Text: Oksana Rumyantseva

The clocks insist its August. The weather is no longer breaking Olympic records and an air conditioner has long since ceased to be your best friend and companion. Everything's returning to normal - even posts on Facebook have become regular again, and football's on the agenda. I've always been amazed at what forces people, regardless of rain, snow or a heat wave, to chase a leather ball around a restricted space? Perhaps it's pleasant company, maintaining your physical shape... or sublimation? I recently came across a remarkable article about football and its subtexts. Naturally, I took a lively interest in the comparison between football and chess:

December 14th-21st, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. That was the time and place when I was again lucky enough to represent NGTU (Novosibirsk State Technical University) – this time at an international competition. The event at the end of last year was the third away performance for our team. The previous two were student games, first on a Siberian, and then on a Russian scale, where we finished first and third respectively.

I’ve got the necessity for playing “the game of association” in my blood.

I’ve always been trying to assign some shape, colour, taste, etc. to abstract words, i.e. words that don’t have a physical equivalent.

It’s incredibly difficult topic. Mental efforts resulted in a headache but the idea about how to begin the discourse starting out from the meaningful phrase "Why is there no sex in chess?" had never come to my mind. I decided to lay down my cards right away and say the truth: there will be neither beautiful preface nor virtuosic exercices. The whole idea is diabolically simple and with the declarative intonation: there is no sex in chess. Sometimes it seems to me the word combination “chess and sex” is a striking example of oxymoron – a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction. But why is it so?