Wednesday, June 1, 2016

"The Half Dozen Defeats of Grandmaster Savielly Tartakover"


This is a video (in Hebrew) of an Israeli group, "Gute Gute", send to me by a colleague (link in Hebrew as well).

The song tells of Savielly Tartakover (also spelled Tartakower), who, having lost six games in a row, gave outlandish excuses for each of first five losses: he forgot who is black and who is white, arrived a day late to the game, fell asleep in the comfortable player's chair, etc. As for the sixth, he notes: 'do I have to win them all'?

This old story about Tartakover (with someone less outlandish excuses in the "original" version) is, no doubt, a tall tale, but how the story originated -- and what possessed the group to write a song about it -- is beyond me. I would not be surprised if it was told about other players as well.

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