Giving Them Their Due

Okay this is the wonderful Dr. Savielly Tartakower, and Sultan Khan, Semmering 1931.

Mr. Khan won this the final game and defeated one of the great wits of chess, the good Doctor Tartakower.

Sultan Khan was neither a sultan or a khan, which means king. It was simply his name. In life he worked as manservant for a well to do gentleman from India/Pakistan. Although his results put him in the top ten chess players of his time, and despite winning the British championship three out of the four times he entered, and despite playing first board for England three times, the World Chess Federation never granted him a title. He was neither a Grandmaster or International master. It sucks to be a dark skinned man in a white racist world.

Dr. Savielly Tartakower on the other hand has a variation of the Queen's Gambit declined, and a variation of the Caro-Kann named after him. But I rather remember him for his sweet quotes like, "The mistakes are all there, waiting to be made." "It is important that all chess players have a hobby." "I had a toothache during the first game. In the second game, I had a headache. In the third game, it was an attack of rheumatism. In the forth game, I wasn't feeling well. And in the fifth game? Well, must one have to win every game?" "A chess game is divided into three stages: The first, when you hope you have the advantage, the second, when you believe you have an advantage, and the third... when you know you are going to lose."

Therefore, by the authority vested in me as a blogger of the Internet, I hearby confer the title of Grandmaster to Mr. Sultan Khan. I confer the title Grandmaster of Chess Aphorisms to the good Doctor Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower. And I confer first place to Grandmaster Sultan Khan for best hat.