Post of the Month wins $100 for Enzo

The winner for May 2004 is Enzo. His winning post is:

Dice and other Unidentified Flying Objects (Long) - Enzo � 14 May 04, 1:02 pm on BJ21's Craps page.

Normally our post of the month discusses some aspect of blackjack or winning money from casinos. This month's winner is entirely different; it contains information about Richard McCall, a personality in the craps world, backed up by links to sources of the information. Enzo's post got immediate results: Shortly after it was posted, all mentions of McCall were removed from the GoldenTouchCraps.com web site.

Every month green chippers select a Post of the Month from among all the messages posted to the green-chip pages during the month. The winner receives $100 and the winning post is preserved in a special section of the Archives dedicated to Posts of the Month.

Green chip is a private club for people serious about winning money from casinos. Membership costs $49 per year. For more information about green chip, click on "Our Catalog" on the top of the page.

Stanford Wong

Enzo's diligence in that post reminded me of some of the best voodoo-busting efforts of Edward Winter in matters of chess.

Congratulations, Enzo.

What did this Edward Winter do in matters of chess?

Chess, more than people think, has its share of charlatans, phonies, voodoo priests, unscrupulous moneymen, careless researchers, and other fauna. In chess journalism and writing, in particular, such manifestations of parasitic life are quite common. It has been said, for instance, and not with much hyperbole, that about 95% of chess books ever published should be chucked to the garbage can (or recycling can, if you prefer) without our knowledge of chess diminishing at all. (Quite the contrary, actually.)

Edward Winter has been one of the knights in shining armor in the endeavor of unmasking the chess clowns and thieves and obstructing (not always successfully) their efforts to usurp the chess kingdom. A chess paladin would be an accurate description. Accuracy, in fact, is the operative word in the man's work and the first criterion by which chess works are critiqued. He has shown the plethora of mistakes, inaccuracies, lies, outright mistakes and other such, contained in popular chess writers' works, such as Fred Reinfeld's or Raymond Keene's. Winter used to have a regular column in the magazine Chess Notes and now writes sporadically a column for specialist publications.

That no chess writer or "guru" has yet to change professions or be forced into shameful exclusion as a result of Winter's merciless unmasking efforts the way "Dr" McCall was as a result of Enzo's POM'd sleuthing is possibly an indication that the chess world is more cynical, apathetic and voodoo-infested than the craps world.

--Cyrus

PS : Anyone interested in Edward Winter's output could check out "Chess Explorations" ("A pot-pourri from the Journal Chess Notes"), "Kings, Commoners and Knaves" or his latest "A Chess Omnibus". I should warn that they are meant only for chess aficionados.

If you ever took time to read a chess book in your life, and I have read over 150 (not counting hundreds of specialize magazines), you will realise that a chess position is rarely static. Some Grandmasters of the game will come to a conclusion about an opening that leads to a middle-game position and 99% of the player will take the analyse for granted. Then, 15 years later, another Master or Grandmaster will look at it again with a new scheme of analyse and come to another conclusion. It`s not a question of being charlatan here, it`s only the nature of the game or the nature of this particular position.

Beside being a critic, I have never yet seen a book written by M.Ed.Winter that would be really worth mentionning in the world of chess. Sorry but let me tell you this, the real con artists are here...not among the chess players.

I am not saying that bad and stupid writings on chess do not exist but they are easely spotted and discarded.

"A chess position is rarely static. Some Grandmasters of the game will come to a conclusion about an opening that leads to a middle-game position and 99% of the player will take the analyse [sic] for granted. Then, 15 years later, another Master or Grandmaster will look at it again with a new scheme of analyse and come to another conclusion."

That is correct. also, it is common knowledge.

However, the books written by the estimable (or, IMO, inestimable) Edward Winter do not, and I emphasize, DO NOT contain one single reference to such a phenomenon! To wit, there is not one item in them about a "wrong estimation" of a position. The books, when they show deceit and crookery, show exactly this, deceit and crookery, not "a change of opinion about a position".

One who has read at least one of Winter's books would know this.

"I have never yet seen a book written by M.Ed.Winter that would be really worth mentioning in the world of chess."

Well, suffice to say, for the moment, that this opinion seems not to be shared by a large number of chess notables. But I would, again, suggest to anyone who wants to make up one's mind that one should read the books.

"I am not saying that bad and stupid writings on chess do not exist but they are easily spotted and discarded."

No, they are not! To "spot and discard" a clumsily, hastily written Chess book, one would need to go through the book diligently, analytically and in detail, which is a most time-consuming and difficult endeavor. People, in reality, trust "names" in chess, and thus, are putting the offerings of such "names" (actually clowns) as ex-GM Raymond Keene on the top of the best sellers' list. In reality, most best-selling chess titles are a waste of paper.

Bad and stupid writing is far, far more easily discerned in Blackjack, if you must know, than in Chess. It's not even close.

--Cyrus

I'm very surprised to see that you range GM Raymond Keene into the categorie of clowns.By the way, a grandmaster title can never be lost.It's like a doctor title.It might be the case that famous players just give their names for books that are actually written by somebody else but for the sake of their reputation, they cannot afford to have rubbish written in their name.
To be chess professional is a tough business, much tougher than Blackjack.In order to make ends meet, many of them have to write books and and under time pressure many errors will occur.But this doesn't mean that the book as a whole is worthless.
As an IM of chess,I can spot a bad chess book as easily as a bad Blackjack book but it's certainly much less than 95% of market.
With the occurrence of powerful Chessprograms, it has become much easier to detect analytical errors in chessbooks, even in the best ones.I think GM John Nunn has written a book about this.But we should accept this as inevitable in such a complex game as Chess and not dismiss the author rightaway.

Francis Salmon