Raymond Keene

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Raymond Keene bigraphy, stories - British chess player

Raymond Keene : biography

29 January 1948 –

Raymond Dennis Keene OBE (born 29 January 1948) is an English chess Grandmaster, a FIDE International Arbiter, a chess organiser, and a journalist and author.p196 He won the British Chess Championship in 1971, and was the first player from England to earn a Grandmaster norm, in 1974. In 1976 he became the second Englishman, following Tony Miles, to be awarded the Grandmaster title. He represented his country in eight Chess Olympiads.

Keene retired from competitive play in 1986 at the age of thirty eight, and is now better known as a chess organiser, columnist and author. He was involved in organising the 1986, 1993 and 2000 World Chess Championships; and the 1997, 1998 and 1999 Mind Sports Olympiads;William Hartson, No rest from mental fight, The Independent, 23 August 1997 retrieved 13 October 2011 all held in London. He has been chess correspondent of The Times since 1985, and is a prolific author, having written over 100 books on chess. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to chess in 1985.

Keene is a controversial figure in the chess world, and has had disputes with figures such as Tony Miles, Viktor Korchnoi, John Donaldson and David Levy. His business dealings, and the quality of some of his chess books, have also been criticised.

Books

Keene claims to be "the author of 140 books on chess". retrieved 21 August 2009. He was the Chess Advisor to Batsford, but now writes for Hardinge Simpole, which he co-owns, and for his own company Impala. His early books such as Howard Staunton (1975, with R. N. Coles) often dealt with players with styles similar to his own. Aron Nimzowitsch: a Reappraisal (1974) is much admired and was revised and translated into Russian in 1986, with a revised third edition published in English in 1999. In 1989, he and Nathan Divinsky wrote Warriors of the Mind, an attempt to determine the 64 best chess players of all time. The statistical methods used have not met with wide approval, but the player biographies and games provide a good overview. Some of Keene’s later work has attracted criticism for sloppiness and the habit of copying passages, including errors, from one book to another.For instance review of The Brain Games World Chess Championship 2000 in Kingpin 33, p. 63-4, by Steve Giddins.Chess historian Edward Winter has written several critiques of Keene’s chess writings. Three of Keene’s books include an inaccurate description of the number of players and rounds in the 1948 World Championship Tournament with near-identical wording. ( by Edward Winter, 5987, 3 February 2009.) In his book World Chess Championship Kramnik vs Leko (Hardinge Simpole, 2004) Keene attributes a quotation to Peter Leko which he did not say and which is in fact an adaptation of a quotation from the boxer Victoriano Sosa. Winter’s research showed that the original appeared in an amended form on the internet and was then reproduced by Keene without verification. ( by Edward Winter, 3752, 21 May 2005.) Winter’s review of World Champion Combinations by Keene and Eric Schiller (Cardoza, 1999) documents a large number of factual errors in that book. ( by Edward Winter.) In his Complete Book of Beginning Chess (Cardoza, 2003) Keene claims on page 237 that Capablanca’s achievement in winning the world championship without losing a game "has never since been repeated". This overlooks Kramnik’s repetition of the feat in his match against Kasparov in 2000, which Keene organised. (Chess Facts and Fables by Edward Winter, McFarland 2006, p. 139.)

Allegations of plagiarism

John Donaldson accused Keene of committing plagiarism in The Complete Book of Gambits (Batsford, 1992).Inside Chess, 3 May 1993, p. 24-5. Donaldson wrote "Just how blatant was the plagiarism? Virtually every word and variation in the four and a half pages devoted to Lisitsin’s Gambit in Keene’s book was stolen." After Keene refused to pay Donaldson a requested $200 for the use of his material, Keene’s American publisher Henry Holt and Company ended up paying Donaldson $3000.