GG Kuznetsov

Dmitri Kuznetsov ran the big top in Moscow for forty years and has never once stopped performing. He narrates his own swings, addresses the room rather than the opponent, and treats every match as tonight's show with an audience of one. Three glasses of tea a match, and he will tell you so before the first roll. The theatre is doing something. Underneath it he is a considerably better player than anyone at his level, and almost nobody notices, because they are watching the performance instead of the position. He gives away his cube plans out loud, in the tone of a man announcing the next act, and it is astonishing how often that turns out to have been the truth. Forty years of judging when a crowd was ready is not nothing: his checker play is loose, his cube reading is close to expert, and he has no interest whatsoever in correcting the first.