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James Eade (born March 23, 1957) is a chess master, chess politician, chess tournament organizer and chess book publisher. He holds the title of FIDE Master. He is best known for his book Chess for Dummies which is one of the best selling chess books of all time. He was a member of the Policy Board of the United States Chess Federation (USCF) from 1996 to 1999. He has served as American Zone President of FIDE, the World Chess Federation, from 2000 to 2002, and has been a Trustee of the U. S. Chess Trust since 2000. He is their current Treasurer. He is a past President of CalChess (the Northern California Chess Association), The Kolty Chess for Youth Foundation (a 501-3 charity), and the Chess Journalists of America. He is a former editor and publisher of both the CalChess Journal and the Golden Gate Chess News.

He organized a number of FIDE futurities and round-robins in the 1990s. He organized the 1995 Pan Pacific International Chess Tournament, the strongest chess tournament ever held in San Francisco, won by Viktor Korchnoi, and the 1996 Hall of Fame tournament, won by Lubomir Kavalek.

As a player, he is a solid master, rated 2320 by FIDE. Politically, he is a controversial person. He and Tom Dorsch took on the US chess establishment, claiming that the USCF was being mismanaged and misgoverned into insolvency. Eade was one of three Northern Californians (with Mark Pinto and Neil Falconer) to bail the USCF out when it could not afford to send a team to the Chess Olympiads.

Eade wrote an article for Chess Life making the case for chess in the Olympic Games. He pointed out that chess was already in the African Games, the Asian Games, and the Central American Games, and that recognition by National Olympic Committees had led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in new contributions to chess. This led some to falsely charge him with being pro drug testing, which is hardly the case. Eade simply maintained that drug testing, a fact of life in the Olympics, is a small price to pay for the right to represent your country overseas.

Eade was made President of the US Chess Trust at the annual meeting earlier this month (August 2010).

He lives in Menlo Park, California, where he continues to teach and write about chess.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "James Eade", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0