We remember IM Michael Basman who passed away on October 26th, 2022

 

 

Mike attended The University of Leeds as an undergraduate reading history.

Here is Mike’s wikipedia entry

Here are his games

An interesting article from chess.com

Confessions of a Crooked Chess Master – Part 1 from Kingpin

Confessions of a Crooked Chess Master – Part 2

From Chessgames.com:

“Michael John Basman was born in St Pancras, London, England. He was awarded the IM title in 1980 and having dual nationality won the Erevan Championship whilst living there in the early 1970s. He was also a pioneer in the production of audio tapes for chess.

He is noted for his use of unorthodox flank openings, such as 1.g4, 1.h3, 1.e4 g5, etc. He expanded on the work of Henri Grob with his book on the topic of 1.g4, The Killer Grob.

He created the UK Chess Challenge, a tournament for juniors of all standards and ages progressing over four stages.”

These stages become well-known as the Schools Stage, The Megafinal stage, The Gigafinal Stage and the Terafinal.

MJB won the ECF President’s Award in 2013.

In the last few years Mike recently received a “bursary” from FIDE as a tribute towards FIDEs more senior players.

Here is an obituary from The New York Times

Chessbase GmbH produced this obituary written by Diana Mihajlova

Pete Doggers wrote this obituary for chess.com

and one from IRLChess is here

We have this obituary from The UK Chess Challenge web site.

David Rowson wrote this obituary for the Kingston Chess Club web site

And from behind a paywall we have this obituary courtesy of The Daily Telepgraph.

Mike wrote this article about his brother Robert Moore.

Publications

Michael was both extremely prolific and innovative with his huge catalogue of publications.