Clash Of The Woodpushers Poem by Kim Barney

Clash of the Woodpushers

A fictional chess game
between Kim Barney and Sylvia Frances Chan

Dear Sylvia, I must confess:
I really loved this game of chess!
(She had the Black and I had White,
and this is how began the fight :)

I moved e4, she moved e5;
when playing chess, I feel alive!
Knight to f3, knight to c6;
does she know she'll be in a fix?

My bishop now goes to c4;
will she do what I'm hoping for?
She does! A kiss I could give her!
She's falling into my Fried Liver*!

Knight to f6 was her reply,
and with my spirits soaring high,
my knight is planted on g5.
Is there some way she can survive?

Pawn to d5 would seem her best,
but there is much more to this test!
My pawn takes pawn, and then her knight
takes pawn. So far this works out right!

And now here comes my big surprise!
Sylvia cannot believe her eyes
when knight takes pawn there on f7
and I am on my way to heaven!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Poet's notes: *The Fried Liver attack is my favorite opening in chess.

I invented it over the board one day in a game at the Grand Junction Chess Club in Grand Junction, Colorado. The chess club was held at the local Lutheran church at that time. This would have been either 1968 or 1969.

I didn't know it had been played before and actually had a name!

Then one day I saw in a book that it had been played by Bobby Fischer and that it was called the Fried Liver.

Still later I found that Paul Morphy had played it more than a hundred years earlier!

All the books say it is unsound, and it is, but Black has so many ways to go wrong, he is sure to find one of them, especially if he has never seen it before, so I play it every chance I get.

I have played this gambit as White hundreds of times and have only lost a handful of games.

Sylvia started this by posting a poem about the two of us playing chess, so this is my response to her poem. Her poem is called 'Our Chess Competition' and she has also posted copies in German and Dutch.
21 May 2020