Player Profile: Kenneth Regan
It's Monday once more, and thus time for another player profile. This week, our interviewee is IM (and Ph.D.) Kenneth Regan. In the late 1970s, he was considered an extremely talented youngster, but he gave up the game to pursue his studies in computer science and math; a gain for those fields (and for his family's income), but a loss for chess.
1. Name:
Kenneth W. Regan (Dr.)
2. Age:
47
3. Title:
IM
4. Where you live, where you're from:
Amherst (Buffalo) NY, originally from Paramus, NJ where my parents still live.
5. Family:
Wife Deborah, children Alexander, 12, and Rebecca, 9.
6. Other interests:
Professional: Computer Science---computational complexity theory, Mathematics. Avocations: Music, foreign languages, singing, fantasy sports (with family).
7. Favorite book/author (not chess):
1. The Bible
2. Martin Gardner's books on Mathematical Recreations (from his column in Scientific American), a definite inspiration.
3. S.I. Hayakawa, Language in [Thought and] Action.
8. When (and how/from whom) you learned to play:
5 years old, watched father play with uncle. My father was the perfect strength for which learning to win was a difficult but attainable challenge---in 6 months. The mountain I pose does seem to have discouraged my kids---though they are champions of their grades at school.
9. Favorite/most influential chess book (if any):
I. Chernev and K. Harkness, An Invitation to Chess---which I still recommend as best spanning the progression from beginner to advanced thinking, and which shows some of the beauty of the game, too. Then Nimzowitsch's My System and Kmoch's Pawn Power In Chess.
10. Favorite player (other than yourself):
Emanuel Lasker---though I do not exemplify his psychological approach, and Nimzowitsch/Larsen/etc. are more my style. I said this long before I found myself applying some of his mathematics in my research! (Indeed, I flagged Wikipedia's statement of the Lasker-Noether Theorem as incompletely worded---nobody has taken my fix suggestion on the discussion page further yet.)
11. A game (not your own) that made a big impact on you:
Nimzowitsch-Hakansson, in the Chernev-Harkness book.
12. Your best game:
My win over Walter Browne as Black in 1975: Hypermodern + Kmoch to the max.
13. Your greatest moment in chess so far:
Beating GMs Shamkovich and Bisguier in the last 2 rounds of the Jan 1977 New York City International to pull out my first IM norm.
(Co-winning the 1977 US Junior Championship and my board prize at the 1976 Student Olympiad---only non-Russian to win a gold medal---are close to it.)
14. The most valuable thing you did to become the player you are:
I always played in open sections, did not mind losing to much higher-rated players, and learned from them in post-game analysis.
What held me back was never studying openings, but that was part of the bargain of going full-bore into mathematics and science and other academic subjects instead, having decided at age 13(!) not to make chess a career.
For life experience, early cameraderie in adult company was most valuable---this helped me be mature enough to give lectures as a teenager, and research colloquia even as a first-year graduate student.
15. What you value most about the game:
Creative challenge. Unlike with Math/CS research, you have an active opponent! Also an innate beauty that everyone can visualize and understand.
16. Your chess credo:
When reading Chessbase's item on recent chess writings by the Spanish surrealist Fernando Arrabal, I realized that the opening and closing lines of his chess poem---curiously, given only in the Spanish original---have long been my unvoiced credo:
"A mis partidas voy/ de mis partidas vengo..."
I translate as: "I go to my games/ I come (away!) from my games." The Spanish "vengo" means come-away here, not just "come", and to me that makes all the difference. While a teenager I thought this in the form, "Enjoy it---without feeling as if your livelihood depends on it, unless it does." But Arrabal's version is more fundamental and IMHO works even for those who seek a living from chess. It also leads into the Susan Polgar credo "Win with grace, lose with dignity," which is a given. As a Christian I see much of life that way, to sacrifice if called for---and then there are parts of life that are not games...
17. Three tips for amateurs:
1. Learn the endgame! and play the opening with that in view;
2. Find books on the middlegame and annotations that help you visualize sequences of 3-4 moves, which chess programs may not be so good for;
3. What struck me most about the crossword-puzzle solving tournaments in the recent movie "Wordplay" was how they were valued for friendship.
18. A tip for ambitious players:
My point 14 is vital.
I still agree with advice I read as a teenager to play over many master games, even without looking at annotations, "learning by osmosis". I believe this should be done at a physical board, not a computer screen---and without being distracted by chess engine evaluations.
19. A game you'd like to present:
Annotated PGN of my win over Browne is attached.
20. Any of your work/services you'd like to plug:
My anti-cheating efforts: research and experimental data-gathering both, largely pro-bono. In http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/, "fidelity" is a 6-way reference to (1) agreement to an agent in general, (2) a particular measure of agreement called "fidelity" which figures into the mathematics, (3) FIDE, (4) faith, (5) playing in good faith, and (6) my personal "keeping faith with the chess world" in general after so long an absence.
Hopefully their application to chess will be unnecessary!---but research papers on this topic may find application in other areas.
For more, see this local 1996 interview.
(His games with Browne, Shamkovich, and Bisguier, together with Nimzowitsch-Hakansson, are here.)
1. Name:
Kenneth W. Regan (Dr.)
2. Age:
47
3. Title:
IM
4. Where you live, where you're from:
Amherst (Buffalo) NY, originally from Paramus, NJ where my parents still live.
5. Family:
Wife Deborah, children Alexander, 12, and Rebecca, 9.
6. Other interests:
Professional: Computer Science---computational complexity theory, Mathematics. Avocations: Music, foreign languages, singing, fantasy sports (with family).
7. Favorite book/author (not chess):
1. The Bible
2. Martin Gardner's books on Mathematical Recreations (from his column in Scientific American), a definite inspiration.
3. S.I. Hayakawa, Language in [Thought and] Action.
8. When (and how/from whom) you learned to play:
5 years old, watched father play with uncle. My father was the perfect strength for which learning to win was a difficult but attainable challenge---in 6 months. The mountain I pose does seem to have discouraged my kids---though they are champions of their grades at school.
9. Favorite/most influential chess book (if any):
I. Chernev and K. Harkness, An Invitation to Chess---which I still recommend as best spanning the progression from beginner to advanced thinking, and which shows some of the beauty of the game, too. Then Nimzowitsch's My System and Kmoch's Pawn Power In Chess.
10. Favorite player (other than yourself):
Emanuel Lasker---though I do not exemplify his psychological approach, and Nimzowitsch/Larsen/etc. are more my style. I said this long before I found myself applying some of his mathematics in my research! (Indeed, I flagged Wikipedia's statement of the Lasker-Noether Theorem as incompletely worded---nobody has taken my fix suggestion on the discussion page further yet.)
11. A game (not your own) that made a big impact on you:
Nimzowitsch-Hakansson, in the Chernev-Harkness book.
12. Your best game:
My win over Walter Browne as Black in 1975: Hypermodern + Kmoch to the max.
13. Your greatest moment in chess so far:
Beating GMs Shamkovich and Bisguier in the last 2 rounds of the Jan 1977 New York City International to pull out my first IM norm.
(Co-winning the 1977 US Junior Championship and my board prize at the 1976 Student Olympiad---only non-Russian to win a gold medal---are close to it.)
14. The most valuable thing you did to become the player you are:
I always played in open sections, did not mind losing to much higher-rated players, and learned from them in post-game analysis.
What held me back was never studying openings, but that was part of the bargain of going full-bore into mathematics and science and other academic subjects instead, having decided at age 13(!) not to make chess a career.
For life experience, early cameraderie in adult company was most valuable---this helped me be mature enough to give lectures as a teenager, and research colloquia even as a first-year graduate student.
15. What you value most about the game:
Creative challenge. Unlike with Math/CS research, you have an active opponent! Also an innate beauty that everyone can visualize and understand.
16. Your chess credo:
When reading Chessbase's item on recent chess writings by the Spanish surrealist Fernando Arrabal, I realized that the opening and closing lines of his chess poem---curiously, given only in the Spanish original---have long been my unvoiced credo:
"A mis partidas voy/ de mis partidas vengo..."
I translate as: "I go to my games/ I come (away!) from my games." The Spanish "vengo" means come-away here, not just "come", and to me that makes all the difference. While a teenager I thought this in the form, "Enjoy it---without feeling as if your livelihood depends on it, unless it does." But Arrabal's version is more fundamental and IMHO works even for those who seek a living from chess. It also leads into the Susan Polgar credo "Win with grace, lose with dignity," which is a given. As a Christian I see much of life that way, to sacrifice if called for---and then there are parts of life that are not games...
17. Three tips for amateurs:
1. Learn the endgame! and play the opening with that in view;
2. Find books on the middlegame and annotations that help you visualize sequences of 3-4 moves, which chess programs may not be so good for;
3. What struck me most about the crossword-puzzle solving tournaments in the recent movie "Wordplay" was how they were valued for friendship.
18. A tip for ambitious players:
My point 14 is vital.
I still agree with advice I read as a teenager to play over many master games, even without looking at annotations, "learning by osmosis". I believe this should be done at a physical board, not a computer screen---and without being distracted by chess engine evaluations.
19. A game you'd like to present:
Annotated PGN of my win over Browne is attached.
20. Any of your work/services you'd like to plug:
My anti-cheating efforts: research and experimental data-gathering both, largely pro-bono. In http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/, "fidelity" is a 6-way reference to (1) agreement to an agent in general, (2) a particular measure of agreement called "fidelity" which figures into the mathematics, (3) FIDE, (4) faith, (5) playing in good faith, and (6) my personal "keeping faith with the chess world" in general after so long an absence.
Hopefully their application to chess will be unnecessary!---but research papers on this topic may find application in other areas.
For more, see this local 1996 interview.
(His games with Browne, Shamkovich, and Bisguier, together with Nimzowitsch-Hakansson, are here.)
Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on
Monday April 16, 2007 at 9:05pm
Thanks and keep them coming.