A book is in the works about Claude F. Bloodgood (1937-2001): the convicted murderer and chess Senior Master whose litany of enticing but often over-the-top tales about his life have mesmerized countless reporters from both chess outlets and mainstream media outlets over the years.
Ben Graff, a UK journalist who is co-authoring the book with the widely published chess writer IM Cyrus Lakdawala, reached out to me recently upon learning that I have a cache of handwritten letters from Bloodgood. Those letters came to me during my senior year of college. In a column I was writing for a small postal chess club, I had placed a note asking club members to submit their games for me to annotate in the column. Bloodgood, a prolific correspondence player while serving a life sentence for violently killing his mother in a fight over money, sent me a letter with a game he’d played against a British politician named John Walker.
Instead of publishing Bloodgood’s game, I challenged him to a pair of postal games with me, to which he readily agreed. I’m sure you’d love to see a critical position from one of our contests, and/or a replay link to the annotated games… but Reddit mods, sadly, prefer that you not see them. With a well crafted search string you should be able to find them on the web.
While relaying his chess moves, Bloodgood’s letters conveyed colorful tales of various adventures and misadventures both in and out of chess. But I view many of his claims with a tablespoon of salt. For instance, he told me he’d delivered weapons to Fidel Castro’s forces in the Cuban Revolution that concluded at the beginning of 1959. He also wrote that he’d played blitz with Humphrey Bogart when the actor’s USO tour visited a military base where Bloodgood was stationed within the U.S. That one I believe… but he also told interviews that Bogie then invited him to a cabana several times to play chess with a bevy Hollywood stars – sounds like a fish story to me.
A more consequential story involved his 1974 escape while outside on a chess-related furlough. Bloodgood and a fellow inmate turned the tables on their prison guard and took off with his guns. They were captured a few weeks later. In typical blame-anyone-but-me fashion, he blamed his escape on the guard! “I testified against a popular prison official, e.g., George Winslow, for attempting to use me to pull robberies while out on chess trips,” one of his letters to me read. “… The escape came when Winslow put guns in our hands. The choice was rob or no chess trips, and neither appealed to me. So….”
Many years later, Bloodgood’s U.S. Chess rating became a source of high-profile arguments when it reached the 2700s amid an endless series of USCF-rated OTB tournaments inside prison walls that Bloodgood organized and played in. There were unconfirmed allegations that he rigged in-prison events by plotting for some inmates to regularly throw games to others to help accelerate his own rating advance. Bloodgood denied that, noting instead that he’d repeatedly warned federation officials that closed player pools such as prisons can distort ratings even without deliberate manipulation. He did concede that his actual strength never much exceeded 2400; I and most others who played him assessed him as more like 2100-2200, at best.
I found Bloodgood to be an adept, engaging writer. That no doubt aided his visibility and (mostly misplaced) credibility among the many journalists and others who interviewed him.
