Hall of Fame - Chess Profile … Norman Stephenson
Q When did you first pick up the chess pieces and become interested in the game of Chess? How old were you.It was some time in 1952 at my High School. One day it was raining and I went along to the lunch-time chess club where someone showed me the moves. There was an initial attraction (I even made some cardboard pieces at home) but within a few days I was back to kicking a ball around the quadrangle and forgot all about Chess. Then, about four years later, a World War 1 vet living nearby asked me to play a few games with him after which my interest was re-sparked. Born in 1940, I was 16½ when I joined my first chess club.Q Which club did you first attend and where was it ?Mum wrote to the Evening Gazette enquiring - and Tommy Wise, their columnist, replied with details of the Middlesbrough Club. It was within walking distance at the YMCA building on the north corner of Southfield and Woodlands Roads.Q. Who encouraged you to take up the game and play at a competitive level. Did you have any coaching.Ron Thomas, a year older than me, was a big inspiration at the start. We came from similar backgrounds and the reverence he felt and showed for the great players of the past had a big effect on me. I’ve been coached, like all players, by the Chess literature and by my opponents – but never personally, in any formal sense.Q Can you remember the very first competitive game you played? Where was it and who was your opponent ; did you win.I won the club’s Minor Tournament over the winter of 1956/57 which qualified me for the Middlesbrough Championship tournament for the following season. I have the game scores against Dr Jackson (club President) and Don Wake. During the following few years, I played a lot of Chess locally – travelling by bus, I won Club Championships at Middlesbrough, Stockton and Hartlepool.
Q What is the highest rating you have had in your chess career and when was that?I never kept records of it but in the late-60s I was usually in the old “3a” category, which I think was 210 – 216. Dave Levens once told me that I’d reached 218 sometime in the early 70s and was 30th or so in the UK rankings, but I haven’t see that in print myself. There’s talk of putting all the old grade lists on the Internet – that would be quite interesting for us old-timers to see.In my time, there weren’t the FIDE-rated tournaments to play in and I didn’t get an ELO-rating until Dundee in 1993 – where I got a 2286 performance. I recall Tim Wall telling me there that it was a mistake to enter the lists at below 2300 (!) Of course, Tim was a very strong North-East player - he only missed out on an IM title later by a technicality, I think. Anyway, I wasn’t able to increase my ELO at all above that first one and it dropped below 2200 a few years ago. Q How many times have you won the Cleveland Individual Championship- which years?I was away from the area in 1961-1964 and 1975-1983 but usually played when I was here until half-dozen or so years ago. I guess I won the County Championship roughly half the times I played in it … but don’t forget I had an in-built advantage in some of them: Tommy and David, his son, always drew - so if I could get the full point against either of them and a draw against the other, I’d won our little tournament within a tournament – and I was very lucky against Tommy several times! I won it for the following seasons:1959/60 1964/65 1966/67 1969/70 1072/73 1973/74 1974/75 1985/86 1988/89 1992/93 1996/97 1997/98 1998/99 2001/02 Tommy won it 12 times between 1949 and 1972, sharing it twice with me (after play-offs) and David won it 8 times between 1974 and 2005, shared once with me … see what I meant above! Q In chess what do you consider your best achievementIt’s hard to say really – because it means comparing performances over a long time-span, doesn’t it? I would have to choose between:1) attaining the same playing standard as Tommy Wise in the early days – he was a rôle model for me in Chess (and other things); 2) averaging 5¼ points, nearly 50%, in my British Championship appearances … I think that was OK for a mere club player; 3) winning the British Senior Championship in 2003 and 2004, the latter one shared with my good friend of 50 years, David Smith; 4) managing and coaching the England U-18 Glorney and Faber teams for a decade – we won both the trophies many times; 5) coaching eight youngsters on a personal level who all turned out well and who all represented England in teams play.
Q Whom do you consider the strongest local player you have played, the one that gave you the most trouble.Again, we have the problem of comparing players over a time-span.My results against whom I consider all-time “top four” opponents:
We can see that Dave Wise probably edges the others out as my personal bête-noire, but Richard Hall through the early 1970s certainly ‘had my number’ and was +4/=6/-0 against me when I went off to London in 1975; I was able to even up the score a bit after I came back in 1983. It has been no secret to any of our contemporaries that David Smith has always been able to outplay me in a positional game but, despite the above arithmetic, I have always had the feeling that Tommy had the best combination of natural talent and ‘work-organisation’ of any local player I have ever faced. He was certainly a player who would have benefited very greatly from having more time to work at his game. Q Have you played in the British Championships and what was your best placing.I played in The British nine times with the following results:
My best placing was the =12th in the first of these, at Oxford. Q If you had had the time to pursue Chess at a semi professional level do you believe you could have achieved more.Yes – I don’t think there’s much doubt about that. It would apply to nearly everyone who has the necessary modicum of talent for Chess. If you talked to any of the players I’ve coached on a personal level, you’d find that (apart from the very top players) I do not consider so-called ‘natural talent’ to be as important as the organisation and work away from the board that a player brings to his game. In the build-up for the race to the South Pole, Roald Amundsen said: ‘Victory awaits him who has everything in order’. He won that race.Q Of the world champions which one has been the biggest influence on your chess over the years.Again, there’s no question in my mind that it was Mikhail Botvinnik who had the greatest influence on my own approach to the game and whose example set the standards for what I asked of the players that I have worked with as a Coach. Botvinnik’s methods are still apt.Q Who do you think has been the greatest player of all time in the world.I think that it is clearly Garry Kasparov, although I consider Bobby Fischer’s achievements on a personal level – working on his own and without modern technology – to be the greater. Tal used to say of Bobby that he was the first real professional player. Anyway, I think Kasparov and Fischer are a long way ahead of any of the others.Q Do you believe Classical chess has seen its best days and what do you think of chess the way it is played today at the top level. Has chess moved on from the 20th Century?Without doubt, Chess has moved on. Probably owing to Kasparov’s style and success, the game has become more dynamic. Just like the modern game of Cricket, the best players are no longer ‘servants to orthodoxy’. Many of them play a sort of poker at the table but not quite in the Tal style; these players really believe that anything that works is good play.Q What was/is your main profession.I’m a Chartered Engineer and the first half of my working life was in the fields of metalliferous mining and metal extraction & refining.
The second half has been spent as a Lecturer in Engineering subjects, including Applied Mathematics. At 69 years old, I am still lecturing part-time at Teesside University but I guess it will be my last year. Q Do you have any other hobbies/sports
Outside my working-life … which I was passionate about … I once listed my ambitions as wanting to play: Bridge like Terence Reese; Chess like Bobby Fischer; the mouth organ like Bob Dylan! Well, I never achieved any of them and never got out of the starting-blocks with the last one. However, I had more success at Bridge – I was a better player at this game than I was at Chess and played at the international level. It used to annoy me, in a back-handed sort of way, because I probably worked a lot harder at Chess.
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