Category: games
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50 Years of Chess: Year 16
The year 1987 was one when everything started coming together for me in chess. Even now, going over my games and results from that year, it’s gratifying to see the years and years of effort at improvement starting to bear fruit. Of course, there was plenty more for me to work on. In chess, there…
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50 Years of Chess: Year 15
For 1986, I’ve decided to show you yet another game I played against a fellow North Carolina champion. This series is becoming a who’s-who of North Carolina chess! First I showed you a game against Matt Noble (co-champion, 2002), then a trifecta of games against Greg Samsa (champion, 1981, 1982, 2002). My opponent for today’s…
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50 Years of Chess: Year 14
The next year in my retrospective, 1985, was my busiest year ever, with 60 tournament games, so there are lots of games to choose from. And it was the year that I won the title of North Carolina state champion for the first time, which of course I consider to be one of the high…
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50 Years of Chess: Year 13
“In my mind I’m going to Carolina…” For anyone who has lived in North Carolina, James Taylor’s song is a little bit of an anthem. Perhaps like “Sweet Home Alabama” for people who live in that state. When you drive down I-95, the length of the East Coast, you start in New England, which has…
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50 Years of Chess: Year 12
By the end of 1982, it was starting to look as if my two-year sabbatical to focus on math instead of chess had been a good decision — not only for my math dissertation, but also for my chess game! My rating was up to 1989, the closest I had ever been to the “promised…
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50 Years of Chess: Year 11
After two years of not playing any rated chess games, I returned to the tournament scene in 1982 at the U.S. Amateur Team East championship. This was my introduction to one of the most popular and fun tournaments in the American chess calendar — the only tournament with no money at stake where you will…
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50 Years of Chess: Year 8
After spending three posts on 1978, a huge year in my chess life and my personal life, let’s move on to 1979. It was my last year of college (spring) and first year of graduate school (fall), and a very strange year. Coming back from Russia to America, I felt detached from my old life…
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50 Years of Chess: Year 7 (Part 3)
In my last post I wrote about the semester I spent in Russia in the winter of 1978. Even the people who lived in Leningrad said it was an brutally cold December. I experienced -25 degrees Fahrenheit (-32 degrees Celsius) for the first time in my life, and farther inland I believe the temperatures got…
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50 Years of Chess, Year 7 (Part 1)
When you put a call out to the universe, sometimes the universe answers! A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I did not have the scores of any of my games from 1976. But then I got an e-mail from an old friend I hadn’t heard from for many years: Macon Shibut, who was a…
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50 Years of Chess: Year 6
Today we’re going to have a bit of deja deja vu vu: a game that I’ve already annotated once in my blog. It is still one of my favorites, and much more interesting than the other two games I have kept from 1977. But I will do it with one ground rule: I’m going to…