List of famous amateur chess players

This is a list of skilled but non-professional chess players who were famous for some other reason, but whose life or work was significantly impacted by the game of chess.

• Film comedian Woody Allen authored a comical epistolary short story entitled "The Gossage- Vardebedian Papers" which takes the form of a chess game via mail along with other exchanges. The two protagonists disagree on the correct position due to alleged lost mail. Both players eventually claim victory. Allen did himself play on occasion, and taught his stepson Moses Farrow how to play.^[1]

• Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov devotes over a page of his autobiography to his hopeless lack of aptitude at chess.

  In the years that followed, I discovered that everyone beat me, regardless of race, color, or religion. I was simply the most appallingly bad chess player who ever lived, and, as time went on, I just stopped playing chess.
  My failure at chess was really distressing. It seemed completely at odds with my "smartness," but I now know (or at least have been told) that great chess players achieve their results by years and years of studying chess games, by the memorization of large numbers of complex "combinations." They don't see chess as a succession of moves but as a pattern. I know what that means, for I see an essay or a story as a pattern.
  But these talents are different. Kasparov sees a chess game as a pattern but an essay as a mere collection of words. I see an essay as a pattern and a chess game as a mere collection of moves. So he can play chess and I can write essays and not vice versa.
  That's not enough, however. I never thought of comparing myself to grand masters of chess. What bothered me was my inability to beat anyone! The conclusion that I finally came to (right or wrong) was that I was unwilling to study the chessboard and weigh the consequences of each possible move I might make. Even people who couldn't see complex patterns might at least penetrate two or three moves ahead, but not I. I moved entirely on impulse, if not at random, and could not make myself do anything else. That meant I would almost certainly lose.
  And again - why? To me, it seems obvious. I was spoiled by my ability to understand instantly, my ability to recall instantly. I expected to see things at once and I refused to accept a situation in which that was not possible.-- I, Asimov: A Memoir

  In spite of this, Asimov incorporated chess into his famous story Nightfall and his novel Pebble in the Sky.

• It is unknown if Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman played chess himself. However, the scenes from his film The Seventh Seal in which the knight from the Crusades plays a game of chess with the figure of Death is arguably the most famous usage of chess in the entire history of cinema. After Bergman's death, the chess pieces used in the film (Bergman had kept them) were auctioned off at rather high prices. Among several historical anachronisms in the film, there is a chess history inaccuracy. In the time-period of the film, the Queen was not a particularly powerful piece, yet a turning point in the story is when Death captures the Knight's Queen. When Bergman died, more than one obituary stated that Bergman had lost his chess-game with Death.

• Mathematician and fantasy author Lewis Carroll wove chess extensively into his second "Alice" book Through the Looking Glass. Most of the characters are chess pieces participating in a game on a giant chess board in which each square is about one square mile in size. Similar chess games played with human pieces on enormous fields often occurred in in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The two Queens always run very fast and the Knight character is always falling off on one side of his horse, characteristics which imitate the moves of their respective pieces in a real chess game. Carroll also composed occasional chess problems.

• Silent screen comedian Charlie Chaplin devotes two pages of his autobiography to playing chess, with particular focus on the time he was one of 20 Hollywood stars to play simultaneous chess against Sammy Reshevsky (then nine years old) at the Los Angeles Athletic Club in June 1921.

• Actor Humphrey Bogart was an excellent chess player, almost of master strength. Before he made any money from acting, he would hustle players for dimes and quarters, playing in New York parks and at Coney Island. The chess scenes in Casablanca had not been in the original script, but were put in at his insistence. A chess position from one of his correspondence games appears in the movie, although the image is a little blurred. He achieved a draw in a simultaneous exhibition given in 1955 at Beverly Hills by the famous chess Grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky and also played against George Koltanowski in San Francisco in 1952 (Koltanowski played blindfolded but still won in 41 moves).^[2]
  Bogart was a United States Chess Federation tournament director and active in the California State Chess Association, and a frequent visitor to the Hollywood chess club. The cover of the June–July 1945 issue of Chess Review showed Bogart playing with Charles Boyer, as Lauren Bacall (who also played) looks on. In June 1945, in an interview in the magazine Silver Screen, when asked what things in life mattered most to him, he replied that chess was one of his main interests. He added that he played chess almost daily, especially between film shootings. He loved the game all his life.^[3]

• Marcel Duchamp for a while abandoned painting for chess. Prior to that time, his 1911 Portrait of Chess Players ({portrait de joueurs d'echecs) contained Cubist overlapping frames and multiple perspectives of his two brothers playing chess. He dropped painting in 1923, concentrating on chess and his strength became near master class. Duchamp can be seen, very briefly, playing chess with Man Ray in the short film Entr'acte (1924) by Rene Clair. He designed the 1925 Poster for the Third French Chess Championship, and later became a chess journalist, writing weekly newspaper columns. While his contemporaries were achieving spectacular success with art, Duchamp observed, "I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position." Later he said "while not all artists are chess layers, all chess players are artists." Duchamp composed an enigmatic endgame chess problem in 1943, included in the announcement for Julian Lev's gallery exhibition "Through the Big End of the Opera Glass". It was printed on traslucent poper with the faitn inscription: "White to play and win". Grandmasters and endgame specialists have since grappled with the problem with most concluding that there is no solution.^[4] In 1968, Duchamp and John Cage appeared together at a concert entitled "Reunion", playing a a game of chess and composing Aleatoric music by triggering a series of photoelectric cells underneath the chess board.

• Mathematician Leonard Euler constructed an 8x8 square with each square containing one of the numbers from 1 to 64. This square was simultaneously a "magic square" (all the rows and columns adding up to the same sum) and a solution to the knight's move problem according to which all 64 of the squares of the chess board must be hit in a series of knight's moves. The square may be viewed here.^[5]

• American Founding Father and scientific experimenter Benjamin Franklin was an avid chess player. He was playing chess by around 1733, making him the first chess player known by name in the American colonies.^[6] His essay on the "Morals of Chess" in Columbian magazine, in December 1786 is the second known writing on chess in America.^[6] This essay in praise of chess and prescribing a code of behavior for it has been widely reprinted and translated.^{[7][8][9][10]} He and a friend also used chess as a means of learning the Italian language, which both were studying; the winner of each game between them had the right to assign a task, such as parts of the Italian grammar to be learned by heart, to be performed by the loser before their next meeting.^[11] Franklin was posthumously inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame in 1999.^[6]

• Actor and novelist Stephen Fry both plays the game and includes a philosophical conversation about chess in his novel Revenge.

• Pope John Paul II was a chess enthusiast. While acting as a vicar for University students in Krakow, Poland, the young priest, then known as Karol Wojtyla, frequently played chess with other students.^[12] However, chess problems alleged to have been composed by him have generally proved to have been hoaxes.^[13]

• Film director Stanley Kubrick was an avid chess player. As a young man in New York, he hustled chess games in the streets for money.^[14] Chess plays a role in the plot of two of his films Lolita and 2001:A Space Odyssey. In Lolita, Professor Humbert plays chess with Lolita's mother, Charlotte Haze, and announces he will "take her queen" while he has designs on her daughter who is kissing him goodnight as he speaks. This scene is not in the source novel. In 2001:A Space Odyssey, the super-computer HAL 9000 defeats astronaut Frank Poole at chess, though making a mistake in chess notation when announcing his moves, just prior to beginning to malfunction.

• Author Vladimir Nabokov wove chess themes into many of his novels. Chess plays a major role in his first novel The Defense about a young chess prodigy who has a mental breakdown. Nabokov published 18 chess problems in his anthology Poems and Problems, and composed three poems in sonnet form about chess in the Russian émigré journal Rul’ in Berlin in November 1924. His autobiography Speak, Memory compares the composition of chess problems to the composition of poetry. In his foreword to The Defense, he calls the creation of surprise twists in a novel "chess effects".^[15] A 1979 study in Yale French Review explores links between Nabokov's chess problems and his novels,^[16] as does Janet Gezari's 1971 Ph.D. thesis 'Game Fiction: The World of Play and the Novels of Vladimir Nabokov', later issued as a book entitled Vladimir Nabokov: chess problems and the novel.

• Napoleon is perhaps the most well-known victim of the chess hoax involving an apparently mechanical chess-playing machine called The Turk that was actually animated by a player hiding inside. In 1809, Napoleon arrived at Schönbrunn Palace to play the Turk. In a surprise move, Napoleon took the first turn instead of allowing the Turk to make the first move, as was usual; but the device's inventor, Mälzel. allowed the game to continue. Shortly thereafter, Napoleon attempted an illegal move. Upon noticing the move, the Turk returned the piece to its original spot and continued the game. Napoleon attempted the illegal move a second time, and the Turk responded by removing the piece from the board entirely and taking its turn. Napoleon then attempted the move a third time, the Turk responding with a sweep of its arm, knocking all the pieces off the board. Napoleon was reportedly amused, and then played a real game with the machine, completing nineteen moves before tipping over his king in surrender.^[17]

• It is unknown to what degree Edgar Allan Poe actually played chess. However, chess figures prominently in both an essay and two stories by him. He wrote an important essay speculating on the secret of the hoax chess-playing automaton The Turk entitled Maelzel's Chess Player. Poe also published a short story in which the Turk figures entitled "Von Kempelen and His Discovery". The Turk was eventually purchased by Poe's personal physician, John Kearsley Mitchell. Unrelated to the Turk, Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" contains a discussion of the psychology of chess, arguing that much greater powers of shrewdness are required to play checkers than chess, whereas the latter only requires intense concentration. In the following paragraph, Poe asserts that proficiency in the game of whist is an indicator of high general capacity for achievement, but not proficiency in chess.

I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts [checkers] than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen.
--Poe The Murders in the Rue Morgue- Paragraph 1

Whist has long been noted for its influence upon what is termed the calculating power; and men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous. Beyond doubt there is nothing of a similar nature so greatly tasking the faculty of analysis. The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.
--Poe The Murders in the Rue Morgue- Paragraph 2

• Russian composer Serge Prokofiev relates in his autobiography that he learned to play chess at age seven and it remained a lifelong passion. He became friends with various grandmasters and frequented the chess club in St. Petersburg, often spending hours on simultaneous games. According to his personal diary, he once beat the future chess champion of Cuba, Jose Raoul Capablanca.

• George C. Scott was addicted to chess according to actress Shirley MacLaine. He played frequently on movie sets, and one of the few people who beat him was director Stanley Kubrick who directed Scott in the film Doctor Strangelove.

• Radio shock jock Howard Stern plays chess every day according to a profile in the New York Times by their chess columnist.^[18]

• Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy learned to play chess at a young age and late in life played chess frequently with his biographer Aylmer Maude writing "He had no book-knowledge of it, but had played much and was alert and ingenious.".^[19] Another frequent chess companion of Tolstoy's was Prince Leonid Urusov.^[20]

• Computer scientist Alan Turing, long considered to be a major founder of the field of artificial intelligence, considered chess playing to be the ideal starting point for researching the field of machine intelligence. He was himself a mediocre player.

• Iconic Western actor John Wayne played chess frequently on movie sets according to both biographers Ronald L. Davis and Herb Fagan. His onscreen characters play chess in the films McClintock and 3 Godfathers. According to biographer Michael Munn, when Wayne was asked a question about the homosexuality of Rock Hudson, Wayne replied "Who the hell cares if he's a queer? The man plays great chess" before further expositing that Hudson's personal life was something he didn't feel he needed to know about.^[21]

• British science-fiction novelist H.G. Wells devoted an essay in his collection Certain Personal Matters entitled Concerning Chess to trying to account for humanity's passion for chess. Chess figures prominently in his short story The Moth, and somewhat incidentally in The War of the Worlds. According to biographer Vincent Brome, Wells was "bad, very bad" at chess.^[22]

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