From Michael Smithson, St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK
I read with interest your article “Is it checkmate for the standard version of chess?”. As the great-grandson of the mathematician Frank Morley, who started his life as an avid chess player at age 10, I was introduced to chess by my grandfather, his youngest son (10 January, p 13).
As a youngster, I experimented with hexagonal chess boards, played Chinese chess and Go, and I developed a quad-game board where standard chess (and draughts), Chinese chess, Japanese chess (Shogi) and Go could all be played. I am now introducing chess to my 7-year-old grandson, Francis Morley Michael. While we have so far stuck to playing on a standard chess board, the games are anything but the standard version. It is checkmate against me every time as Francis makes up his own rules and gobbles up all my pieces.
Hopefully, by age 10, he will play by standard, or fairer, rules, or something completely different that allows the game of chess to be more enjoyable for players of different rankings.
Advertisement
