Talk:Hastings 1895 chess tournament

Link

The link associated with William Pollock leads to William Pegues Pollock. This is entirely incorrect. The person who played in Hastings 1895 was Dr. William Henry Krause Pollock. He came in 19 out of 22 with a score of 8.0, along the way beating both Tarrasch and Steinitz, respectively the fourth and fifth place wiinners.

Fixed Peter Ballard 12:48, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Tone of introduction

The introduction needs to be made neutral. Starting with an opinion that Hastings 1895 was the greatest tournament ever, aside from being a patently false statement, is not a neutral way to start off an article. I'll try to work on it. Buki ben Yogli (talk) 01:40, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. Looking through the history, the extravagant intro was written in the early days of Wikipedia, and no one has gone back to tone it down. By all means fix it. Peter Ballard (talk) 01:46, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Flags

Quale, you mentioned some of the other flags besides that of Steinitz were wrong on the page. Which ones? Also, are flags supposed to represent the nationality of the player (in which case, Steinitz is obviously Austrian), or the country they were "representing" at the time? ChessPlayerLev (talk) 05:44, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

The Hastings Chess Tournament, p. 348:

"Steinitz, Wilhem, fifty-nine at the time of the Tournament, was born on May 17, 1836, at Prague, Bohemia.

Educated in Vienna, he soon made a chess name for himself, and was sent to the London Tournament in 1862 as the representative of Austria. At that time he adopted this country, but deserted us in 1883, becoming an American citizen."

If Steinitz was an American citizen in 1895 then why was he "obviously Austrian"? You can compare the cross table on p. 343 to what we have in this article. Albin, for example. is listed as American. The mini-bio on p. 350 says he was born in Bucharest but "now represents New York". It also says that he was age 47 at the time of the tournament, and that "The goddess of chess did not make his acquaintance till he was a well-grown man". Quale (talk) 06:16, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Also see our article William H.K. Pollock which says that Pollock represented Canada at Hastings. This agrees with the tournament book. Quale (talk) 06:21, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Good information. That being said, you left my main question unanswered; what is the purpose of the flag on the crosstable? Is it the nationality of the player, their current citizenship, what? On a different note, what pages would you recommend me to read of that book in terms of interesting, unusual information? It's quite long! ChessPlayerLev (talk) 06:24, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

I just downloaded the PDF from Google books. I find it easier to read as a PDF than directly on Google books, but of course the PDF is just scanned images so there's no text search. You can search using Google books to find the page numbers and then go back to the PDF if that's convenient. I'm not very familiar with the tournament book, but most of it is just games scores and commentary. The annotations aren't anywhere near the level you'd expect today, of course, and I'm sure you could do better yourself even without the aid of a computer. (After 117 years I guess that shouldn't be surprising.) The beginning gives a little background and some details of the regulations which might be of modest interest. Pages 13 through 341 are just games scores and commentary. Little of this is likely to be of interest unless you want to look at a particular game. Pages 342 through 362 are interesting, and include the prizes awarded, the cross table, and the mini-bios. The rest doesn't seem very important, although the table of openings employed on page 366 is interesting. It might be good to get that information in more articles in Category:chess competitions as it's a simple way of showing what was in fashion at that time. The index on pages 369–370 doesn't have much in it, but it does index by opening if you wanted to look at the games that way. It's probably easier to use a database for that kind of search.

As far as nationality vs current citizenship, as far as I know sportsmen are always identified by the country they are representing. We actually had a long discussion about this some time ago, now archived at Listing Native Countries in tournaments. (OK, long, but not as long as the marathon current discussions of chess theoreticians or chessmetrics.) For most modern tournaments it's usually pretty easy to determine which country to use for a player, as it should be the same as their FIDE federation. In some cases this can be a little tricky as with Roman Dzindzichashvili at Lone Pine International 1980, but we should usually be able to figure these out. For older tournaments it can be much harder. It's ideal, I think, when we can find a cross table or other documentation with the information we need. An example is the cross table in the Hastings 1895 tournament book, although it associates Lasker with England. Krakatoa gave examples from other tournament books, such as confirmation that Lasker was Soviet at Nottingham 1936. Quale (talk) 04:33, 27 August 2012 (UTC)