Wednesday 19 August 2015

Have you ever been grunfled, missus?

A misprint in today's Independent chess column set me thinking about chess openings named after people. (The Independent reference should be to the Grünfeld defence, not to the Grunfled.)  Lo and behold, the estimable wikipedia has catalogued virtually (I cannot spot any omissions) all of them.

All I can add is that Leonard Barden, the veteran columnist and then a British international master, confessed in the 1960s to mis-attributing (quite innocently) the Robatsch Defence to Karl Robatsch, who did not in fact initiate it. The name nevertheless stuck for many years until being largely supplanted by Modern Defence.



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