The Rope-a-Dope and the Fishing Pole

February 21, 2018

The PRO (Professional Rapid Online) Chess League is well into its second season now, with six rounds complete. The league is easier to follow online than it was last year, because it now has a website independent of chess.com (http://www.prochessleague.com), and there are recaps posted on the day of the rounds. Most rounds take place […]

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Official Book Announcement

February 13, 2018

Going off topic today! I hope that my readers will forgive me. As many of you know, for the last two years I have been working on a big, non-chess book. It’s called The Book of Why, and we are now entering the home stretch. Publication date is now just three months away (May 15). […]

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In the Company of Legends, Part 3

February 3, 2018

Today we’ll see the conclusion of my three-part epic game against Jay Bonin from the 2005 HB Challenge. The first two parts show how we followed and finally deviated from a terrific GM battle, Polugaevsky-Tal from the 1969 Soviet Championship. I’ve really enjoyed reading everybody’s comments about that game. Even if it was home analysis […]

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In the Company of Legends, Part 2

January 31, 2018

Position after 21. … Rc4. White to move. FEN: 3q1r2/pb3pp1/1p4k1/3pP1N1/2r2Q1P/8/Pn3PP1/3RR1K1 w – – 0 22 Last time I left you with this quiz position, from the classic game Polugaevsky-Tal, Soviet Championship 1969. What should White play? Even if you didn’t read my earlier post, I strongly recommend taking some time to analyze this position. One […]

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In the Company of Legends, Part 1

January 28, 2018

One thing that I miss about playing in tournaments is not having games to blog about afterwards. Hopefully my tournament absence will end fairly soon, but in the meantime I still have hundreds of games from the past that I’ve never blogged about. Here is my one game against an American legend — Jay Bonin, […]

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The Search for Concepts

January 22, 2018

Last week I got together with three of my friends — Mike Splane, Gjon Feinstein, and Eric Fingal — for a chess analysis session/chili feed. I’m glad to say that both parts of the occasion went well; the chess was perhaps even better than Eric’s wife’s chili, which is saying something. Mike showed us a […]

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Observation

January 2, 2018

Happy New Year! Here’s our first chess problem of the year, which doesn’t look like a chess problem:How many acorns do you see in the picture? Yesterday I went hiking with my wife and one of her friends in a state park near Santa Cruz, and toward the end of our walk I took this […]

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How to Beat a Grandmaster (Part Two)

December 30, 2017

This morning I got a reminder in Facebook of a blog post I wrote exactly two years ago, called How to Beat a Grandmaster. My friend Robin Cunningham, a FIDE Master, was at that moment playing in the Hastings Masters tournament in England, which traditionally bridges the old year and the new year in chess. […]

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Assistants and Assistance

December 26, 2017

I guess, in retrospect, it was silly to think that anybody would come to chess club on the day after Christmas. Even though I told several parents last week that we would be open for business, I think that everyone is just too much in the holiday spirit to think of leaving home and coming […]

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Learning from the Students

December 21, 2017

In the most recent meeting of the Aptos Library chess club for kids, I decided to show them a position from a game that I played against Shredder, the computer. (Usually my lessons are taken from the excellent book Tactics Time by Tim Brennan and Anthea Carson, but every now and then I throw in […]

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