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Topic: Grandmaster Criminal....the story of Bloodgood
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The Neo-VAPEN Gambit.
"How I Became a Super GM, by Claude F. Bloodgood."
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By the early 1990`s, Bloodgood`s standing with the powers of Powhatan was again such as to be entrusted with another chess program, although, this time furloughs and outside activities were positively nixed.
As it transpired, he resurrected.
Given some careful consideration, however, this is something of an odd choice:
Why should Bloodgood have cared to organize, and play in tournaments against fellow prisoners, mostly, if not all, of whom could offer him no real competition?
Wouldn`t, for example, getting a bit af state money, for a CC Group been more to his liking?
Conjectures abound Bloodgood`s supporters, would maintain that this was a legimate chess activity, Bloodgood arranged to benefit his fellow inmates.
The detractors however, merely scoff, labeling the second VAPEN as yet another failed Bloodgood scam.
Finally, there is even some opinion that VAPEN II was primary a Bloodgood hoax:
OLD CLAUDE JUST WANTED TO SHOW, WHAT A BUNCH OF POTZERS RUN THE
UNITED STATES CHESS FEDERATION.........
Well, here`s how it worked.
With the bit of state money granted,
Bloodgood had a bunch od cheap chess sets bought,
registered his 50 or so members with the USCF,
getting himself Tournament-Director status as well,
and then, put the VAPEN-boys down for a bit of rated OTB.
You see, when you`re locked up 24/7,
and the entrance fee is ZIP,
("I know the TD, he`s a pal of mine")
and the playing hall is on the next floor,
"Yeah, cellblock C ~~~ fer chess"
your games-score can pile-up real fast.....
And indeed they did!
Within any given month, on cellbock C of the Powhatan Correctional Facility, the VAPEN Chess Club,
"With TD Bloodgood Pushing g4 On Board 1"
would finish more rated tourneys then were played on the whole eastern coastline that year.
Man, talk about racking up them rating points...
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The Grandmaster Criminal
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By 1996, Bloodgood`s USCF rating was 2702
Huh?
Yeah, read`em and weep, pal ; 2702
That meant that Claude Frizzle Bloodgood III was;
1. a Super Grand Master!
2. rated no.2 in the USA!
"Some Joker Named Gata Kamsky STOLE First Place")
and
3. entitled to a place in the USA Olympic Chess Team!
Huh?
As far back as 1958, Bloodgood has warned USCF officials of a serious statistical flaw in their rating system, an "inflation error", resulting from "closed pool sampling"~~
...but who the heck`s gonna listen to a guy who plays the Grob?
and so nothing was done....
Until Bloodgood became a Grandmaster under their system!
The USCF`s answer was as simple as it was bureaucratic;
they erased Bloodgood`s name from the rating list.
Haw that`s ingratitute for you.
Grandmaster Bloodgood, however,
got a tremendous laugh out of the entire affair.
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kloosterveen wrote: By 1996, Bloodgood`s USCF rating was 2702 [...] That meant that Claude Frizzle Bloodgood III was;
1. a Super Grand Master!
2. rated no.2 in the USA! |
Not quite. First, at the upper end of the scale, USCF ratings are about 60-70 points higher than FIDE ratings. The top five USCF-rated players are:
Kamsky: 2726 FIDE - 2757 USCF = 31 points' difference
Nakamura: 2670 - 2740 = 70
Onischuk: 2664 - 2728 = 58
Kaidanov: 2604 - 2693 = 89
Ehlvest: 2601 - 2690 = 89
Second, you don't become a Grandmaster just by achieving a certain rating. You need to achieve a FIDE rating of 2500 at some point and also achieve good-enough results in at least three tournaments including enough GMs and IMs of enough nationalities.
Third, this rating was almost certainly a correspondence rating, since Bloodgood seems unlikely to have been playing in OTB tournaments while on death row. There's no particular connection between correspondence ratings and OTB ratings. (On the other hand, there are no USCF correspondence players currently rated over 2492.)
| Until Bloodgood became a Grandmaster under [the USCF] system! |
The USCF doesn't award Grandmaster titles.
Anyway, thanks for posting the story -- it's an interesting read.
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The Captive King in Decline
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On the serious side, during these years Bloodgood published his second and third book:
"The Nimzovitch Attack: The Norfolk Gambits" and
"The Blackburne-Hartlaub Gambits"
Both of these works are of the same level as
"The Tactical Grob"
His last two books and the ratings hoax proved, however, to be something of a last hurray for Bloodgood; from 1997 until his death, he was confined to the mewdical unit in Powhattan Prison, suffering a steadily worsening lung condition.
"My health got real bad" he told Julian Borgwer in a interview, "I can,t walk four or five steps before I start wheezing like a son-of-a-bitch"
Despite these diabilities, Bloodgood continued, propped in bed, or sitting in his state-provided wheelchair, to write and play CC, pushing pawwns forward to g4, until three months before his death.
Claude Fizzell Bloodgood died August 4, 2001
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"Hey Joe, he`s pulling a Grob on us!"
"Keep your cool, Bill, and we`ll drop this punk like a dirty skirt!"
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Of course he did not get the Grandmaster title officially, Richerby.
I must say, you are easy to pull a leg.
But his rating was not CC rating but YES, it was USCF OTB rating!
I think you missed a couple of lines.
Please read again.
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