It’s me, Mr. C., and today, we will discuss Franklin Knowles Young, the worst chess author of all time.

No doubt you have heard of the term GOAT (stands for Greatest of all Time) well I think we should have another term WOAT) for worst of all time.

There are many terrible chess books but the ones ( yes he had the nerve to write more than one) that stand out as the most disastrously awful books ever written,  were the ones written by Franklin K. Young.

If you want to know a lot about this particular WOAT the definitive article is by the great author Edward Winter which can be found here.

I have also borrowed heavily from Mr Winter’s very informative article.

Why was he the worst?

Why was he so bad? Well, he would never use one word when he could use 50. Take, for example an excerpt from one of his books:

Please read before you look at the diagram then take a minute to laugh your head off.

To tell the truth, this is hilariously funny. If he wasn’t serious, he played a colossal joke on us all.

I defy anyone to tell me what this means:

“Always deploy so that the right oblique may be readily established in case the objective plane remains open or becomes permanently located on the centre or on the king’s wing, or that the crochet aligned may readily be established if the objective plane becomes permanently located otherwise than at the extremity of the strategic front.”

It means play 1. e4

More About Franklin K. Young

There is a good article on the meaning of his system by Batgirl wh0 is a famous chess author. You can read it here.

He was said to be one of the hardest authors to translate into English. This is funny because all his books were written in English.

Another reason his books were so terrible was their long windiness. In his book Chess Generalship, he spends 40 pages just discussing the book’s premise, which is to combine chess and war. He constantly quotes famous people in and out of context, and in the first 101 pages, we see not one chess diagram. His book was 240 pages, and to tell the truth, enough was enough.

Whether he was a sage, charlatan, or fool, his books are basically unreadable. However, if you would like to try to tackle the challenge of reading these so-called books, you can find online copies on this page.