50 Years of Chess: Year 1

September 2, 2020

That was so much fun, let’s do it again! In my last post I started a year-by-year retrospective of my (almost) fifty years of tournament chess, with the year 1971. I called that Year Zero because I actually wasn’t quite into tournament chess yet. My chief opponent was still my father. In 1972, chess exploded […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 0

August 31, 2020

Recently it occurred to me that I’m getting very close to the 50th anniversary of my debut in tournament chess. There aren’t so many people who stay active in chess that long. Why not start a series of posts where I pick one game from each year to annotate? I’ll probably get to see some […]

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Fire, Foresight, Fortune

August 20, 2020

Boy, if it isn’t one catastrophe, it’s another. First there was the coronavirus. Then the protests in many U.S. cities (though, thankfully, not very much unrest in Santa Cruz, where I live). Now there are fires in the mountains north of Santa Cruz, set off by a lightning storm this weekend. In the eastern and […]

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Not All Equals are Equal

July 29, 2020

Here’s a position I reached in a recent rapid game against Shredder. I’m White, and it’s my move. The computer is set to a rating of 2321. One of the nice things about Shredder is that you can stop the clock even during a “rated game,” and I like to do this at most once […]

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First Live Chess in Four Months!

July 26, 2020

Yesterday I played my first live, in-person chess game since the coronavirus pandemic started, in early March. To be precise, March 3 was the last date when the chess club at Aptos Library met. Most likely I played one of the kids that day, although I don’t specifically remember a game. The next week, March […]

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Anti-Chess

July 19, 2020

For every good, instructive game that I play against the computer, there must be two or three really awful games. Here’s one that I played this morning that is so bad that it’s good. I’m playing White, Fritz (with its rating set to 2025) is playing Black, clocks are set at 10 minutes for 40 […]

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Winning the Queenside Battle, Winning the Kingside War

July 12, 2020

Have you ever had a game that you won and you didn’t understand why? I call it a Billy Preston game, in honor of the singer who had a #1 hit in the 1970s called “Will It Go Round in Circles.” The lyrics go: “I’ve got a story ain’t got no moral / Let the […]

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The Audacity of Hope, 2020 Version

July 5, 2020

Going off-topic today, with apologies to my chess fans. I. Last night Kay and I had movie night, a family tradition every Friday. Sad to say, I can’t tell you what movie we watched last week, or the week before that, but I can tell you that last night we watched Hamilton and it was […]

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Back in Business!

June 30, 2020

My computer issues have been taken care of, thanks to one of my readers, Marshall Polaris. Marshall is a Kolty Club member, a fan of this blog, and was also a participant on the Kolty Club team in the U.S. Amateur Team West tournament back in February. (Back in the long-ago days when you could […]

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A Weird and Wonderful Game

June 18, 2020

Just when I think I’m wasting my time playing so many games against the computer, along comes a game like this one! I’ll show you the end first. FEN: 2kr4/ppp5/6p1/2Q3P1/4PP2/5KN1/PPp4q/R4B1r b – – 0 23 I’m playing Black against Fritz, with its rating set at 2025. What would you do? If you want a little […]

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