The Mammoth Book of Chess

Among the evils that anyone who takes up chess may encounter are “table shakers” (“some players translate nervous tension into vibrating their table or chair”) and “coin janglers” (“some spectators seem to shake a pocketful of coins when watching other games”). Another problem is cigarette smoke. Mikhail Botvinnik, the first Soviet world champion and “a tremendously serious man”, used to ask opponents in training matches to bombard him with the stuff.

I draw here on an entry on “Distractions” in the glossary that appears in the third and final part of Graham Burgess’s chess course, which is headed “Essential Chess...