dana blogs chess

Category: Chess Life

  • My wife’s crazy (smart?) idea

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    Last weekend my wife, who is a quilter, went to a weekend quilting retreat at Asilomar, a conference center/resort on the Monterey Peninsula about an hour’s drive south of Santa Cruz. It’s one of the most scenic spots you can imagine, with lots of ocean views amid Monterey cypress trees, rustic cabins, and a dining hall…

  • Queen Sac Variation/Bryntse Gambit update

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    One of the questions I get asked fairly often at chess tournaments is: “Have you had any more chances to play that queen sacrifice variation?”  In case there’s anyone reading this who doesn’t know the story, see my Chess Life article from March 2007 or my ChessLecture called “Nuke the Sicilian!” or just go to…

  • Karpov-Fischer

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    A couple nights ago I was browsing one of the Russian chess sites, www.64.ru, and came across an interesting article by Anatoly Karpov about the world championship match that never happened: Karpov vs. Fischer. The link is here if you want to test your Russian, but if not I’ll translate for you. What’s interesting, first, is…

  • The story behind “Double Queen Sacs”

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    Every now and then I like to use this blog to take you “behind the scenes” and tell you some things that were left out of my ChessLectures. Last Friday’s lecture on Double Queen Sacs, or the “Henry VIII theme” (in honor of Henry VIII, who sacrificed two queens …. get it?), was one of the…

  • Double your pleasure

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    … or double your misery, or whatever. I now simultaneously have an article in Chess Life (which arrived in the mail yesterday) and a lecture on ChessLecture. As longtime readers of this blog know, the Chess Life article has been in the works since last fall. It’s basically a print version of a ChessLecture that…

  • Hook and Ladder sighting

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    I was just playing over one of David Vigorito’s games in the recently concluded Foxwoods Open, and darned if he didn’t pull out the Hook and Ladder Trick! That makes him the second ChessLecturer I know of to make use of it. (The first one was Jesse Kraai, who used it to score a crucial…

  • I’m back!

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    Back from my four-day sojourn in Houston, that is. I went to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, in order to learn what’s new in our solar system and hopefully find some topics for articles. I did come back with a couple of ideas. I won’t discuss them in detail here, because it would be…

  • Delay of Chess Life article

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    Back in November, I mentioned that I had submitted an article to Chess Life based on my lecture “Eight-Dimensional Chess,” which they accepted and tentatively scheduled for spring of 2008. Now, alas, I find out that I will have to wait a little bit longer. The editor told me that the U.S. Chess Federation is having budget problems.…

  • Tuesday night at the Mechanics — Daniel Naroditsky

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    This Tuesday night the Mechanics Institute held a reception for its latest member to make a big splash in world chess: 11-year-old Daniel Naroditsky, the world champion chess player under the age of 12. That has a nice sound to it, doesn’t it? “World champion.” Naroditsky earned this honor by scoring 9.5 out of 11 in…

  • New article for Chess Life?

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    This week I submitted an article to Chess Life that was very closely based on my “Eight-Dimensional Chess” lecture on www.chesslecture.com. I’m glad to say that the editor liked it a lot. He said that the earliest slot for publication is in late spring or early summer, so that is probably when it will appear…