The Chess Mind

Though we’re missing Halloween (also Reformation Day!) by a day, it’s still close enough for us to enjoy our fourth Halloween show – we can now label it a tradition. Normally we celebrate the best in chess, but not now. Turning things upside down, we celebrate – or at least take a perverse pleasure – in the worst of chess, especially when it’s the world’s best who are the victims.

This week, it will be a special world champions edition; believe it or not, there are an awful lot of games to choose from. Think you messed up last week at the club? You’ve got nothing on these guys. We’ll watch Tal, Petrosian, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik and Anand all take their pratfalls, and often in the worst possible situations, too. Are these games instructive? Probably not. But it’s hard to beat this collection for entertainment, and as a reminder that for all their very real greatness at the chess board, they’re human too.

So join me this Thursday night at 9 p.m. ET, and BYOS (Bring Your Own Schadenfreude). (Directions for watching live shows - free - can be found here.)

We had some annoying technical problems with the show, so it probably won't be feasible to upload it for viewing in the archives. For those who'd like to see what they missed, even if not they're not getting the full experience, I've linked to the games, here. Note that you can actually see video footage of two of the games online: the Karpov-Kasparov game is here (could have done without the strange looping and the sound track, though) and Anand-Kasparov (a real classic!) is here.