[BrianWall-ChessList] Skittles with Alekhine

[Brian Wall]

Longtime Colorado chess player Jim Bickford has passed away; on
December 4, in Boulder. (Boulder Daily Camera, December 9, 2007.)
Jim had been in poor health for several years.

I met Jim at Gates in 1967 and we were great friends for 40 years.
In the 1970s he did charts for my investment management company. In
the 1980s he was a programmer on my team that wrote the successful J-
Wave trading software and SmartBBS communications package. From 2000
to 2005 he also did programming for my company, CommTools, Inc. I
introduced him to the FOREX markets and he took to them like a duck
to water. We collaborated on several FOREX books for John Wiley &
Sons. He also published two FOREX books on his own with McGraw-Hill.
His mathematics-statistics-programming skills were beyond anything
I've ever seen – and I have met many recognized power players in
those fields.

Jim was an active CCA member and player from the time of his
military discharge in 1967 to about 1975 when he gave up OTB chess
to pursue a programming career. He was a Czech translator and code
analyzer for the U.S. Army and also passable in Spanish, German and
Russian.

Jim played correspondence chess in the CCLA in the 1990s but gave it
up in some disgust with the advent of computer chess. He wrote
several articles for the CCLA magazine. He played some quite
beautiful correspondence games.

He had a master's eye for tactics in OTB chess but his strong desire
to win and to sacrifice kept his rating in the expert range. I often
provoked him into playing `unsound' sacrifices – only to find myself
mated shortly thereafter! Alekhine was his hero. The late Bob
Wendling once told me if Jim and I could combine his tactics and my
positional play we'd be a 2400 player!

One of his favorite stories was of the late Chris Hendrickson
following him into the men's room at the Wyoming Open after he beat
her in a game. She felt she had been swindled and was intent on
giving Jim a good piece of her mind about it!

He wrote the Syzygy series chess opening books; the openings were
always a great love of his, as they were for me – one of many common
interest bonds we shared through the years. The first edition in the
1970s with Eugene Salome, the second edition in the 1990s. The only
third edition to be published was The North Sea Variation of the
Modern, 2006. Several other volumes were planned including a six-
volume comprehensive coverage of the Modern/Robatsch but only the
Milner-Barry Variation of the French is likely to now be published.

A brighter, more loyal and honest person I have yet to meet. My best
and oldest friend has gone off to play skittles with Alekhine.

He is survived by his daughter Larissa, a grand daughter and ex-
wife, Linda.



from Mike Archer
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