King’s Gambit Corrigenda

Errors in my work pain me, but they are hard to avoid in a 150,000-word book. There will be other editions and printings, in which I can excise any gremlins that may have slipped in. Kindly send me mistakes you find if they’re not listed here:

p. ix footnote. Efim Bogoljubow was born in 1889.

p. 46. In my simul game against Larsen, I moved when he arrived at the board not before. I’ve seen young players (despite repeated admonitions) move before the GM returns to their boards, but I was not one of these crass youths. I abided by the simul rules. I miswrote, and somehow neither I nor the strong players who read the book in galleys caught this. Mea culpa.

p. 52. I describe Kalmykia as a semiautonomous Russian republic. And later, on p. 305, I say that Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, when he came to power, was “the world’s youngest leader of a sovereign state.” These statements are in contradiction because Kalmykia is not sovereign. I need to research this, and clarify, just how much autonomy Kalmykia has compared to, say, New York State.

p. 89. French Defense should be Caro-Kann Defense.

p. 94. I sloppily used Russian and Soviet interchangeably. I should have written (line 7) that “a Soviet player has always held the classical world title…” and (line 9) that “it wasn’t just the Soviets’ command of the moves that made them superior at the chessboard…”

p. 127. Yacob Murey is a grandmaster.

p. 326. I have the talented Nigel Short becoming a grandmaster two years younger than he actually did. He was nineteen, not seventeen.

p. 393, note 3. My endnote about Peter Winston’s fate is wrong. The online source I used said he never made it home from the tournament. But “Shedding Some Light on ‘The Great Chess Mystery,'” in Chess Life (Oct. 2007), indicates that Winston did make it home and disappeared for good a few weeks later.

p. 428. Asa Hoffmann’s name in the index should have two n’s, as it correctly has in the rest of the book.