before deciding to put (RUS) in all of them. Now I have made a big clean up mess that I could have avoided just by slowing down long enough for you to answer my question about this.

So yes I'm sorry, but more concretely I will slow down on everything. If I have a question to you or another senior editor, I'll wait for the answer. If I disagree with the answer, then we'll have a discussion and reach a consensus before I act. If I see a collection nomination, I'll take a good, long, hard look at the entire thing before clicking "AYE."

You and Peter and Paul (and others) did a massive amount of work on those USSR collections and I feel very bad about cocking up the nomination and promotions on them.

I will slow down.

Dec-12-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  Phony Benoni: <nescio> Hello!

A couple of months ago, <cg> began a concerted effort toward constructing the long-requested historical tournament pages. A first step was to give the Biography Editors (now styled Games Editors) the power to add or correct date and round information on game pages so that the Historical Tournament pages would display properly.

My Historical Tournament pages 1&2 are a record of collections which had been updated. (We soon finished over 200 collections, totalling nearly 20,000 games).

Pages 3&4 were suggestions for future work. I took most of them from Peter's (suenteus po 147's) work. I had been planning to go back and add collections from others as well, but the whole thing has sort of gotten away from me.

Even though we're still swamped with work, additional collections from important tournaments are encouraged. Peter has not been active for several months, and there seems little chance of his coming back anytime soon. If he started a collection with only a few games, please feel free to redo it.

I have no idea about the status of his submitted games, and it seems the only way to check is by searching the database.

I see you have finished some collections already. Is there any way you can find the dates of the individual rounds? The games in an Historical Tournament collection are ordered by date; if this is missing, a mess ensues. For an example, see USSR Championship (1931), where the games are in no apparent order.

Even without the dates, though, good collections are useful. If the dates can be found and added afterward, everything will be fine.

PS. The correction slip process does not hamper our work at all. In fact, once corrections are made they are automatically reflected on the Historical Tournament page and enhance its quality. If you hadn't noticed, corrections are being made much more efficiently these days.

PPS. I'm not completely sure what you mean. Are you say that the my Historical Tournaments 1-4 lists are clogging up the searching process? I can only apologize for that, but hopefully the problem will slowly go away since I am trying to remove entries from these introductions as they are turned into Historical Tournament pages.

I hope this all helps. Drop in again if I've been unclear.

Dec-12-12  nescio: <Phony Benoni> I see.

Yes, last year (as jww) I made collections of the Saltsjobaden 1948 interzonal because there wasn´t one, which surprised me for such an important tournament, and of Beverwjk 1963 and 1967 because those tournaments interested me for some reason.

As for the dates, next time I am in Amsterdam, probably in a few weeks, I will visit the Max Euwe Centrum which is reported to have one of the largest collection of chess books in the world. (Only the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Den Haag seems to have more.) I´ll see what that collection can offer me but even tournament books don´t always provide that information, so I may have to look in the magazines too.

I don´t intend to spend much time on your project, for I think it´s largely a waste of effort. In most tournaments only a minority of the games is really worth looking at, so why collect all the games and create a separate page for each of the tournaments?

I´m only in favour of it because it may help to improve the database. A database should indeed have all the tournament games and should certainly not contain so many mistakes as this one.

Dec-12-12  nescio: I will at least submit the missing games of the old Beverwijk Hoogovens tournaments and may even make collections of them, but, except for the 1963 tournament, they are not very important and only interesting because of the long tradition and the fact that the 2013 Tata Steel event may well be the last of them.
Dec-12-12
Premium Chessgames Member
  jessicafischerqueen: Good evening.

This time I'll await an answer from you, but any future nominations I make will use this list as a guide to the country code:

<Regarding <Phony Benoni's> idea to use current FIDE country codes, here's a fairly current list:

http://users.skynet.be/hermandw/if/...

So in this list Germany is (GER) and England is (ENG).

I suggest we follow his suggestion, and for the time being at least, let's all use these codes for the nomination site field?

Don't be thrown off by the Flags on this list, they are the FIDE flags for each country, not the actual national flags.>

Discussions about decisions seem to have a way of petering out or becoming "forgotten" over time.

However, I'd like to be able to nominate events without causing future clean up problems.

You suggested this list, and Daniel previously alluded that he was pleased we had been using more recognizable codes for some of the countries than are featured in the list he put in the nomination box.

Such as (ENG) and (GER), I assume.

So, if you don't want me to follow the FIDE list in any new nominations, just let me know and tell me to wait more.

If you do think this would be ok for me to do, please let me know.

I won't do any nominations until I hear from you.

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