Like it, Ed! More anthropomorphisms of chess openings please.

This is almost exactly where I am, Guy. In my 4 years of playing chess seriously (not well, but seriously) I've always played the Sicilian. I started with the Najdorf but got too many hammerings so a year or so ago I switched to the Kan / Paulsen. I'm quite liking it - much harder for White to steamroller you but counter-attacking possibilities tend to arise if Black is patient enough.

The French waitress grabbed the upstart American grandmaster by his tie, fixing his innocent American eyes with her cold Parisian blues. "So," she cooed and snarled with inimitable Gallic charm, "you think you can play the king's pawn against me, like you are Bobby Fischer? I will teach you things you never saw in America." With that she leaned over, her jet black glistening with the lights of the Eiffel tower, and planted one right on his king's pawn.

How's that, Kevin? For more, check out www.YetmanBrothers.com

I have a feeling the French Defense shouldn't be played by anyone under 17 unless accompanied by parent or guardian.

Heh heh, thank you Ed. I read the first chapter of the story on your website and just found myself imagining it in a heavy Noo Yoick accent!

The caramel-brown eyes of the Italian starlet bore into me like seven-horsepower drill press. She'd opened with 1. P-K4 P-K4, 2. N-KB3, and I'd tried 2...N-QB3. When you're playing a dame who is hotter than a steam radiator in January it doesn't pay to try for fool tricks. She brushed back her ebony locks and eyed me up and down like tailor at the mortuary--and not just any mortuary, but the one in Beverly Hills. She reached for her king's bishop and slid him out...3.B-B4.

"We will see," she purred with her Neapolitan accent, "if you are man enough to play the Ulvestad variation."

On that note, I was just looking at this year's Bulwer-Lytton winners, and the ones in the Detective category are pretty darn saucy:





Can you believe THIS only got a Dishonorable Mention??




The Orc Discussion in the other thread naturally drew me to the Fantasy category:



It just kills me that some of these weren't fleshed out into full novels.

The hack writer desperately scrutinized the message boards, which unlike real boards have no splinters, searching for a metaphor he could steal or a clever phrase he could swipe, just like taking money off a bum downtown San Francisco--"purloin in the tenderloin" he called it in his more poetic moments, which, like his good chess games, came mercifully few and far between.

The one, in Historical Fiction, is tres magnifique:

Counter perspective:

Asking instead, not just what the World Champions played as black, but instead, what they had the most trouble handling when they themselves played e4. Kasparov vs. the Berlin, Fischer vs. the French for example.