Sunday, June 21, 2009

Monokroussos on God and Steinitz

It's Steinitz who allegedly walked around barefoot challenging God and offering Him pawn and move, but I recall reading that the story may be apocryphal.

I suspect it may be. There are plenty of chessmasters who have done things to build the repuation of our royal game as a bastion of mental illness, but it is important not to multiply such stories beyond necessity.

The parallel with Dawkins, however, holds nicely.

1 comment:

JSA said...

Cool; thanks for tracking it down.

I once read Chesterton saying something like, "Chess masters always go mad; poets never do",, and remember thinking to myself that Chesterton probably didn't know that many poets. Or maybe that bipolar disorder wasn't recognized as a form of madness back then.