Sun 30 Nov 2008

Bob Wade, 1921 - 2008

A few different chess news sites and blogs are carrying stories this morning that English IM Bob Wade passed away overnight.

Bob was a really nice guy and a living connection to so much chess history. I met him for the first time in London in the late 1990's and then a couple of times since. Most memorably, when he made the enormous trip from England to Queenstown, New Zealand in 2006 to play in a tournament. That's a seriously long couple of flights for anybody, let alone an 85 year old. He didn't leave the hotel in Queenstown, so I spent quite a few hours talking to him over tea in the mornings before games. Great sense of humour, a million and one stories, and a willingness to listen as well.

The Week In Chess has a nice obituary on its front page at the moment, although there's no permalink to the item, so it will move away from that link over time. Hopefully a more permanent one will appear.

Shaun Press has a game that Bob played against Sydney's Frank Crowl in 1945. I'll add one other story with a connection to that era: in the Gibraltar tournament in January, 2007, Bob played one of the top Australian players, David Smerdon, and was defeated. He mentioned in the post-mortem that the last time he lost to an Australian was 1949. Admittedly, he hadn't played a large number of them in the interim (although he played a few at the Queenstown tournament the year before), but, still, that's a long period of activity just to be able to have a statistic spanning 60 years.

You'll be missed, Bob.

Topics: chess