Chess Board Options

En selvbiografisk bok med stormester Larry Kaufman som har hatt en bemerkelsesverdig karriere også med utviklingen av sjakkspillende dataprogrammer. Som sjakkspiller nådde han toppen i høyere alder enn kanskje noen.

Se blant annet innholdsfortegnelsen for å få et inntrykk av hvor spennende denne boka er for mange sjakkinteresserte.

Forlagets egen omtale:

Larry Kaufman can safely be called an exceptional chess grandmaster.

Larry Kaufman started out as a prodigy, however not in chess but as a whizz kid in science and math. He excels at shogi (Japanese chess) and Go, and is also a world-famous computer programmer and a highly successful option trader. Remarkably, as a chess player he only peaked at the weirdly late age of fifty.

Yet his victories in the chess arena are considerable. Over a career span of nearly sixty years Kaufman won the state championships of Massachusetts, Maryland, Florida, Virginia, D.C. and Pennsylvania. He was an American Open Champion and won the U.S. Senior Championship as well as the World Senior Championship.

‘Never a great chess player’ himself (his words), he met or played chess greats such as Bobby Fischer, Bent Larsen, Walter Browne, Boris Spassky, Viktor Kortchnoi and many others. He worked as a second to legendary grandmaster Roman Dzindzichashvili, and coached three talented youngsters to become International Master, one of them his son Raymond.

This engrossing memoir is rife with stories and anecdotes about dozens of famous and not-so-famous chess players. In one of the most remarkable chapters Larry Kaufman reveals that the American woman chess player that inspired Walter Tevis to create the Beth Harmon character of Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit fame, is his former girlfriend. You will learn about neural networks, material values and how being a chess master helps when trading options. And find lots of memorable but little-known annotated games.

Larry Kaufman is an American Grandmaster. He has been involved in computer chess since 1967, when he worked on ‘MacHack’, the first computer that competed in tournaments with human players. More recently he has been working on the programs Rybka and Komodo.

Fra forordet:

I was never a great chess player, nor a great shogi (Japanese chess) player, nor a great chess programmer, but somehow I have managed to win many state, national, international, and even world championships in these three chess-related fields over a span of nearly sixty years, and as a result have traveled extensively and gotten to know many of the champions and title contenders in all three arenas. This book is primarily about these great and other outstanding or well-known players (and programmers), although my own life story in relation to these three endeavors (and a few others) is also included.

Others have achieved significant successes in two out of these three fields (for example Hans Berliner in chess and chess programming and Yoshiharu Habu in shogi and chess), but I don’t know of anyone else who has achieved significant competitive success in all three. So I hope readers may find my own story interesting along with those of the real champions. There are also plenty of commented games (and game fragments) played by great players, by other featured players, by myself, and by engines against human grandmasters, mostly with suitable handicaps.

Most of this book is about chess players (both human and computer!), with a chapter each for chess programmers and programs, and shogi players. I would actually have nearly as much to say about the shogi world as I do about the chess world, having been very deeply immersed in it for many years, but this book is in English, not in Japanese, so I imagine that most readers will know much more about chess than about shogi. As an American, I naturally know many more of the U.S. chess superstars than the others, but I did get to know a reasonable number of famous chess players from the Soviet Union and other countries, and have quite a few interesting stories to tell.

Introduction

• Part I 20th century champions I have known
• Chapter 1 Pre-World War II masters
• Chapter 2 Bobby Fischer
• Chapter 3 The 1972 U .S . Championship
• Chapter 4 Bent Larsen
• Chapter 5 Svetozar Gligoric
• Chapter 6 Steve Brandwein
• Chapter 7 Finding Beth Harmon
• Chapter 8 Roman Dzindzichashvili
• Chapter 9 Viktor Kortchnoi
• Chapter 10 Walter Browne
• Chapter 11 Boris Spassky
• Chapter 12 Garry Kasparov

• Chapter 13 Ken Rogoff, Mark Diesen, and Eugene Meyer

• Part II My non-chess career: options, shogi, and other games

• Chapter 14 Chess Options
• Chapter 15 Shogi

• Chapter 16 Other games

• Part III My chess career and my students

• Chapter 17 Memorable games
• Chapter 18 The Baltimore versus Cuba match
• Chapter 19 Three World Seniors
• Chapter 20 My three students who became IMs

• Chapter 21 Raymond Kaufman

• Part IV Computer chess

• Chapter 22 54 years with the chess engines
• Chapter 23 Man vs Machine, 2020

• Chapter 24 NNUE

• Part V Various chess-related topics

• Chapter 25 Chess ratings
• Chapter 26 Openings
• Chapter 27 Material values