Perspectives

by Burt Hochberg

An Imperfect Visionary

Visionaries are by definition impractical. But an impractical
visionary with a lot of money can make a difference in pursuit of
his dream. I would like now to remember a man whose long-range
vision was not achieved because it--or he--was too impractical and
because technology was not ready for it. In the process of trying to
achieve it, however, he made a real contribution to the game he
loved.

Sidney Fried, whose R.H.M. Press produced some of the best
modern literature on chess, grew up poor in New York. In his
youth, he said, he was a Communist. He abhorred paying taxes.
Once he achieved financial success (first by investing in warrants
and options, then by writing books and two weekly newsletters on
the subject), he made certain that everything of real value that he
possessed was legally owned by his company, not by him
personally. During the years I knew him well (roughly 1972-84),
he had an elegant four- story townhouse on New York City's east
side, a handsome yacht, and a house in Rancho Mirage, California,
just a knight's move from Frank Sinatra's estate. The house had
formerly belonged to Zeppo Marx and his wife, Barbara, who later
became Sinatra's fourth wife. His success in avoiding taxes while
he was alive, however, resulted in a tremendous problem for his
two sons after he died in 1991 at the age of 72. Though he left a
significant legacy in his work for chess, he did not, incredibly,
leave a will.

Sidney took very good care of his health. A man of relatively small
physical stature, he was always trim and fit. His diet consisted
mainly of fish, he did not smoke, and he played tennis whenever he
had the chance. He wore his longish hair combed straight back and
he was always dressed neatly and simply. His only affectation was
a little pencil mustache that rode interestingly up and down on his
lip whenever he produced one of his characteristic crooked
half-smiles.

He was in love with chess, but it was an unsatisfying, one-way
relationship, like an adolescent sexual longing. Chess is not an
easy lay, and Sidney was not strong enough to overcome its
resistance. Chess "annihilates a man," wrote H.G. Wells. "You
have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish
to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy, and
unreliable--but teach him, inoculate him with chess." Had Sidney
Fried not been financially secure, chess might have ruined him.

The middlegame and endgame held little interest for him. The
great unsolved mystery of chess, as he saw it, was the opening.
Because Sidney hated the idea of memorizing openings, he wanted
to find a universal, one-size-fits-all "system" that would always
yield an acceptable position almost without regard for the
opponent's moves. The only mystery, as I saw it, was why Sidney
persisted in playing his inferior fianchetto hybrid in game after
game, invariably getting a severely cramped position after half a
dozen moves, to his perplexed annoyance. Sidney was anything but
stupid, but he was definitely obstinate. He seemed to think that if
he played his "system" often enough, it would one day realize that
he did not intend to give up and would lie down and behave. 

I met Sidney in 1972. I was the executive director of the Manhattan
Chess Club; he was a member. When I resigned that year after a
disagreement with the club's board of directors, Sidney invited me
to dinner, along with Lubosh Kavalek. The recent Fischer-Spassky
match had led to a worldwide chess boom, which Sidney felt was
the perfect opportunity to launch the great plan that had been
percolating in his mind. Now that I was free of my duties at the
club (though I was still the editor of *Chess Life & Review* [now
*Chess Life*]), Sidney wanted me to help develop a chess
publishing program under the umbrella of his financial publishing
company.

His plan had two prongs: I, from my home in New York, would
develop various book projects and oversee the whole enterprise,
while Lubosh, from his home in Reston, Virginia, would work on
Sidney's special dream, The Survey of Current Chess Openings.

The basic idea of The Survey was simple. The entire universe of
openings would be mapped out in a grand outline and each opening
divided into its constituent variations. Starting with the most
current or significant variations and becoming more inclusive over
time, 100 recent games in each variation would be analyzed by an
assigned grandmaster and published as hole-punched pages for
insertion in a looseleaf binder to be provided. As warranted by
tournament practice, the sections would be updated with additional
pages, forming an ever-expanding database.

Sidney, Lubosh, and I had many meetings, separately and together.
I once spent an entire day at Lubosh's home as we tried to figure
out how to coordinate the work of the many grandmasters who
would be invited to participate, and how to organize our own work
flow. Lubosh, with his profound knowledge of the openings and
his friendship with so many grandmasters, would decide which
grandmasters were to be assigned to which variations and would
make sure the work got done on time. He would check incoming
manuscripts for technical content and then send them to me for
editing and production.

Meanwhile, I would be working on separate book projects,
traveling to important chess events--such as the San Antonio
tournament in 1972, the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and
Petrpolis Interzonals in 1973, the Nice Olympiad in 1974, and the
Statham tournaments in Lone Pine, California--to talk to the
world's leading grandmasters about book ideas. (Incidentally, my
traveling to these events enabled me to report on them for *Chess
Life & Review* at no cost to the U.S. Chess Federation, since
Sidney paid all the bills.)

Some of the books R.H.M. published during that period were
*How to Open a Chess Game*, by Evans, Gligoric, Larsen,
Portisch, Petrosian, Hort, and Keres (the creation of this book is
worth an article all to itself); *Understanding the French Defense*,
by Gligoric and Uhlmann; *My Best Games*, by Karpov; *The
Life and Games of Mikhail Tal*, by Tal; *The Najdorf Variation*,
by Geller, Gligoric, Kavalek, and Spassky; *The Gruenfeld
Defense*, by Botvinnik and Estrin; *The Modern Defense*, by
Hort and Mednis; *The Art of Chess Analysis*, by Timman; *The
Best Move*, by Hort and Jansa; and others. I produced or edited
many of them; a few were translations of foreign originals; others,
especially the later ones, were produced in England by David Levy
and Kevin O'Connell.

Any publisher would be proud of a list like that, and Sidney was
indeed proud of it. But he was obsessed with the Survey. Although
its early sales and subscriptions were not particularly encouraging,
Sidney spent lavishly on it. He simply refused to consider the
possibility that his instincts might have misled him.

I believe his instincts were correct. What sank the Survey in the
early 1980s was not public indifference (it was far too soon to
gauge that) but two other factors. One was a really bad
recommendation he had recently made in his financial newsletter.
Some investors lost money, subscriptions fell off dramatically, and
he suddenly had to reign in his propensity for spending money on
his hobbies. R.H.M.'s chess program was one of the casualties. It
was simply costing too much.

But the Survey would have been done in anyway by computer
technology. We couldn't have predicted in the late 1970s, when the
first Survey sections were beginning to come out, that within a few
years home-computer databases would be commonplace.
Compared to a computer database, a paper-based openings
database like the R.H.M. Survey would have seemed as clumsy as
the engine crank was after the electrical ignition was invented.

Sidney's dream was only partially realized, but its attempt had
valuable consequences. Of course there is the library of chess titles.
All have been out of print for years (though I believe the Tal and
Timman books have been republished in new editions in England,
and there are rumors that others are in the works), but thousands of
players and students have benefitted from them and many
grandmasters were very well paid to write them. And I have no
doubt that Lubosh Kavalek's legendary database, which has been a
significant factor in several world championship matches, can trace
its roots to the work he did for R.H.M.

Although at the end of his life Sidney Fried was disappointed that
he had not achieved all that he had wanted, he achieved a great
deal more than most visionaries. He made a difference.