By Douglas Holtz-Eakin
The young drop coverage to avoid higher premiums
The Hollywood Reporter's list of its 10 best stories of the week:
It's a paradox: Our beloved game, so rigorously logical and immune to deceit at the chessboard, rests on a foundation of lies.
We can claim the Super Bowl, the World Series and three of golf's four "majors," and we have played host to eight Olympics. But when it comes to staging big-time chess events, the U.S. is something of a backwater. So for patriotic reasons if nothing else, it's nice to report on the fifth annual SPICE Cup, staged last month in Lubbock, Texas, by Texas Tech University and the Susan Polgar Foundation.
It's a story that -- like so many tales told about the great masters of the past -- turns out to be totally bogus. When longtime U.S. champion Frank Marshall played one of the most famous moves in the history of the game, thrusting his queen into a "nest of pawns" to defeat Russian master Stefan Lewitzky in a 1912 game in Breslau, Poland, spectators reportedly were so enthralled that they showered the board with gold coins. Marshall was justly proud of the game but later claimed never to have seen a single one of the gold pieces supposedly left in tribute.
