There are those who believe that the sole duty of the poker gamesman is to build up his reputation for impenetrability and toughness by suggesting that he last played poker by the light of a moon made more brilliant by the snows of the Yukon, and that his opponents were two white slave traffickers, a ticket-of-leave man and a deserter from the Foreign Legion. To me this is ridiculously far-fetched, but I do believe that a trace of American accent - West Coast - casts a small shadow of apprehension over the minds of English players.

The theory and practice of gamesmanship; or, The art of winning games without actually cheating.

In our small chess community in Marylebone it would be mock modesty on my part to deny that I have built up for myself a considerable name without ever actuall…

How to be one up - how to make the other man feel that something has gone wrong, however slightly.

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

If you smell what The Rock is cooking!

'When everyone routinely uses profanity, it will lose its emphatic value, and then how will we express ourselves strongly? Will we be forced to rely on careful…