Two guys crazy about chess

Chess News and Chess Trivia Blog (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2010

Elliot Williams

Hello Everyone,

Chess is such a beautiful thing that you don't have to be a professional to love it. We found two very nice interviews of non-professional chess players - who are crazy about chess - and have excelled in other fields.

One is the rookie guard with the Portland Trail Blazers - Elliot Williams. Williams says he started playing when he was a student at St. George's Independent School.

"I saw some guys playing [in high school] and I thought, 'Sure, why not?'" Williams said. "Chess is not a game that you pick up right away. It's a mental game and it took me a while, but I just kept playing."

You can read the full interview here.

Charles Krauthammer

The other person crazy about chess though being in a different profession is Charles Krauthammer - the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post!

Krauthammer, in a recent interview, said he had written many columns on chess, including one each year for 20 years in Time magazine. When he was nominated for the Pulitzer in 1986, he said one of the 10 columns submitted to the judges was about one of the world championship matches between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. (He did not win the Pulitzer until the following year, when all of the submitted columns were political commentary.)

Krauthammer became hooked on the game when he was 20 — he is now 60 — and visited a friend in Cambridge, Mass. He found his friend’s roommate sitting with a chess set and an unfamiliar device.

“I said, ‘What is that?’ ” Krauthammer recalled, “And he said, ‘That is a chess clock.’ I had just come in from the plane. It was 10 o’clock at night, and I sat down to play and didn’t get up until 5 in the morning. I had found something that I loved, and I was in deep trouble.”

You can read this fascinating interview here.

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