The Wintered Rook, continued!

July 24, 2016

My chess friend Mike Splane, whose comments have often been seen on these pages before, had so many things to say about my recent post The Wintered Rook that they would never have fit into a comment.He sent me a complete re-analysis of the game by e-mail. I’d like to share it because it’s interesting […]

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Little Beetle Blogs

July 21, 2016

Yesterday, just for fun, I read a bunch of articles online about whether blogging is dead. I guess my interest was provoked by this article, already two years old, about the end of Technorati’s blog-rating directory. The article explained Technorati’s quiet, no-fuss decision to shutter what used to be their #1 service: In recent years, […]

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The Wintered Rook (Memorable Games, Part 4)

July 18, 2016

One of the most impressive things about Bobby Fischer’s 60 Memorable Games was his inclusion of two losses, which is not normally done in a “greatest games” collection. But he called his book memorable games for a reason. I think he was not interested in idle bragging; he wanted to show his readers games that […]

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My Life Story, in Black and White

July 13, 2016

Warning: Going way off topic for this post. I’m not talking “black and white” as in chess pieces, I’m talking about it as in people. This is something I don’t do very often because people, unlike chess pieces, are not defined by their color. However, the things that have happened in the U.S. over the […]

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Extreme traitor pawns

July 11, 2016

I’m going to take a short break from my series of 6 memorable games, partly because I haven’t decided on game #4 yet and partly because of a cool e-mail that I got from Larry Smith. Larry, you might recall, was one of my teammates at the U.S. Amateur Team West tournament this year. He […]

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Trapping the Trapper (Memorable Games, Part 3)

July 5, 2016

The year 1989 was a time of many changes in my life. I got married, I changed my name, I got a new job, and I moved from Durham, North Carolina (where I had spent six very happy years) to a small college town in rural Ohio. With so much going on, chess took a little bit of a […]

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I Think It Was the Unicorns (Memorable Games, Part 2)

June 26, 2016

The year 1988 was a unique time in my life, both chessically and personally. In 1987, I had just won my second North Carolina championship and earned the National Master title. In hindsight it seems like the one period of my chess life when I was brimming with confidence; I had achieved two of my greatest […]

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My Six Memorable Games, Part 1: First Queen Sac

June 23, 2016

If Bobby Fischer had sixty memorable games, surely I can come up with six, right? During this period when I’m not playing a lot of tournament chess, perhaps it’s a good time to look back at some highlights from the past. Actually, I have already written in this blog and elsewhere about some of my […]

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Disaster Movie

June 20, 2016

Summer is traditionally the time for disaster movies, so in the spirit of the season I’d like to bring you one of my most embarrassing disasters against Shredder, the computer chess program. In fact, I might even do a whole series of them. Believe me, I have plenty of material for such a series! My previous […]

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Patience, patience, patience

June 16, 2016

Recently one of my readers asked whether I play against the computer for training or just for fun. I answered that it was probably 75 percent for fun and 25 percent for training. But perhaps I was wrong, because the two are not mutually exclusive! Here’s a game I played yesterday that, in my opinion, […]

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