The e-mail was short and to the point, sent by a well-known grandmaster:

Passing through on Thursday.  Would like to discuss your New In Chess article. You buy the drinks.

I sighed.  It was happening again.

Make no mistake – New In Chess is the world’s premier chess magazine, and to have your analytical insights published there, for masters and amateurs alike to read, is no small thing.

It was only after my article had been rejected by NIC that the problems had begun.

Several months ago, I had been kibitzing some blitz games at the Club.  For one of our more notorious pawnpushers, the faster time control was simply an efficiency of sorts, a way to lose more games, in a shorter amount of time.  He had been playing an interesting gambit, however, one, which, in the hands of someone who had only two thumbs (instead of ten), might have proven effective.

At the end of the evening, Perry had mumbled something about a “missing third chapter,” and promised to send me a copy.

A couple of days later, I had found a computer disk in my mailbox.  Fifteen years ago, a couple of over-reaching amateurs had published a monograph on a counter-gambit for Black that was so old that it was ready to become new again.  Except amongst connoisseurs of the arcane, however, it had caused little reaction.

There had been whispers – along with Elvis sightings at the local 7-11 – that the book had originally had a third chapter, outlining how to play the opening as a gambit for White, but that it had been cut out in the final editing, and had never seen print.

I had actually been impressed by the ideas and lines of the gambit on Perry’s disk – enough so to spend two weeks analyzing it, after which I had set down my impressions in an article, and sent it off to the magazine.

In the old days, the printed pages of a rejected article would find their way to the “round, circular file” of the trash can.  In modern times, when works are submitted electronically via e-mail, rejections are apparently tossed into the void, virtually shredded, or flushed into cyberspace.

In any event, a week or so after my article had been turned down and had disappeared from the hard drives of the NIC editor, it made its first appearance on an oddball website touting “the Forbin Project.”  Several dozen chess analysts from around the world had been pooling their computing time and power, to get to the “truth” of various openings.  They had given me credit, then number-crunched my work, and posted the revision.

The gambit I had been looking at was actually not very “computer friendly” – it contained material imbalances that often misled or defied silicon analysis – but I had found some of the “corrections” and new ideas intriguing.

Shortly thereafter, due to an incident apparently involving “warez,” the website had been shut down.  It had taken me several frantic e-mails to convince prosecutors of my own, personal, non-involvement.  I’m just a chessplayer!

Days later, however, the opening had appeared, again, in its own “thematic tournament,” with the first moves erroneously named after me, at a rogue internet chess playing site, www.chess~smack-down.com.  Several dozen games, many of high quality, had resulted.  The flame wars on rec.games.chess.analysis, however, resulting from my supposed “egotistical approbation, etc.,” of someone else’s “rightfully-named opening and intellectual property, etc.,” had caused a week of migraines.

From there, revised versions of my article had subsequently appeared on a Young Pioneers’ web page, filled with glittering insights that “every Russian schoolboy knew”; then in fierce, dueling reviews in a chess forum that salivated over and micro-analyzed anything with the name “Marshall” in it; and finally on a chess history website that had put everything into the proper context and ultimately argued that the opening had first been played by Petroff, in any event, in 1847 – so there!

Last week, Mig had joked in his on-line column at ChessBase that Kramnik had been secretly preparing the gambit for his upcoming title match.  Edward Winter, over at ChessCafe, had opined that there had never been any evidence that the monograph in question had ever had a “reversed” chapter – and which, as published, actually had five chapters, anyhow.

Like some chessic vampire, that cursed article of mine seemed to be more alive after its editorial death than it ever had been before its rejection.

And now, another grandmaster wanted to discuss my work – until he ran out of interest, I imagined, or until I ran out of cash.

Tennis, anyone?