Hay-On-Wye

Chess champ takes on 20 opponents at Hay
May 25 2008 Media Wales

Former chess grandmaster Boris Spassky will today take on 20 opponents simultaneously – including one in Antarctica.

Spassky will take up the challenge at the Hay Festival, in mid Wales.

And, with Antarctica 8,000 miles away, it will be the longest distance live chess match ever attempted.

Spassky’s on-line opponent on the continent will be Ian McNab, a field technician with the British Antarctic Survey based on the Rothera Research Station.

His other 19 opponents, who include comedian Dom Joly, Liberal Democrat Welsh Assembly Member Peter Black, and a number of the area’s leading child chess prodigies, will play him in person.

Mr MacNab, 52, from Manchester, said: “I am not very optimistic. I would describe myself as an amateur, but I was quite good as a teenager. I don’t think that Boris has much to be afraid of.”

The former outdoor pursuits instructor is part of a British team of 21 scientists and experts who are undertaking a long-term monitoring of environmental and maritime changes in the region.

Their next physical contact with the outside world will not take place until the arrival of a supply ship in October 2008.

Spassky, a 71-year-old Russian, became grandmaster at the age of 18 and proceeded to win the Soviet Chess Championship twice.

He was in the world’s top ten players for most of the years between the mid 50s and the mid 80s.

The simultaneous chess match will take place at 6pm at Richard Booth’s Bookshop, in Lion Street, Hay-On-Wye.

The challenge pre-emts the former world number one’s talk at the annual literary festival tomorrow about his famous loss to Bobby Fischer, in Reykjavik, at the height of the Cold War in 1972.
Source of article : HERE …
 We visited Wales a few years ago and I wanted to travel back through this “town of books”…Hay-on-Wye…and on THIS LINK

you can read what I said about the town…I’ve added two pictures here from that link…and on THIS LINK you can see my pics about Aberystwyth, in Wales where we visited friends.

    

You can clearly see the slot to leave your money at the “Honesty Bookshop” in Hay-on-Wye.

 Hay Castle  is where the “Honesty Bookshop” is…where you pay 50p per book and you can see the slot on my first pic for the money!

…and this is the bookshop! image:travel.nytimes.com
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 Please click HERE to visit the website of “Hay-On-Wey”…the “town of books”…

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Wales

On our way back from Aber, we planned our journey especially to go through this town! It is a town full of bookshops! Unbelievable! This first photo, is a bookshop in the open, but secondhand books….and they trust you to leave the money in that box! Every second shop in this town is almost about books! Wow…if you’re a booklover like me, this is really the place to be! One bookshop has all the classics…and the books were really expensive, but I spent more than an hour just paging through books in awe… in some shops you can really get books quite cheap…very cheap…but then it’s not really the books you might be interested in…the area is beautiful. We had tea/scones – our favourite – and there were a bunch of old ladies sitting nearby…they all spoke Welsh…as this town is on the border of England and Wales! It’s an English town, but we’ve heard that it’s more Welsh than English….
Read also my other post about the visit in Wales!
Follow this link to read more….
http://www.hay-on-wye.co.uk/bookshops/frameset.htm

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