I admit that I rarely spend more than eight minutes thumbing through "Chess Life" when it comes each month so it wasn't much of a surprise that I had to be told by e-mail that the latest issue contains a photo of me in it. I thought it might be in the coverage of the Kasparov-Junior match in NY where I was doing the official online commentary for X3D.
Nope, it's in the report on the Amateur East team even in New Jersey. (Yes, these events were way back in January and February. Now you can understand the eight minutes.) For better or for worse, I have attained the level of ubiquity at which my photo is captioned only with "Mig," with no last name. At last I have reached the status of my idols Cher, Sting, and Moses.
Bashing Chess Life is a tradition in the US but I'll be constructive. The report on the Kasparov-Junior match (by Robert Rizzo, with contributions by Jennifer Shahade and Brian Killigrew) is fine. They were there, they attended the press conferences, they talked to people. Good. But the first thing you notice is that the 7-8 page report in the USA's premier chess magazine does not contain an interview with Kasparov or the Junior team. Not only did they not bother to do one ("they" being the editors who should have assigned this) but they didn't ask around afterwards. For example, I have hours of post-match one-on-one material with Kasparov and Junior programmer Shay Bushinsky.
Of course maybe I'm just disgruntled. Chess Life filled page after page (and the cover) with my photographs from the Kramnik-Fritz match in Bahrain half a year ago and I still haven't been paid! Various e-mail and face-to-face promises about checks in the mail have gone unfulfilled. So let's say I have a bunch of great stuff their readers would be interested in, why would I pitch it to them? Sad.
