Hi everyone,

I don't post much these days but when I saw this post I felt I had to tell a story which happened about 10 years ago when I was an employee of Chess Kids.

I believe this was the only occasion I have met Mr Teichmann

I was employed as the assistant arbiter for the Australian Masters, at the Chess Kids Tournament Centre in North Rd.

Mr Teichmann and other leading players, including Guy West, Stephen Solomon etc were participating.

There had been a miscommunication between David Cordover and the parents of two of the children who regularly attended his coaching classes, resulting in those two children being dropped off at the tournament venue.

As soon as we realised that the children had been dropped off incorrectly, we contacted their parents and were waiting for them to be picked up.

In the meantime the children were asked to play outside, and were doing so (albeit loudly) about 10 metres from the venue.

A couple of players complained that the children were being too loud, so I went outside and asked them to keep quiet while waiting for their parents.

Unfortunately a few minutes later the children were too loud again.

Mr Teichmann decided to silence them himself. He suddenly got up from his board without saying a word, went up to the children very aggressively, grabbed them by their collars and shook them with incredible force.

He did it so hard that one of the boys had scratches all over his neck.

It would be an understatement to say that everyone in the tournament hall was shocked.

For me personally I have never ever seen anything so horrible at a chess tournament.

Mr Teichmann calmly walked back to his board and sat down without saying a word.

When the parents arrived they were in hysterics about what Mr Teichmann had done to their children. They even called an ambulance to the scene to make sure the injured child was ok.

To his credit, Mr Teichmann did apologise profusely to the parents when they arrived.

In summary - we all know that the chess scene is full of weirdos, anti social dudes etc. But for Mr Teichmann to be targeting MCC in the light of his own behaviour, is in my opinion, extremely unfair.

George Z.

Although I wasnt there at the time, I was also aware of this incident. However I didnt know the exact details so I decided not to mention it in my original response to Eriks post. I also didnt want to seem like I was picking/continuing a fight.... All I will say about it are two things:

1. people living in glass houses shouldnt throw stones.

2. if any player playing in an MCC event did what Erik did in that situation while my committee is running MCC, they would be banned for life - regardless whether they were a GM, IM, FM, 1200 player etc.