Hail Mary

August 4, 2022

Generally speaking, when you are in a bad or losing position, you should not count on finding a single miraculous move — a hail Mary — to save your position. Hard-nosed, patient defense will save more games than prayers will. But on the other hand, you should keep an eye out for the rare case […]

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Summer of ’72

July 31, 2022

Fifty years and one week ago I completed my first USCF-rated chess tournament, the U.S. Booster Championship in Chicago, Illinois. I’ve never really considered this to be my “first tournament,” because I had played earlier that summer in the 1972 Indiana State Championship. But a funny thing happened — that tournament never got rated. I […]

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Mutual Delusion

July 24, 2022

A couple weeks ago I wrote about an online game that I played against Grandmaster Mackenzie Molner. We agreed to play a second game with the same conditions: game in 30 minutes, 5 second time delay per move, and each of us would write our comments on the game for the blog. Just as a […]

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Mike Splane in Chess Life

July 12, 2022

If you look through the July 2022 issue of Chess Life, you might find a familiar name on the last page. Mike Splane, whom I have mentioned many times on this blog, is featured in the column “My Best Move,” which ends every issue. The game that he writes about also appeared on this blog, […]

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Mackenzie v. Mackenzie

June 22, 2022

Last month I received a surprise e-mail from Mackenzie Molner, a grandmaster who is launching a “chess academy” at grandmastermac.com. He asked if I would be interested in having him write a guest post for my blog, as a way of cross-promoting both my blog and his website. I had never spoken with Mac before, […]

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Daniel Naroditsky: New York Times Columnist!

June 15, 2022

You know something really unusual has happened when one of your Facebook friends who is not a chess player posts something about chess on your wall. “Have you heard about this?” she asked. “The New York Times has a new chess column.” I did know about it, but just barely! Only one day before, one […]

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50 Years of Chess: The Grand Finale

June 11, 2022

With this post, I bring to a close my pandemic project for this blog: a retrospective of all 50 years of my chess career (so far). I had intended to end the series with a game from 2021, my fiftieth calendar year of tournament chess. Unfortunately, the pandemic did not release its grip in time, […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 50 (The Agony and the Ecstasy)

June 2, 2022

During the pandemic I wrote a long retrospective of my chess career, in which I analyzed one game from each of my 50 years of tournament chess. Actually, I had to make a couple of exceptions, because there were two years when I didn’t play any games and a couple more years where I couldn’t […]

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Bittersweet Return

May 31, 2022

After two years and three months of not playing any tournament chess, I finally returned to action this weekend in the 2021 (not a typo) CalChess State Championship. Short summary: I was glad to be back. My first goal was to say “f you” to the coronavirus. I won’t let you keep me away from […]

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Coming Back to Life!

May 22, 2022

My chess calendar is finally starting to get busy again! Next weekend I will play in my first chess competition since February 2020, the last month of the Before Times. I’ll be playing in the 2021 CalChess Open State Championship, and yes, you read that right. Salman Azhar, the founder, mastermind and guru of Bay […]

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