Subject: Site review - Chess History Date: 1999/09/13 Author: Mark Weeks <100046.2106@compuserve.com> This eighth review, following the Chess History bookmarks, is for 'Chess History' by Bill Wall. I'm skipping over 'Chess Downloads' by Klaus Wrba, because it is a list of links which was recently added as a bookmark. I'll come back to it in the future. Wall's main page is at http://www.misc.traveller.com/chess/history/, which makes it one of the Traveller Chess Sites. The addresses for these sites recently changed to 'Live On The Net', so the new address is http://chess.liveonthenet.com/chess/history/. This page is not quite the same as the Traveller page, although it links to files having identical text. Bill Wall is a compiler of chess lists -- lots of lists, long lists. His main page ('Bill Wall's Chess Page') at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/chess.htm is proof of that. The GeoCities page is a mixture of lists related to chess history ('Computer Chess History' & biographies of 'Masters of Chess'), plus lists of general chess interest ('Art and Chess' & 'Epigrams of Chess'). For this review, I'll restrict my comments to the material found on 'Live On The Net' (& 'Traveller'). The main page has six links -- '0-1799', '1800-1899', '1900-1930', '1931-1960', '1961-1989', & '1990-present' -- each link covering that period of chess history. The linked pages are formatted text files where the entries are sorted chronologically in the format... ...There is no use of hypertext links or any other HTML on the pages. This material would be an excellent candidate for loading into a database to do searches on a specific topic, like 'Fischer', and have all of the entries for Fischer listed together. It would help to identify & eliminate some of the inaccuracies that I'll cover below. The first entry, for the year '0531' (note the leading zero), is 'INDIA; Chess introduced into Persia from India during reign of Khusrau Nushirwan. (531-578)'. The last entry, for '1998.11.23', is 'Vladimir Bagirov of Latvia wins 8th World Senio Chess Championship, Austria.' (sic). In an archived article on the Chess Cafe (http://www.chesscafe.com/text/winter01.txt), titled 'A Question of Credibility', Edward Winter accused Wall of sloppiness, or more precisely, of possessing a '10-watt searchlight'. Is this fair? I decided to check Wall's facts for one topic. I chose Lasker, because there at least two well known historical personalities with this surname, & because I know enough about the former world champion to avoid having to look up most of Wall's facts. Using the 'Find' function of my browser, I searched each of Wall's pages on 'Lasker' & pasted the relevant lines into a separate list. I could also have downloaded & searched the pages using a simple tool like GREP, but I wasn't expecting too many references. I found 46. After I've posted this message, I'll attach the full list as a reply. Without spending too much time, I was able to identify a number of discrepancies which I'll present in chronological order. --- >1890.07.26 > Berlin, Bertold Lasker & Emanual Lasker 1st. I don't remember this & it looks suspicious. I can find no mention of it in other reference material, although it might be true. --- >1899 > Blackburne beat Lasker. 1st time a Br player beat a reigning ch. There is no mention of the tournament where this happened, which was London 1899, where Lasker finished first. --- Omissions are a problem. There is no mention of Paris 1900, where Lasker was first. Although Wall notes that Marshall won Cambridge Springs 1904, he does not mention that he finished ahead of Lasker (& Janowski) at 2nd-3rd. --- >1907.01.26 > Lasker-Marshall world ch match, NY. >1907.04.08 > Lasker beats Marshall, 11.5-3.5, Baltimore. >1907.06 > Lasker-Marshall match, Lasker won. There are three different dates for the Lasker - Marshall title match. --- >1910.01.07 > Lasker-Schlechter world ch match, Vienna. >1910.02.10 > Lasker defeats Schlecter in 10th match game to retain title, Berlin. >1910.10 > Lasker-Schlecter match. There are two different dates for the Lasker - Schlechter title match. Schlechter's name is not spelled consistently. --- >1911.04.10 > Capablanca defeats Lasker to become world champion. >1921.03.15 > Lasker-Capablanca world championship match, Havana. >1921.04.28 > Capa beats Lasker, 9-5, Havana. >1921.06 > Capablanca-Lasker match, won by Capablanca. Lasker ch for 26.8 yrs. There are three different dates for the Lasker - Capablanca title match. The first date is wrong by a decade. --- >1923 > Marshall successfully defended his title in a match with Edward Lasker, by a score of 5-4. Here there is a lack of precision. It's not clear from the context which title was on the line. I looked at the page again & couldn't tell. I suppose it's the U.S. Championship, but it could be another prestigious title. --- >1941.01.11 > LASKER; Emanuel Lasker (b. 1868) died in Manhattan. >1945.04.17 > LASKER; Emanuel Lasker wins New York international. Em.Lasker returns from the dead to win a tournament. --- So Winter has a point. None of the Wall pages can be taken at face value. They all need to be confirmed against another source. In the same article Winter took Mark Crowther to task for sloppy prose. It is certainly Winter's right to demand the same level of perfection from others that he achieves himself -- it is one reason why he is so well respected. The reference material for chess history exists mostly on paper. The Walls & Crowthers of the world are helping to shift that material to electronic media. It will be a long, long road before this shift is complete & there will be many accidents like those I've discovered in Wall's work. In the meantime, I'm glad to have Bill Wall's lists & Mark Crowther's reporting, and I'll live with the imperfections. It is much easier to fix the errors than it is to compile the same material from scratch. -- Respectfully, Mark Weeks