Author: Fernando Villegas
Date: 10:28:13 10/31/98
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Hi Quenton. In fact I also read the book, although just one time and my opinion did not change after that. Yes, the guy agonized, but in the end, agonizing or not, he pushed the boy. Why? Because being himself an average, mediocre writer, tried to become something through his son. Is an od history this one of a father fulfiling his frustrade goals trough his children. Besides, for what? For chess... I can tolerate a father like Leopold Mozart pushing his son to become the greatest genius of all times in the most marvelous of all forms of arts, something that had enriched the life of millions, but to play chess? And then, who is Waitzkin now after so much effort and pain? Just another IM, not even a real top GM. Better for him and for the world had been to be a good dentist or something. There is something annoying in chess precisely because the huge abysm between the efforts and sacrifices that demand from smart people and the hollowness of the activity as such. I have seen too much bright minds in my own little country, perfectly ruined by chess, people that abandoned his careers in engineering, law, arts, etc just for getting a better place in a local tournament... And then there are a lot of people that does not know really what a destructive machine chess can be and that caress the idea to teach chess in the schools as a mean to improve achademic proficiency. Nuts! If you want to stimulate smarts kids, give them more maths, writting, etc, but not chess; that is the surest way to lose some of them in a closed way, in an unfruitful way to nothingness. Too much glamour has been shed over chess unmtil the point it seems something special, and it is not something more special than checkers or Othello. Imagine a guy saying Othello should be imparted in ths schools to improve kids's minds.... Chess, like liquour, is great but must be handled qwith care. Me, myself, I have lost many hours that I could put to better use in writting my books instead of just playing a chess program. Yes, this is a dangerous drug not fitted for kids. Once I talked with a Soviet GM -now in USA- and he recognized that ches was used by autorities to keep people thinking in nothing but a board instead of the miserable kind of life they were coerced to endure. Fernando
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