A Fine Rook Endgame, Part 4

by | Dec 22, 2022 | endings, games, literature, positions

Today I’m going to finish my series of posts on one of the classic rook-and-pawn endgames: the endgame with balanced pawns on the kingside, and with one player enjoying an outside passed pawn on the queenside. The prototypical position is number 367 in Reuben...

A Fine Rook Endgame, Part 3

by | Dec 3, 2022 | endings, literature, positions

I hope you’re ready for some very, very challenging endgame analysis! Today we’ll have what I think is the most difficult and interesting of my four posts on what I call the “Fine endgame”: rook plus 4 pawns versus rook plus 3 pawns, with the...

A Fine Rook Endgame, Part 2

by | Nov 12, 2022 | endings, literature

Last time I introduced a new series of four posts about a very basic (but very difficult) rook and pawn endgame. It’s the endgame where one side (we’ll say White) is a pawn up, and that pawn is an outside passed pawn (we’ll say an a-pawn). As per the...

A Fine Rook Endgame, Part 1

by | Nov 6, 2022 | endings, literature, tournaments

I’m back! Actually, I never left, but this blog has been silent for seven weeks, so some of you may have been wondering where I went. My apologies: I was busy with other things (like a book proposal), but to be honest, I just didn’t have any topics that...

Sifting through the Rubble

by | Sep 18, 2022 | games, openings, positions, tournaments

For the last month, since I got back from my disastrous tournament in Minneapolis, I haven’t shown any games from it because I thought they would be too embarrassing. But in order to learn from a failure, you have to face it and ask what happened and why. So now...

One Day in Reykjavik

by | Sep 2, 2022 | Chess Life, literature, people, ruminations

My diary, 9/1/1972 Sadly, I was rooting for the wrong guy. This month’s Chess Life has an interesting 50-year retrospective on the Fischer-Spassky match. I thought that the most insightful article was a short interview with IM Anthony Saidy, who hosted Fischer...

Chess, Capitalism, and Chess.com

by | Aug 28, 2022 | current news, people, ruminations

To take my mind off my recent “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad” chess tournament, here are some thoughts on other things going on in the chess world… My friend Gjon Feinstein has alerted me several times to a YouTube channel called “Chess...

Epic Success and Epic Fail

by | Aug 25, 2022 | current news, people, ruminations, tournaments

For the last week I have been in Minnesota, playing in the Minnesota International Chess Festival, which was organized superbly by Alex Betaneli. It may have been the strongest event held in Minnesota since the HB Global Challenge in 2004. But that event was done in...