Great business profile in today’s NY Times.
We need to get better at collecting and retelling stories like these. It’s great to develop the next Robson or Caruana, Nakamura or Kamsky. But the real point of teaching chess to children is to painlessly teach them new ways of thinking.
Great post, Bill!
There are thousands of stories like this from thousands of people too immersed in other aspects of life to pursue chess with the zeal of USCF OTB and correspondence competitors.
While treading water here in Florida until NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff’s new space shuttle mission takes off and a new Earth vs. Space game starts here on USCF’s site, two more such stories have come to me:
This Saturday, Hip Hop Chess promoter Adisa Banjoko is hosting a panel discussion at his HHCF event in San Jose, California, and Nancy Cartwright (the voice of Bart Simpson) will participate. Here’s a link:
hiphopchess.blogspot.com/2011/05 … mpson.html
A few days ago, over lunch with former Analog and Omni editor and legendary science fiction writer Dr. Ben Bova, he asked me if I bore any of the responsibility for his “being beaten at chess by my computer every day.”
Also, two weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine blog had an article again showing just how much more “mainstream” chess is than USCF members (and leaders!) realize:
Show Some Spine
tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011 … ome-spine/
The picture with this article is worth a thousand words, and the popup comment with the picture is worth a thousand more:
‘‘The opening moves of the great chess champions prove (to me) that without an idea …, you’re unarmed.’’
[I saw this mentioned in the USCF Issues forum first, so initially posted a version of the above there.]
Thanks for the post, Bill. Victoria Livschitz, who is currently the CEO of Grid Dynamics in Fremont, CA, decided when she first immigrated to help make ends meet by serving as a chess coach. How did she find students? She conducted a simul in a Cleveland, OH public park!
It’s a very interesting story. As a fellow chess enthusiast/technologist, I suspect that practicing chess has contributed to her success in grid computing. (It certainly helped me.) We could use more stories like this.
BTW, according to MSA she earned a provisional rating of 1730 in 3 games about 8 years ago. It was at a tournament which had some scholastic sections, and there was a Louisa Livschitz who attended as well. Victoria’s daughter, perhaps?