King's Gambit Poem by gershon hepner

Injecting new thinking into the old
your logic can be start-of-art,
and though what you’re telling has often been told,
rethinking can help it impart
a message that makes it appear to be new,
with a logic both ancient and fresh.
Without revolutions, if you are a Jew
you can turn what are old words to flesh.

Inspired a comment made by Bruce Pandolfini, a chess teacher whose career was launched by Bobby Fischer after he defeated Boris Spassky in 1972.
He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, but, indifferent to study and classes because they took time away from chess, he dropped out at 16. Mr. Pandolfini remembered: “When I was a kid, I’d go to the Marshall early in the morning, and Fischer would be there. There was a cabinet of filed games from the 19th century, thousands of games that someone, maybe a lot of people, had put on index cards and diagrammed by hand, and Fischer would be playing them, one at a time. I couldn’t understand why he was doing it. These were games using discarded ideas — the King’s Gambit and so on.” The King’s Gambit — an opening strategy in which White sacrifices a kingside pawn to get a quick attack — had long been dismissed as too risky and romantic, seductive only to the blindly attack-minded. Bobby Fischer, along with his contemporaries, favored other strategies, known by names like the Sicilian Defense (the epitome of a sharp counterattack by Black) or the Ruy Lopez (a slowly building game of maneuver for White) . “But Fischer’s argument was that the old ideas were not necessarily bad ideas, ” Mr. Pandolfini said. “They had merely fallen out of favor, and by injecting new thinking into an old idea, you created state-of-the-art logic.”


1/18/08