No More Rooking in the Free World

Vasily Vasilyevich Smyslov, former Soviet and Russian chessmaster, has died at the age of 89. The Brooklyn Dodgers of international chess, he was World Chess Champion from 1957 to 1958, losing on 8 other occasions. He was twice equal first at the Soviet Championship (1949, 1955), but in Communism, isn’t everyone equal? His total of 17 Chess Olympiad medals is the all time record, and in five European Team Championships, Smyslov won ten gold medals. Smyslov was widely regarded as a cunning innovator, developing lots of tactics I won’t even pretend to understand, and earning a character being named after him by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Don had him last year before abandoning us