John L. Watson
Encyclopedia
Chess
Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...
International Master and author.
Watson was born in Milwaukee and grew up in Omaha
Omaha, Nebraska
Omaha is the largest city in the state of Nebraska, United States, and is the county seat of Douglas County. It is located in the Midwestern United States on the Missouri River, about 20 miles north of the mouth of the Platte River...
, Nebraska
Nebraska
Nebraska is a state on the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States. The state's capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha, on the Missouri River....
. He was educated at Brownell-Talbot, Harvard, and the University of California
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
at San Diego, where he took his degree in engineering. He has won many chess tournaments including the first US National High School Chess Championship and the American Open.
Watson is best known as a chess theorist and author, and has written more than thirty books on many aspects of chess. His 1999 book Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy won the British Chess Federation's
English Chess Federation
The English Chess Federation is the governing chess organisation in England and is affiliated to FIDE. The ECF was formed in 2004 and was effectively a re-constitution of the extant governing body, the British Chess Federation , an organisation founded in 1904...
Book of the year award as well as the United States Chess Federation
United States Chess Federation
The United States Chess Federation is a non-profit organization, the governing chess organization within the United States, and one of the federations of the FIDE. The USCF was founded in 1939 from the merger of two regional chess organizations, and grew gradually until 1972, when membership...
Book of the Year. The successor volume Chess Strategy in Action was the Chesscafe Book of the Year. These two books explore and theorize how radically chess has changed since the early 20th century, and how old and supposedly 'time-tested' rules for the conduct of play have been replaced by broader and revolutionary practice over-the-board. These books have been translated into several languages. In a lighter vein, Watson wrote the Chessman comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
series, illustrated by Chris Hendrickson and Svein Myreng. Chessman Comics are now out-of-print collectors' items. Watson has a regular book review column at The Week in Chess
The Week in Chess
The Week in Chess is one of the first, if not the first, Internet-based chess news services.TWIC has been edited by Mark Crowther since its inception in 1994. It began as a weekly Usenet posting, with "TWIC 1" being posted to Usenet group rec.games.chess on 17 September 1994...
, the publication of the London Chess Centre (available online). He has a weekly Internet radio show 'Chess Talk with John Watson' on Chess.FM, the radio arm of the Internet Chess Club
Internet Chess Club
The Internet Chess Club is a commercial Internet chess server devoted to the play and discussion of chess and chess variants. ICC currently has over 30,000 subscribing members...
(ICC).
Watson is also much in demand as a chess coach
Coach (sport)
In sports, a coach is an individual involved in the direction, instruction and training of the operations of a sports team or of individual sportspeople.-Staff:...
; his students have included Tal Shaked
Tal Shaked
Tal Shaked is an American chess grandmaster, who is best known for winning the World Junior Championship in 1997....
, the 1997 World Junior Champion
World Junior Chess Championship
The World Junior Chess Championship is an under-20 chess tournament organized by the World Chess Federation ....
, Senior Master Patrick Hummel, Abby Marshall
Abby Marshall
Abby Marshall is a chess player from Columbus, Ohio, USA, who has resided in Virginia, USA since late 2005. She is a Woman FIDE Master and in 2009 won the Denker Tournament of High School Champions, the first female player ever to have attained the title...
, and also other US scholastic champions.
Watson is married to Maura Giles-Watson; they live in Lincoln, Nebraska
Lincoln, Nebraska
The City of Lincoln is the capital and the second-most populous city of the US state of Nebraska. Lincoln is also the county seat of Lancaster County and the home of the University of Nebraska. Lincoln's 2010 Census population was 258,379....
.
Selected books
- Play the French, third edition, (Cadogan Chess Books) ISBN 1-85744-337-3
- Chess Strategy in Action ISBN 1-901983-69-2
- The Unconventional King's Indian ISBN 1-84382-150-8
- The Gambit Guide to the Modern Benoni ISBN 1-901983-23-4
- Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy: Advances since Nimzowitsch, Gambit PublicationsGambit PublicationsGambit Publications is a major publisher of chess books. The company's headquarters is in London. It has published more than 150 chess books.The company was founded by three chess players...
, 1999, ISBN 1-901983-07-2 - Chess Strategy in Action, Gambit, 2003, ISBN 1-901983-69-2
- English 1...P-K4 ISBN 1-84382-144-3
- Dangerous Weapons: The French, Everyman Chess (2007): ISBN 978185744 435 3
- Mastering the Chess Openings, Gambit Publications (in four volumes)
- Volume 1 (1. e4): ISBN 1-904600-60-3 (2006)
- Volume 2 (1. d4): ISBN 1-904600-69-7 (2007)
- Volume 3 (1. c4): ISBN 1-904600-98-0 (2009)
- Volume 4: ISBN 978-1-906454-19-7 (2010)
