Friday, April 6, 2012

Brazen moves?

" It was one of the most brazen moves in the chess world since the Najdorf Sicilian Defense, perhaps even the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit."
   One of my agents sent that quote to me today and I couldn't imagine what they were talking about. Forget the Najdorf, but more brazen than than the BDG? Gotta be the Jerome Gambit, I guessed.
   Nope, turns out it was another story about Susan Polgar moving her gang from Texas Tech to Webster. You can see the story in the link at the end of this.
    All I can say is it's about time. Colleges have been buying big time sports championships for decades now, and it's time for chess to get in on the action. Sure, it'll make it harder for the real amateurs, students, you know, to complete.
   The only way I got to play tennis at Auburn centuries ago--well decades anyway--was that in those days all the scholarships had to go to the big moneymaking sports. The few colleges that gave tennis scholarships, Florida for one, I recall, bought up the good players, and the other schools made do with the second-raters, like myself.
   So no money, no scholarships was good for me. Tulane was still in the SEC in those days, and one year I got to spend the week of the conference tournament in New Orleans. Compensation for getting knocked out early by one of the moneyed players was freedom to spend the rest of the week crawling the city--Bourbon Street mainly.
   Still, I'm okay with buying the best players you can. I just hope it just doesn't go so far as offering bounties for knocking players out of the game. Somebody told me they do that sort of thing in big money football.


Bold Move In The Small World Of College Chess