Tell us more about yourself and your chess games

Hi Pilgrims,

You are hereby warned that the chess career of George Eraclides has so far managed to escape the attention of the great players, such as Kasparov, Karpov, Fischer, and others of their station. Even those below their august level - the merely talented grandmasters - have not heard of Eraclides.

That is probably a good thing, because their time is valuable and they will not have learned very much by studying Mr Eraclides’ games. In fact, they may have had their own abilities undermined by his insidiously bad style of play.

The Eraclides collection of stories and games is intended to provide light amusement to the chess fan who is also looking for honest and humorous writing related to chess. The games have their moments, it is true, but the writing is so much better.

Mr Eraclides, realizing the paucity of his chess ability, and the meagreness of his successes, has endeavoured instead to write and annotate with humour, providing a few moments of fun as he blunders, and continues to blunder, his way across chessboards since 1965.

Do not delve too deeply into the intricacies of his games, although it is true that the occasional insight may be of use to the ordinary reader.

If you are one of those types who will not open a chess book or play a game over, unless you think you can derive some measure of self-improvement from the experience, then I suggest that you do the following: Play over the games of Mr Eraclides, examine his annotations (try not to laugh too much except in places where he intends that you laugh) and then see if you can discover improvements to the lines of play.

In other words, use his collection of games as a manual of poor play, and enhance your skill by discovering better, winning, moves. What a stout fellow you will become. A good player, but perhaps somewhat humourless.

For the rest of you who are much more sensible, and realize that we cannot all become great players through self improvement and the lack of a sense of humour, you are urged to play these games over for fun, enjoy the writing, and read the whole thing with a glass or three of brandy.

You are bound to enjoy the brandy!

Games and stories will be added to this Blog over time in no particular chronological order. Please be patient (a good trait in a chess player) as I have a day job, a loving partner who insists on her share of attention, I am a slow chess player and an even slower annotator.

I also wish to check what I publish, just in case I actually played better than I realised at the time.