At this point, we have profiled every Jewish world chess champion, man or woman. Well, not really. We did cover every normal, regular chess champion, and even the speed variants: rapid and blitz. Not so correspondence chess.

What on earth is correspondence chess?

Imagine, if you will, a world without the Internet. (Easy enough for some, harder for others.) Better yet, imagine a world without phones. (?????) And now imagine you want to play someone in chess. Someone who lives far, far away. What do you do?

You write them a letter, or a postcard will do. On that postcard, you write: "1. e2-e4". For those not chessably inclined, that means that white's first move is moving the e-column pawn from the second to the fourth row. Then you wait. And you wait some more.

Your correspondent receives your postcard, thinks of a response, and writes back: "1. c7-c5". You can figure out what that means. So he sends that postcard and... waits.

You receive that postcard and... well, you get the drift. This goes on for days, months, even years. This is correspondence chess!

A bunch of Jews have won the Correspondence Chess World Championship, including Hans Berliner, the first-ever American winner. He took the 1965-68 title. (We weren't kidding! It takes three years to finish this thing!) Berliner, a computer scientist born in (ahem) Berlin, later helped design one of the early chess computers, HiTech.

What's most astonishing? Correspondence chess is still played to this day!