2017 World Cup — Round 1

September 6, 2017

One of my favorite events of the chess calendar is here, and in fact the first round nearly got by me before I realized it. Yes, it’s the month-long chess orgy known as the World Cup. What I don’t like about the World Cup: It’s not a world championship, and should never have been marketed […]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Read the full article →

Another Rip Van Winkle Story

September 3, 2017

In 2014, GM James Tarjan returned to tournament chess after an absence of three decades, and I wrote a post about him called Rip Van Winkle Returns. Last week a friend’s Facebook post reminded me of another, less well-known “Rip Van Winkle” chess player — the terror of Ohio chess in the early 1990s, Boris […]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Read the full article →

Great Defense or Bungled Offense?

August 29, 2017

The 2017 U.S. Masters championship in North Carolina ended last weekend with a dramatic Armageddon game between GM Sam Shankland, the tournament’s highest seed, and GM Yaroslav Zherebukh, last year’s second-place winner. Curiously, neither Shankland nor Zherebukh won the 2017 tournament: the winner was Vladimir Belous of Russia, with a score of 7/9. The playoff […]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Read the full article →

The Great Eclipse Trip of 2017

August 27, 2017

For those who’ve noticed a certain silence from my blog over the last few days, the reason is that I went eclipse-chasing. Somehow or other I managed to turn a less than three-minute eclipse into a full week trip. And it was great! The best thing about the eclipse was that it provided an occasion […]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Read the full article →

A Still Unknown Trap

August 10, 2017

Eight years ago, when I was still recording for ChessLecture, I gave a lecture called “My New Favorite Trap.” I talked about a 100 percent risk-free trap in the Center Counter Opening that should be especially effective against players who are “booked up.” Amazingly, according to ChessBase the trap had only been sprung one time […]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Read the full article →

Different Kinds of Equal

July 30, 2017

Inspired by Eric Rosen’s victory in the London System in my last blog post, I decided to give it a try against the computer. And guess what happened? I won my shortest game ever against Shredder. To be honest, the win had much more to do with Shredder’s awful play than my good play. Although […]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Read the full article →

The Best Way to Beat a GM

July 26, 2017

This title sounds like the beginning of a joke: The best way to beat a grandmaster… is ANY WAY YOU CAN. (This is spoken by somebody who has never done it.) Nevertheless, if I ever beat a GM, I would want to do it the way that IM Eric Rosen did today. At the Xtracon […]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Read the full article →

John Hesp. Poker. Chess. Fantasy.

July 22, 2017

Last night and the previous night I watched parts of the World Series of Poker (WSOP) final table on ESPN. It’s the first time I have ever watched live poker on TV, although I have watched the “canned” broadcasts now and then in the past. Of course, whenever I watch poker I mentally compare it […]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Read the full article →

Stunning Finish in U.S. Junior

July 17, 2017

After yesterday’s post in which I wrote about eleven of the top junior players in the U.S., of course I have to write about the U.S. Junior Championship, which concluded today. Six of the players I wrote about yesterday — Troff, Liang, Chandra, Li, Brown, and Tang — were in the ten-man field. Perhaps the […]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Read the full article →

Even More Golden

July 16, 2017

Three years ago I wrote a post called The Seventh Samurai, which was motivated by the fact that I had looked at the list of the 100 top juniors in the world and saw seven Americans on the list. One of the names, Akshat Chandra, was unfamiliar to me then (though quite familiar now), and […]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Read the full article →