Harold James Plaskett was British Chess Champion

British Chess Championship

The British Chess Championship is organised by the English Chess Federation. There are separate championships for men and women. Since 1923 there have been sections for juniors, and since 1982 there has been an over-sixty championship. The championship venue usually changes every year and has been...

 in 1990, awarded the International Grandmaster

International Grandmaster

The title Grandmaster is awarded to strong chess players by the world chess organization FIDE. Apart from World Champion, Grandmaster is the highest title a chess player can attain....

 title in 1985, and is also a writer, blogger, sometime explorer/cryptozoologist and legal campaigner. Married in 1995 to writer Fiona Pitt-Kethley

Fiona Pitt-Kethley

Fiona Pitt-Kethley is a British poet, novelist, travel writer and journalist. She was born on 21 November 1954. She lived for many years in Hastings, East Sussex, and moved to Spain in 2002 with her husband, former British chess champion James Plaskett and their son, Alexander.She was educated at...

, they have a son, Alexander, born 1996, and live in Cartagena, Spain.

Biography

Generally known in the chess world as 'Jim', he has written nine chess books and also one quasi-autobiographical one, Coincidences.
For some years in the 1990s he was chess columnist at The New Statesman.

He appeared unsuccessfully several times on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (UK game show)

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is a British television quiz show which offers a maximum cash prize of one million pounds for correctly answering successive multiple-choice questions of increasing difficulty...

?, and then drew on his experiences to write a defence of contestant Charles Ingram

Charles Ingram

Charles Ingram is a former British Army major who made headlines worldwide after he was accused of cheating in the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? in 2001. He was convicted of deception, although he maintains that he did not cheat...

, who along with two supposed accomplices had been found guilty of cheating to win the £1 million top prize.

This essay led to an article by Bob Woffinden

Bob Woffinden

Bob Woffinden is a British investigative journalist. Formerly a reporter with the New Musical Express, Woffinden has specialized since the 1980s in investigating miscarriages of justice. He has written about a number of high-profile cases in the UK, including James Hanratty, Philip English, Sion...

 in The Daily Mail of 9 October 2004 - Is The Coughing Major Innocent?, and also prompted a reconsideration of the case in The Guardian Comment is free blog on 17 July 2006 from Jon Ronson

Jon Ronson

Jon Ronson is a Welsh journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio presenter and nonfiction author, whose works include The Men Who Stare At Goats. His journalism and columns have appeared in British publications including The Guardian newspaper, City Life and Time Out magazine...

 - Are the Millionaire three innocent? Woffinden and Ronson had both been initially sceptical.

Plaskett may also be heard at Episode 29 of The Pod Delusion podcast being interviewed by political blogger, Mark Thompson

Mark Thompson (blogger)

Mark James Thompson is a Liberal Democrat blogger based in Sandhurst in Berkshire. He edits the "Mark Thompson's Blog" which began in November 2008 and is also a regular contributor to the Dale & Co group blog edited by Iain Dale....

, who was himself led by Plaskett´s essay to take an interest in the case of The Millionaire Three.

Plaskett finally got into the hotseat on 21 January 2006, becoming the third person to reach £125,000 without using any of his lifelines en route to winning £250,000. He was accompanied by friend and fellow Grandmaster Stuart Conquest

Stuart Conquest

Stuart Conquest is an English chess Grandmaster.-Chess career:In 1981, at the age of 14 he won the World Youth Chess Championship in the under-16 category. Conquest was British Rapidplay Chess Champion in 1997...

.

He also organised and led a 1999 National Geographic expedition to Bermuda

Bermuda

Bermuda is a British overseas territory in the North Atlantic Ocean. Located off the east coast of the United States, its nearest landmass is Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, about to the west-northwest. It is about south of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and northeast of Miami, Florida...

 to follow up reports of "Octopus giganteus

St. Augustine Monster

The St. Augustine Monster is the name given to a large unidentified carcass, originally postulated to be the remains of a gigantic octopus, that washed ashore on the United States coast near St. Augustine, Florida, in 1896. It is sometimes referred to as the Florida Monster or St. Augustine Giant...

" near the island, but was unsuccessful in filming it.

His brother, Allan, invented the snickometer

Snickometer

A Snickometer, commonly known as Snicko, is used in televising cricket to graphically analyse sound and video, and show whether a fine noise, or snick, occurs as ball passes bat. It was invented by English computer scientist Allan Plaskett in the mid-1990s...

 device which is used globally to assist in umpiring decisions in cricket.

Karl Shuker

Karl Shuker

Karl P. N. Shuker is a British zoologist, cryptozoologist, and author living in the West Midlands, England. He works as a full-time freelance zoological consultant, media consultant, and noted author specializing in cryptozoology.- Career :...

, another Briton with an interest in both cryptozoological expeditions and unusual phenomena, had previously reached the same £250,000 figure when a contestant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.

External links

• http://www.jamesplaskett.com