Cover Stories with Chess Life

Cover Stories with Chess Life #43: Harold Scott

Today’s guest on Cover Stories is a man in demand.

By my count Harold Scott is making his third podcast recording today. He has been a guest on Evan Rabin’s Premier Chess Podcast along with GM Joel Benjamin, a feat that he repeated in a joint appearance with Ben Johnson and the Perpetual Chess Podcast.

But today it’s just him.

Harold is the author of our March cover story about eight year old Megan Paragua, who recently became a rated expert. Megan’s uncle is New York GM Mark Paragua, but as we learn from Harold’s piece, she’s doing a lot of the hard work to improve on her own!

Harold Scott is a chess teacher and coach currently residing in the Bronx, New York. He is also a FIDE Instructor, a US Chess Senior tournament director, a rated expert, and a writer to boot. His first book, Winning the World Open, is co-authored with GM Joel Benjamin and released in January of this year. It’s an absolutely fantastic read, and any fan of American chess history and lore would do well to pick it up.

Cover Stories with Chess Life #41: GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave

Yes, it's January. And yes, this is the December edition of Cover Stories. (Look for the January EP soon!)

GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave is the author of our December cover story, “My American Tour,” which discusses his victory at the 2021 Sinquefield Cup and his second place finish at the 9LX (or 960) tournament directly afterwards.

We’ve been trying to set up time for an interview for a few weeks, but Maxime’s packed schedule meant that today – January 2nd – was our first opportunity to record. It turns out that this was fortunate indeed, as in the interim, Maxime played in a number of events, including the World Rapid and Blitz Championship in Warsaw, where he became the FIDE World Blitz Champion.

We discuss his victory in the Blitz, his visit to Dubai and thoughts on the World Championship match, and his long sojourn in Saint Louis. We also learn about his openings, his technical setup while traveling, his time on the Carlsen team in 2016, and his ongoing love of mathematics.

Cover Stories with Chess Life #40: GM Alex Lenderman

Today’s guest on Cover Stories with Chess Life is the author of our November 2021 cover story on the U.S. Open, which he won with a dominating performance and score of 8½/9. More recently, he finished in shared fourth through sixth place at the 2021 U.S. Championship, his +1 score leaving him just a half-point outside the playoff won by GM Wesley So.

GM Alex Lenderman is one of America’s top grandmasters, and his story is one of long, hard work paying off with success. US Chess records have him playing nearly 1200 tournaments since 2001, including seemingly every event in the NYC area for many years. These include dozens of New York Masters rapid events, and closer to my heart, two Nassau Chess Club championships in 2007 and 2008.

Today he has a bachelor’s degree from Webster University, where he was on their fabled chess team, and having – I think – just graduated, he is looking to a very bright future.

Cover Stories with Chess Life #39: GM Sam Shankland

Today’s guest on Cover Stories with Chess Life is the author of our September cover story on the Prague Chess Festival and, as of the September 2021 FIDE rating list, the 26th ranked player in the world.

The winner of the 2018 U.S. Championship and a stalwart on American international teams, Grandmaster Sam Shankland has already, at age 29, done almost everything there is to do in chess. He has written books for Quality Chess and the Chessable platform. He has been a second for Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen. He even appeared on a reality TV show, “Kicking and Screaming,” where he and partner Caleb Garmany survived the initial cuts but were eliminated on the second episode.

Shankland’s Prague performance is chronicled in our September issue, but his magical World Cup run, where he fell to GM Sergey Karjakin in the quarterfinals after defeating Jobava, Areschenko, Jumabaeyev and Svidler, is a must-read part of our October issue. He also just participated in the Saint Louis Rapid and Blitz, and the Sinquefield Cup, and I’m sure he’ll have more to say about both of those events today.

Cover Stories with Chess Life #38: IM John Donaldson

Today’s guest on Cover Stories with Chess Life is the author of our July cover story, or, better, the package of cover stories. He is also, in many ways, its subject, as is reflected by his presence on our July cover in a magisterial photo by Ian Spanier.

International Master John Donaldson has done almost everything there is to do in the world of chess. Becoming an International Master in 1983, Donaldson has been a successful player, author, and team captain, piloting American teams in international play since at least 1986. For 20 years Donaldson ran the Chess Room at the Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco; now retired, we will have to find out what lies ahead for him.

The author of at least a dozen books, his newest, Bobby Fischer and his World, is the nominal subject of our July cover story. John talks about the origins of the project, what he has learned since the book was published, and what Fischer mysteries remain unsolved. (Perhaps you can help solve them!) An excerpt is also included.

Cover Stories with Chess Life #37: Jacob Aagaard

Today’s guest on Cover Stories with Chess Life is the co-author of our June cover story on the 2020-2021 Candidates Tournament. No, it’s not me. It’s Grandmaster Jacob Aagaard.

Jacob Aagaard is one of the most lauded authors and trainers in the chess world today. The winner of the Boleslavsky medal from the FIDE Trainers Commission – a group for which he later served as director for a time – Aagaard has written twenty plus books under his own name, and more than a few under others!

Aagaard is the 2007 British Champion and the 2012 Scottish Champion. He has played on two Olympiad teams – Scotland and his native Denmark – and worked as the national coach for the Danish team and for the Indian Women.

Over the years Aagaard has worked as a trainer for some of the world’s best players, including GMs Boris Gelfand, Sam Shankland, Surya Ganguly, and Sabino Brunello. Most of the top Indian juniors have devoured his books. And with good reason.

Today I speak to Jacob at his home in Glasgow. Jacob, welcome to Cover Stories with Chess Life. How are you doing?

Cover Stories with Chess Life #36: Taylor Kingston

Today’s guest on Cover Stories is Taylor Kingston, a well-known chess author and historian who I tapped to write our May cover story on the 1946 U.S. Championship match between Arnold Denker and Herman Steiner. I was looking for a historical cover story, and when I saw that it had been 75 years this May since the match in the 2021 International Chess Calendar (published by Russell Enterprises), I reached out to Taylor to ask if he’d be interested in writing it. Imagine my surprise when he told me that he was also the editor of the calendar!

Taylor Kingston has done just about everything there is to do in the world of chess journalism. He has written over a hundred book reviews for the old ChessCafe website, along with feature articles, interviews, and books under his own name. The newest, Edgard Colle: Caissa’s Wounded Warrior, is just out from Russell Enterprises. He has also done editorial work behind the scenes for some of your favorite books.

I’m speaking to Taylor today at his home. Or, I should say, his new home, as he has just moved. Taylor, welcome to Cover Stories with Chess Life. How is everything going with unpacking?

Cover Stories with Chess Life #35: Hans Niemann

Today’s guest on Cover Stories with Chess Life is pulling double-duty: he is the author of the April 2021 cover story, and he is also its subject.

GM Hans Niemann is, to my knowledge, America’s newest grandmaster, having crossed the 2500 barrier in December after earning his three GM norms. The title became official on January 22, 2021 after FIDE’s final approval.

This final step was the culmination of a long road for Niemann, chronicled in his article “The Road to Grandmaster.” We hear about Niemann’s early days, about his scholastic successes and later struggles, and about the mental changes he needed to make to finally achieve his goals.

Cover Stories with Chess Life #34: GM Alex Yermolinsky

Good time of day to all of you, my friends on the Cover Stories with Chess Life podcast.

There are some people who, simply by the effect of their personality or their voice, become larger than life figures in their field. Today’s guest, Grandmaster (and everyone’s favorite Uncle) Alex Yermolinsky, is one of those people.

A St. Petersburg native, Alex emigrated to the United States in 1989 after nearly a decade working as a coach in the Soviet Union. Soon his rating skyrocketed, earning the GM title and reaching the 2600s (back when that meant something), and Alex was rewarded with invitations to elite events like Hastings, Tilburg, and Wijk aan Zee. He is a veteran of many US Olympiad teams, and the winner of the 1993 (shared with Shabalov) and 1996 US Championships alongside buckets of Opens over the years.

But Alex was never simply a player. His entrepreneurial spirit was apparent from his earliest days in America. The Yermo Chess Academy, dating from around the turn of the century and based in Cleveland, was an early effort, paired with a must-read Internet site that still holds up when found on archive.org. Some of the fruits of that website, and certainly a lot of its spirit, can be found in his 1999 The Road to Chess Improvement, a title that was published to rapturous reviews and that remains one of my favorite books.

Alex became the Grandmaster in Residence at the Mechanics Institute in 1999 and held the office through 2007. He was elected to the US Chess Hall of Fame in 2012.

Currently he resides in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a relative hop, skip, and jump from my own home here in Omaha, where (as his ChessBase bio says) “between his chess work online he plays snooker and spends time outdoors - happy as a clam.”

Anyone who has met Alex knows that he is a man of great opinion, and that he is not afraid to share those opinions with anyone who asks. That’s why I asked him to write our February cover story on the Skilling Open, where Wesley So ruined Magnus Carlsen’s birthday by defeating him in the Finals. Alex is a great analyst, as the article reminds us, but he’s also an excellent writer, and I’m glad to bring him back to the pages of a magazine that he once (due to the influence of a previous editor, and following Bobby Fischer) called Chess Lies.

Cover Stories with Chess Life #33: Adisa Banjoko

If Jazz is America’s first great cultural export to the world, hip-hop is its second, and perhaps most important.

From its earliest days, emerging from DJ and MC battles in the south-south Bronx, the rise and growth of hip hop music and culture has been exponential, and today there is no corner of the globe where hip hop has not taken root, often in surprising ways. Originally born from the grinding experience of 1970s urban American life, today’s hip hop is a true creolization of cultures, mutating and transforming itself as it is constantly reinvented by its new fans and practitioners.

There are few who are as important in the history of hip-hop as is Robert Diggs, known to the world as RZA from Wu-Tang Clan. The main producer for most of the Wu-Tang’s albums, RZA is also an MC, a student of world religions and meditation, a practitioner of the martial arts, and a chess player.

Chess has long been intertwined with hip-hop culture and the Black American experience, from the barbershop like the one run by my friend Jerome Helm here in Omaha – check him out in the January issue of Chess Life Faces column – to the halls of academia, as shown by my old colleague Dr. Tommy J. Curry in his 2008 article “Hip Hop Tactics.” That’s in the Philosophy Looks at Chess volume edited by Ben Hale, where my “Garry Kasparov is a Cyborg” article can also be found.

What becomes apparent, when reading RZA’s books like the Tao of Wu and when reading this month’s Chess Life cover story, written by our guest Adisa Banjoko, is that chess and hip-hop are tied together, and that chess can be much more than the staid enterprise we sometimes limit ourselves to in our imagination.

We saw part of that in The Queen’s Gambit, a topic that Adisa talked about at length in a recent podcast episode (#141 of The Bishop’s Chronicles). We see a lot more of it in the interview, which ties chess to spirituality, the martial arts, and diet – veganism and tea. It’s a very different vision of our game than the hegemonic image would indicate, and I think a vision that we would all do well to consider these days.

Adisa “The Bishop” Banjoko is an author, an educator, and the founder of the Hip Hop Chess Federation. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram.