Talk:Eric Schiller

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[edit] Old talk

I strongly object to the negative remarks made by Camembert on the Eric Schiller biography. In the first place, Camembert is not a chess player, or at least this name is unknown to chess. In addition, it can seen by his remarks about Judit Polgar that he knows nothing about chess or about her. It is further objectional that somebody can use a fake name to attack somebody on Wikipedia.

What I am objecting to is the following remarks by Camembert, "Many of them have received scathing reviews: reviewing for the Chess Cafe, Carsten Hansen said Schiller's tome on the Frankenstein-Dracula Variation of the Vienna Game was "by far THE WORST BOOK I HAVE EVER SEEN" [1], while Tony Miles' famous review of Unorthodox Chess Openings for Kingpin consisted of two words: "Utter crap."

I revised Schiller's biography and within just a few minutes Camembert put this all back in. I feel that he should be banned and blacklisted from Wikipedia for this.

The fact is that Eric Schiller has written more than one hundred published books on chess and dozens of published articles in academic publications on Linguistics. If he were such a bad writer as Camembert claims, nobody would buy his books and no publisher would publish them. In addition, the authors of the two negative reviews which Camembert cites were political oponents of Schiller (one of whom is now dead), so it is simply wrong to cite them.

I request that Camembert who knows nothing of which he speaks be banned from Wikipedia.

I would suggest that either your comments are in bad faith or you do not know what you are talking about. Anyone who has published at least one hundred books ( and from memory claimed on the back of one book to have published around two hundred) cannot be a good writer. As Winter has demonstrated his works are filled with numerous historical and literary bloopers

While it may be the case that too much space is given to these arguments to suggest that these arguments are totally unmerited, and more that the wikipedian who wrote them deserves to be banned is risible. One of the main reasons Schiller is a notable figure is the scathing attacks made on him by Winter, Miles et al.

"Anybody who has published at least one hundred books cannot be a good writer???" If that doesn't deserve the Wiki-dunce-cap award of the year I don't know what does. "One of the main reasons Schiller is a notable figure is the scathing attacks made on him by Winter, Miles et al." He wrote over 100 books and yet you claim he is famous because of his REVIEWS? Walk into any bookstore in the USA you can see his name on the shelves--several times over--and yet you think that this man would be unheard of if it wasn't for book reviews? This is just all so much nonsense, and moreover the biography reads like it was written by a grade school child with a vendetta. I haven't made any edits but in my opinion this is one of the worst biographies I have read in Wikipedia, and I've read hundreds of them.

Daniel Freeman 03:41, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ==============

On Wed, 31 Aug 2005 06:07:00 GMT, "Alan OBrien" <alaneobrienSPAM@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

>I appreciate you sticking up for Schiller, but the paragraph you obkect to: > >> What I am objecting to is the following remarks by Camembert, "Many of >> them have received scathing reviews: reviewing for the Chess Cafe, >> Carsten Hansen said Schiller's tome on the Frankenstein-Dracula >> Variation of the Vienna Game was "by far THE WORST BOOK I HAVE EVER >> SEEN" [1], while Tony Miles' famous review of Unorthodox Chess >> Openings for Kingpin consisted of two words: "Utter crap." > >...is in fact entirely correct. I suppose you are saying that there should >be no mention of those two reviews. But for many of us that is what Schiller >is most famous for.


On 30 Aug 2005 23:29:31 -0700, "politikalhack@gmail.com" <politikalhack@gmail.com> wrote:

>Schiller has written more good books than he is generally given credit >for, but Alan O'Brien's remark is rather fair. > >Ten years or so ago, I remember making some deprecating remark about a >Schiller book (don't remember which one) which IMO was not good at all. > The next time I ran in to Eric, I felt obliged to reference the remark >and apologize: he good-naturedly said, "Don't worry, I'm used to it." > >Schiller gave a scathing but just review of my recent play

Yes. I am saying that those two quotes from negative reviews should not be included in any encyclopedia article. It would be perfectly OK to add External Links to those negative reviews, However, if you read an article in Encyclopedia Britannica, would you expect to find the words "THE WORST BOOK I HAVE EVER SEEN" and "Utter crap"?

An encyclopedia article should deal in facts, not opinions. Calling a Schiller book "Utter crap" is clearly an opinion. This comment should be removed from Wikipedia.

If such a comment appears in a book review or in a newsgroup such as rec.games.chess.politics, that is a different matter altogether, because the expression of personal opinions is called for there. You will notice that I have not complained about the more than one hundred personal attacks Bill Brock has directed towards me on rec.games.chess.politics, but I did object when Bill Brock attacked me on Wikipedia encyclopedia.

Another pont is that Eric Schiller writes his books to be read by 1500 players. His purpose is to entertain and to teach a little about chess while doing so. His book about the Frankenstein-Dracula Variation of the Vienna Game is a perfect example. It is filled with quotes and spoofs from Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. Naturally, a grandmaster like Miles or a FIDE Master like Hansen will not like such a book, but Schiller knows that they were not going to buy his book anyway. Schiller books are popular with lower-level players, and that is his intended audience.

I am also annoyed at the name "Frankenstein-Dracula Variation" of the Vienna Game. I looked this up and discovered that this is an opening I have been playing for Black since the early 1960s. I played the black side of this opening to defeat master Don Sutherland in the 1964 Northern California Championship at the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco. Who gave anybody the right to rename this old opening the Frankenstein-Dracula Variation of the Vienna Game?

By the way, is "Alan OBrien" the same person as Camembert?

Sam Sloan

I think any strong chessplayer will tell you that Eric Schiller is a complete hack of a writer. Most of his books are slopped together with very little attention. Nor is the analysis in them at all accurate. The Carsten Hansen review linked by Camembert explains in some detail why Schiller's "Frankenstein-Dracula" book is a classic example of a poorly written (and that's being charitable) Schiller book. One can debate whether this Wikipedia article on Schiller has an appropriate tone for an encyclopedia, but I am mystified by your suggestion that Camembert should be banned for accurately quoting reviews critical of Schiller's books.
I expect that you will rejoin that my "name is unknown to chess," (as you said of Camembert, whose real name I suspect is not "Camembert"), and/or that I am Camembert's sockpuppet (as you suggested of Alan O'Brien). To answer these in advance, I am not Camembert's sockpuppet and have never met the man. My real name is Frederick Rhine, I am a USCF National Master, and a USCF Senior Master at Correspondence Chess. You can find two of my games in Chess Informant, volumes 32 and 57. The opening novelty in the first game, Rhine-Sprenkle, was voted by the Informant editors as the 8th-9th most theoretically important in volume 32 (as you can see in volume 33). Nunn spends a chapter on it in all three editions of his classic Beating the Sicilian. So I know something of chess, and no doubt Carsten Hansen and the late GM Tony Miles (the two reviewers quoted in the article) know/knew a great deal more.
Of course, if you think the Schiller article is not NPOV, you are welcome to balance it with positive reviews by strong players of Schiller's books -- if you can find any. In fairness, some of Schiller's books that have co-authors are actually good -- such as the suggestively named Big Book of Busts -- but I suspect that is more due to John Watson's work than Schiller's. Krakatoa 16:00, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
Disclosure: I have cordial relations with both Fred Rhine and Eric Schiller. Schiller started writing books to support himself while in graduate school. It's hard to maintain both quality and quantity. Yes, Miles's "review" has become famous; it would be silly not to quote it. Eric has written or co-written several good books; Fred has noted a proper way to address NPOV issues. Billbrock 18:40, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
Possibly amusing P.S. - I met Fred Rhine circa spring 1979, when I was working as a clerk at Powell's bookstore on 57th Street. He was buying a handful of Reinfeld books, I warned him not to, and he explained he was buying as a collector.... Billbrock 22:54, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
You love telling that story, Bill. Yes, it's true. I remember the encounter. I didn't recognize you, but thought it was weird that a bookstore employee was trying to persuade me not to buy the books I was buying.
Fred Reinfeld, while even more prolific than Schiller, was head and shoulders above him both as a writer and a player. I wrote most of the Wikipedia entry on Reinfeld, and was quite impressed by the guy -- and not just because he and I have almost the same name. He wrote some excellent books (biographies of Lasker, Nimzowitsch, Capablanca, etc.), but always said that the schlock he wrote for fish (I'm sure he didn't put it quite that bluntly) were his big sellers. But even those books by Reinfeld are pretty good. They're instructive, well-written for their intended audience, and are not full of mistakes -- unlike Schiller's books. A lot of beginners have learned about tactics from 1001 Winning Chess Sacrifices and Combinations, for example. You could do a lot worse, and buying Schiller's books is a prime example of that. Krakatoa 00:30, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
I thought Schiller's book on the Catalan was pretty good. (And I learned a lot about chess from the books Keene co-authored on the Pirc-Modern and Keene's brilliant study of Nimzowitsch--which is to say the "hacks" of today weren't always hacks, so be charitable, folks--doing stuff is hard.) It would be fair to add something about Eric's significant contributions as an organizer--wasn't he behind the 1983(?) World Student Team, held at the U of Chicago? He was my immediate predecessor (circa 1988-89) as editor of the Illinois Chess Bulletin, and did a fine job.
Fred is right: Reinfeld is cool. Billbrock 02:46, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
I haven't seen Schiller's book on the Catalan. It may well be good. He is a strong enough player that he ought to be able to write decent books, particularly given the availability these days of Fritz and such to check one's analysis -- but I don't think he usually puts in the time necessary to write good books. I wouldn't throw Keene into the "hack" category, for the reasons you cite. He is one of those players (Soltis is another) who are quite strong (both GM's), have written some excellent books, but sometimes churn out junk to make a buck (see Nunn's criticism of Soltis' pamphlet on the Giuoco Piano, which presents the Møller Attack as a strong line for White, giving some throwaway analysis as to how to meet 13...h6!). Of course, the "Winning with the Latvian Gambit" syndrome is a big problem for authors -- they write a book on some highly dubious line, which must have "Winning with the" in the title to sell books, and then feel obliged for consistency's sake to present the dubious line as being incredibly strong, never mind what those pesky theoreticians say about it. Most professional chessplayers don't make big bucks, so I'm sure there's a great temptation to publish less-than-stellar work to make some money. And unfortunately there may often be an inverse relationship between the quality of a book and how well it sells -- the schlocky "Winning with the" opening books sell a lot better than the loving produced biographies of Nimzowitsch. Krakatoa 18:47, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

There are several problems with your point. Perhaps most important is that Miles himself had a reputation. Miles was constantly attacking chess personalities in print. Among his many victims were Anatoly Karpov, Raymond Keene, Woman's Grandmaster Martha Fierro, Indian Chess Organizer Umar Koya, Nigel Short, and many others. The list is long. Any time you read a Miles article you could be almost certain that it would contain an attack on somebody.

It is well known that Miles even got into fistfights in chess tournaments. He even punched me out during the 1986 World Chess Olympiad in Dubai because of his mistaken belief that I had written something derogatory about him.

Miles was known to be mentally ill. He served time in both jails and mental hospitals.

The negative review by Miles of an Eric Schiller book must be taken in this context. Unfortunately, the original author of the article about Schiller appears not to be a chess player. His biography of himself describes himself as a "music student" and says nothing about chess. He probably did not even know that Miles was mentally ill and prone to attacks on people and he probably did not know that Schiller has written more than one hundred chess books and the fact that he has received two negative reviews means little.

Again it must be emphasized that Schiller states that he writes his books for Class C chess players. His point is a very good one, which is that there are only a few thousand chess masters in the world whereas there are millions of Class C players. Is it better to write a book for a few thousand potential readers, or for the millions? Schiller knows that chess masters rarely buy chess books. They have their own computer databases and do their own home analysis to prepare for tournaments. Class C players on the other hand will appreciate and buy a chess book with some tricky lines that their rival Class C players might fall into, even though the masters might consider the same lines to be unsound and unplayable at the top levels.

Sam Sloan

What about Carsten Hansen? Is he a drooling lunatic too? Krakatoa 17:30, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
I don't really like spending time on edit wars, but I suppose I ought to respond.
This idea that Schiller has only received two bad reviews in his life is, as I daresay you know, not correct. He's rather well known for getting bad reviews. Here, for example, is the BCF bookshop (which you would think would benefit by giving glowing reviews to everything) saying of the same book Hansen reviews that it "surely belongs in the Chamber of Horrors". I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to dig up more opinions like this. I do take your point about him writing for Class C players (although I don't see how that can forgive the kind of mistake found in 639 Essential Endgame Positions that Hansen deals with in his review), and I've added a quote from John Watson dealing with this to the article (I note, however, that one of the books Watson defends on the grounds of it not being for advanced players is advertised on Schiller's website as being "For Advanced Players"; make of that what you will).
Incidentally, I play chess, read a lot about it, and own quite a lot (too many) chess books. I'm not an especially good player--really just an enthusiastic patzer. The significance of any of that escapes me. --Camembert 17:50, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

OK. I am satisfied with Camembert's balancing. The article is okay now.

Sam Sloan 19:16, 2 September 2005 (UTC) Sam Sloan Sam Sloan 19:16, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Camembert added quotes from a positive review of two of Schiller's books by John Watson, Schiller's sometime co-author. I think this is a good effort at providing balance -- ironic that Camembert rather than one of Schiller's defenders did this. Krakatoa 17:38, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

"I think any strong chessplayer will tell you that Eric Schiller is a complete hack of a writer." This gets a big loud resounding "so what??" Wikipedia indexes musical bands, does it not? Does it tell us which bands produce good music and which produce poor music? Wikipedia indexes painters, right? Does it say which ones are hacks and which ones are eminently talented? Wikipedia indexes actors? Does it mention which actors are talentless hacks and which ones are geniuses? The answers to all of this are, of course, "no", "no", "no", and "no". So why are authors treated differently? Daniel Freeman 10:59, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia should report who gets good or bad reviews, as long as the sources are reputable. e.g. (the first widely-panned actors that sprung to mind), negative film reviews are reported in the Olsen twins article. Peter Ballard 12:53, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] All those books

What do you say we prune the list a little and include several of the more notable or better selling - the article is in danger of looking like an infomercial otherwise... --SpinyNorman 06:55, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

What source is there for the claim that "Schiller was for many years the right-hand man of World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov."? What source is there for the claim that "Barnes & Noble bookstores have sold more than one hundred thousand books written by Eric Schiller"? (I agree with the "infomercial" comment of SpinyNorman.) - Louis Blair (6 March 2006)

[edit] Linguistics section

...sounds like another infomercial. It would be a favor to Eric to shorten this.... Billbrock 04:44, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree. Would it be true to say that Schiller is not notable as a linguist? i.e. he may be a very good linguist, but if he was not a chess player/author, would his achievements as a linguist be worthy enough to get him an entry in Wikipedia? I suspect not, just as Mikhail Botvinnik was doubtless a very good electrical engineer but his engineering feats would not get him into Wikipedia either. And the same for most (but not quite all) chess players who also have/had a day job. Therefore, unless I hear an objection in (say) the next week, I'll reduce the linguist section to a single paragraph, maybe even a single sentence. Rocksong 03:31, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
No objections, I'll cut it down shortly. (p.s. I am same person as User:Rocksong). Peter Ballard 03:11, 26 May 2007 (UTC)