Irena Kavalek
 

Some twenty years ago my husband, Lubomir (Lubosh) Kavalek, started 
working on a book of his memoirs. It was to be a story of his chess life 
accompanied by games or game fragments. He kept compiling stories 
and collecting games and the amount of material grew. In 2015 he started 
working with the well-known Czech-American writer Jan Novak. With 
Jan’s help the text of the book started to take shape. Now the plan was to 
have perhaps a two-volume work with the games published in a separate 
volume.
On January 18, 2021, Lubosh died unexpectedly. Jan Novak compiled the 
existing text, without the games, and prepared it for publication. The book 
is to be published in the Czech Republic under the title Rozehraný život.
It seemed important to me to publish an abridged version of the 
book in ‘the West’. I spent the rest of 2021 translating relevant parts into 
English. I omitted some vignettes of purely Czech interest and added a 
few paragraphs I found in Lubosh’s notes. Some quotes are translations of 
translations.
While going through Lubosh’s papers I found a list of games that he 
considered for inclusion in the book. My assumption was that those 
games, some probably annotated, resided somewhere in his computer or 
on one of the numerous USB flash drives scattered around his office. This 
presented a challenge since I know nothing about computers and even less 
about chess. To the rescue came Craig Saperstein who used to take chess 
lessons from Lubosh as a kid. Craig, now conveniently a software engineer, 
volunteered countless hours of his free time to look through Lubosh’s 
ChessBase files trying to locate annotated games that could be included in 
the book. 
Various lists I found in my husband’s papers and the internet helped me 
to compile a timeline of his personal a professional highlights included as 
an appendix. Any mistakes of omission or commission are my own.
Several others helped as well. I owe a great debt of gratitude to John 
Donaldson for his careful reading of the text and his general help and 
advice throughout. My thanks to Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam for shepherding 
the project through to publication. Also thanks to my son Steven and his 
family for their moral support during this difficult year.

              Because of these joined endeavors, Life at Play took the shape that was
reasonable planned by its creator.