John Littlewood (chess player) John Littlewood (chess player) John Eric Littlewood (25 May 1931 – 16 September 2009) was for many years a leading British chess player and took the title of national senior champion in 2006. Perhaps his most famous game was the one he lost against the world champion Mikhail Botvinnik at the Hastings International Chess Congress 1961/2. Littlewood launched a fearsome attack which Botvinnik was able to defend only by means of a tactical finesse. Botvinnik chose to include the game in his autobiographical "Best Games 1947–1970". John Littlewood was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire in 1931, the fourth of his eleven
Hexagonal chess occur in practical play. These endgame studies apply to both Gliński's and McCooey's variants: Starchess is a hexagonal variant invented by Hungarian chess teacher László Polgár. The board is a horizontally oriented regular hexagram, consisting of 37 numbered cells. Due to the small board, games typically finish quicker than in standard chess. Each player has five pawns, a king, knight, bishop, rook, and queen. The white pawns start at cells 5, 12, 18, 23, and 29; the black pawns at 9, 15, 20, 26, and 33. At the beginning of the game, the players place their other pieces alternately on