GG Horvat

Ivan Horvat teaches mathematics at a Zagreb gymnasium and spent his twenties as a national-level chess player, good enough to draw grandmasters and honest enough to know he would never beat them regularly. He marks his own games. Printed out, gone over in the same red pen he uses on homework, annotated in the margin and given a grade out of ten at the bottom, and the grades are harsher than anything his pupils receive. Four is a common score. He weighs each checker before he touches the cube, treats a position as a problem to be solved cleanly, and says almost nothing while doing it, which his students would not recognise at all.