GG Steiner

Lara Steiner managed quiet Zurich fortunes for twenty years and wrote Positional Backgammon under her own name, to her bank's mild horror. She plays exactly as the book instructs: glacial, textbook, immaculate.

Almost nobody in this club has been in a room with her. She plays online by preference, where her patience is hardest to disturb, and she has skipped live events for years without ever explaining why. Her cube is studied by players who would not recognise her voice. A position, she writes, is a portfolio: protect the downside and the upside turns up on its own. A question about the book gets a page number and nothing else. She has never signed a copy or appeared at anything arranged round it, and a member who writes about a chapter is sent the paragraph that answers it.