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To: Blurb2350

Nepomniachtchi

Roman Dzindzichashvili

And he appeared in Searching For Bobby Fischer so you have no excuse for missing that one . . .


18 posted on 12/03/2021 3:36:36 PM PST by LRoggy (Peter's Son's Business )
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To: LRoggy

Alexander Konstantinopolsky


22 posted on 12/03/2021 4:22:45 PM PST by FreedomForce
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To: LRoggy
Roman Dzindzichashvili

Dzindzichashvili would on occasion play incognito in Washington Square Park (as depicted in Searching for Bobby Fischer), hustling the chess rubes for pocket money.

Some decades ago, when I was in college, I was playing in the Virginia Open in Fredericksburg, held back in the day at what was then the Howard Johnson's Hotel. Dzindzi was there, as was Igor Ivanov, the Soviet player (then untitled but later to be awarded the grandmaster title) who had defected to Canada only a year or so earlier. (Dzindzi himself had emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel back in 1977.)

Anyway, I'd gotten wiped out pretty early on in my Saturday evening game, so I left the playing site with a chess playing buddy of mine to visit some girls he knew who were attending what was then known as Mary Washington College. We ended up not getting back to the hotel until about 2:00 a.m. As we were coming in, we passed by the small (arcade) game room, where we spied Dzindzi and Ivanov together, playing pinball.

Even in my relative youth I found something quite poignant in the scene, these two men having left their own country not all that long ago (and, in Ivanov's case, with the KGB literally trying to chase him down), and one aspect of the freedom they found in the West was to be able to play pinball in the middle of the night, at Howard Johnson's Hotel in the Middle-of-Nowheresville, America. I dunno. The scene had something of a Moscow on the Hudson feel to it, and I've never forgotten it.

29 posted on 12/03/2021 4:50:50 PM PST by DSH
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To: LRoggy

Hmmm . . . you’re right. How ‘bout this: The greatest difference between the number of letters in the surname and in the given name. 16 - 5 = 11 and 14 - 3 = 11. So it’s another draw.


33 posted on 12/03/2021 5:29:08 PM PST by Blurb2350 (posted from my 1500-watt blow dryer)
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