Amateur Team East
Please Comment if you are trying to hook up for playing, traveling, or rooming.
Thank You
Mike Griffin
02/05/2010.
The Chess Blog of the Boylston Chess Club ... The Boylston Chess Club (BCC) is a part of the Boylston Chess Foundation (BCF).
Please Comment if you are trying to hook up for playing, traveling, or rooming.
Thank You
Mike Griffin
02/05/2010.
Forty plus years ago those who wanted to play a serious thought game for recreation had to physically relocate themselves to a chess or bridge club. Before the 60's television was in its infancy and again people had to go to theaters and symphonies for entertainment greater than radio. Entertainment business found ways to attract people and their money. Bowling, dog and horse tracks, boxing, other spring events also attracted people. In the 1800'ds to early 1900'ds during winter golf courses would build giant toboggan slides and fields were flooded to enable outdoor skating.
It was expected to visit someplace to be entertained. Or have a piano and other instruments at home to play for one another.
At the BCF the board is in a conversation as to how to improve attendance to chess lectures. Five years ago lectures attracted at least 30 people, today you are lucky to get 12. Which is sad because of the excellent quality of these lectures. Attendance to all the arts has been off the last couple of years. So for what ever the reason, people are using the internet and television to entertain themselves at home.
For all of the above reasons I foresee that OTB (Over the Board Chess) chess will slowly decline over the next few decades. It will never go away, but demographically you can see players dropping out or dying off. Although there is a huge population of children playing chess; around their sophomore or junior year of high school as the rigors of college approach ,and they discover the opposite sex, time for chess just goes away.
At any given time there are ten's of thousands of chess games being played over the internet. Internet chess is in its pre-adolescent stage as the players, service providers, and professionals work to develop successful models that will supplant the decline in OTB. I see the savvy chess professionals positioning themselves in places to leverage internet opportunities.
We have to realize that chess is above all a recreation and competes for time and resources with an ever expanding market of recreation: a recreation that can occur from ones home. My kids are all good chess players their preference has been internet games. And if they want to get physical they use the wii. Yet I think OTB, where you have to interact with other people directly provides benefits to all ages and types of chess players. The social benefits of community is great; yet I realize that these internet virtual worlds are becoming more social as well.
Organizations like the USCF, MACA, and the BCF must strive to redefine themselves involving the internet. BCF President David Vigorito is looking for ways to leverage the internet and blog evidenced from his first meeting with the Board of Directors as BCF President. I agree with David that we have to find ways to involve chess and the internet. I wish I had some good ideas in how to involve the local Boston chess community. I would like to see a way in which clubs could have an avenue of involvement with internet chess. Perhaps with the involvement of some site like ICC chess, we could have an Internet Met League where clubs could play each other in the way national teams face each other in the National Chess League via the internet? And we need a way to attract very young kids and e-teach them the game.
Where do you think chess is headed?
Please Comment.
Thank You.
Mike Griffin 02/04/2010

Gary Kasparov recently stated that he believes that since computers have become more adept at beating human chess players many have since turned to poker as it still remains unbeaten by computers.
While reading and watching Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman I realized it was that years of being a salesman had wired Willy Loman's mind to view things a certain way. In life imitates art once again, my life experiences have been bolstered by modern psychology, psychiatry, medicine, and biology that indicates the same thing: you are what you do.
People who invest significant time being involved with chess are improving their thinking and analytical powers just like a body builder strengthens their muscles by lifting weights. Reinforcing this idea is David Shenk's book The Immortal Game - he claims that chess rewires the brain and all mankind for the last 1500 years has been drawn to chess, making chess the greatest game in human history.
The good news is most of us in the US alive today will live to our mid 80's. The bad news is half of the people in their mid 80's today have various stages of Alzheimer's disease . Yet it has been proven in numerous studies that playing thinking games defends the brain against this disease. I hope this fact keeps the boomers coming to tournaments; unfortunately chess demographics indicate that we are losing 6 to 8 percent older players each year.
Now for you younger folks there are benefits as well. Obviously kids who study chess learn how to deal with situations and apply their analytical skills in real life situations, albeit they reside on 64 squares. Yet successful application of pieces on these squares is based on learning the mechanics of how to generate the most effective force in combination with dissolving one's opponents ability to do the same. Being trained as be a middle school teacher we became keenly aware of the importance of pushing kids to take on the most difficult mental challenges they were capable of handling at the earliest stages that their cognitive ability could handle the challenge. Add to that the need for every kid to find their passion, usually something that's not initially or inherently easy, but becomes something they learn to excel at; which provides, the mortar that builds and glues their self esteem and ego. All my kids play internet games and while these games are quite challenging I contend that chess allows you to create a new reality at the moment. The reality is out in front of us unhidden, present yet so complex.
Upon waking up on the mornings that I know I am going to play chess my mind already is processing in a different way. This may sound weird, but my thinking is different when I even know I'm going to play chess. What does all this mean? Well it means that if chess is your past time, there are collateral improvements in your thinking, increasing capability, and protection your future thinking ability. Pretty heady stuff indeed.FM Paul MacIntyre was in the group of 5 tied for second at the 2010 Liberty Bell Open.
from the Boston College Chronicle
The Boylston Chess Foundation is committed to delivering high quality chess content in many formats. One way to bring chess to the community is to invite GMs and IMs to give a lecture. We normally schedule these in the evenings during the week.
Well, I was just up in Canada, too, but for some reason I was unable to buy enough rating points to get over 2500. Where did you go shopping, Marc?
What is the difference between a book collection and a library? For the past two years Dr. Jason Rihel (Biochemist by trade) worked on cataloging the BCF's chess books. He determined that there exists 2100 volumes, including DVDs and VHS tapes. For those months Jason would be seen connected to his IBM laptop sitting by stacks of books typing away. This one-man Herculean task called the Chess Club Library Project now provides us members with two lists of this great asset.
Now we know what we have. And if you are interested in buying a book it will help the club as well.
So thank you Jason Rihel for sacrificing the time to inventory these books thus enabling the rest of us to know what the BCF has and allow us to enjoy them.
BCF members: did you have any ideas as to how we can improve our library?
Please Comment.
Thank You
Mike Griffin 01/18/2010
About 44 participated in playing in this year's Herb Healy. This is down about 20 people from 2009. The deficit caused the $320 expense of the food to be absorbed by the BCF, contrary to previous years where entry fees covered prizes and the food.

I remember walking from Park Street Station to Boylston Street in 1976, the morning after the first First Night, to play in the HH. In those days the city of Boston hadn't figured out all the rules and the whole Boston Common was covered in about one foot depth of trash and people were still partying. Public drinking was prevalent and people were in various states of ossification; it was a very chaotic situation.
Below is the score of a beautiful HH French Defense having Ben Goldberg
performing the classic exchange sac and then offering his queen.
Ben Yuan
counters in a dangerous almost successful fashion. A fantastic game played by both sides.
Zongyuan Yuan vs. Ben Goldberg
1 e4 e6
2 d4 d5
3 Nd2 Nf6
4 e5 Nfd7
5 Bd3 c5
6 c3 Nc6
7 Ne2 cxd4
8 cxd4 f6
9 exf6 Nxf6
10 Nf3 Bd6
11 O-O O-O
12 Bf4 Bxf4
13 Nxf4 Ne4
14 Ne2 Rxf3
15 gxf3 Ng5
16 f4 Nf3+
17 Kg2 Nh4+
18 Kh1 e5
19 dxe5 Bg4
20 Qb3 Bf3+
21 Kg1 Qd7
22 f5 Nxf5
23 Bxf5 Qxf5
24 Ng3 Nd4
25 Qxb7 Rf8
26 Qxg7+ Kxg7
27 Nxf5+ Rxf5
28 h4 Rf4
29 Kh2 Rxh4+
30 Kg3 Rg4+
31 Kh3 Ne2
0-1
How was your HH experience? Please Comment. Thank You Mike Griffin 01/11/2010
It is not too late to join the Monday Night Swiss with a 1/2 point bye for the first round. What we lack in quantity, we make up in quality -- come join us to play some competitive games. Email me at oresick@gmail.com to register.
The annual Herb Healy Open House ushered in the new chess year.
While thumbing through the Boyslton Chess Club Library, I started to wonder how early I could find a reference to our esteemed club. We know that it was formally founded on August 27, 1919, and that the Young Men's Christian Union, our original home, had chess playing in the late 1800's. But could I find the actual references in print, especially to the days when it was still informal?

This article is significant, as it is the earliest mention of an EVENT that features players specifically from the Boylston Chess Club that I could find. Can anyone get earlier?
So that is probably how early we can officially go. But chess was played in the Boylston Chess Club space in the YMCU on Boyslton Street for many years before the founding of the club. How early can we go?
YMCU on Boylston photo-1911
Is this the nascent Bolyston Chess Club, meeting for some casual games, or even a tourament?
What I like about this reference is that chess is not mentioned in the 1867 or 1868 yearbooks, giving me confidence I'm hitting one of the earliest references to the chess of the future Boylston club. Not a spectacular mention, but one that suggests chess was played at the YMCU 50 years before the club was officially founded.
Astronomer and Boylston Chess Club member Philip Nutzman was part of the Harvard team that recently discovered the exo-planet, GJ1214b, also known as a Super-Earth. The work was published in the premier journal, Nature. Only 40-light years away, this is the first "super-earth" with an observable atmosphere.