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🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Wed, Apr 20, 2016 12:58 AM UTC:

While browsing through Golombek's Encyclopedia of Chess, I noticed an entry on a Chess player with my birthday. And besides having my birthday, he was born 12 years before me, which also places him in the same Chinese astrological sign. Out of curiosity about such things, I wanted to look him up and find out how much he is like me. His name is Tony Miles, and when I looked him up on Wikipedia, I learned that he's already dead. He died of heart failure in 2001 at the age of 46. So I've already outlived him. He became a Grandmaster in 1976 at the age of 21. After losing all his games against Garry Kasparov in 1986, he had a mental breakdown in 1987. From what I gather from the Wikipedia article, his identity was wrapped up in being the #1 Chess player in the UK, and jealousy of those who took his place drove him mad.

The main thing we had in common is an interest in Chess. But I have normally been more interested in challenging myself than in gaining supremacy at a particular game. I quit Chess club in high school, because some people there were more focused on winning than on the intellectual challenge of playing Chess. I have also avoided Chess competition, because intellectual challenge interests me more than memorizing opening positions for the sake of winning against someone who might otherwise be a better player. I eventually gravitated towards Chess variants, because this is an arena where intellectual challenge and having fun are more important than being the top player at a particular game.


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