World Cup Day 2 Recap

September 12, 2015

The second day of the World Cup was a pretty bad day for the Americans and a pretty good day for favorites. The top six seeds all advanced to the second round, so the highest-seeded player who has not yet punched his ticket to round two is #7 Alexander Grischuk, who has played two draws […]

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Beyond the Chessboard

September 11, 2015

There’s no question in my mind what the game of the day was on the first day of the 2015 FIDE World Cup. But first, let’s review what happened. Even though none of my prognostications can actually go wrong on the very first day, because every player who loses gets another chance tomorrow, still there was […]

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World Cup Prognostications

September 10, 2015

Tomorrow the FIDE World Cup chess tournament begins in Baku, Azerbaijan, the birthplace of former World Champion Garry Kasparov. I’ve gone from being a detractor to a fan of the World Cups. I hated them when they were masquerading as a world championship. I think that world champions should be decided the traditional way, by […]

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I’m Over It Now

September 9, 2015

Thanks to my blog readers for all their helpful comments on my last post. Especially I’d like to give credit to Todd Bryant, who figured out that my 60th move against Bryon Doyle was just fine. In fact, 60. Rxh6 is the most natural move there, and several people said that they would also have […]

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Fails

September 7, 2015

It’s right there in the French name of the game: échecs. Failures. Except that now, in the Internet era, we just call them “fails.” So in the CalChess Labor Day Championship I had four epic fails. Loss against Kostya Kavutskiy. loss against Michael Wang, loss against Uyanga Byambaa, and a draw against Bryon Doyle that […]

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The New Seventh Samurai

September 2, 2015

Last year I wrote a post called The Seventh Samurai, in which I talked about the fact that the U.S. had seven people on the list of top 100 juniors (under age 21) in the world. Six of them were players I had heard about, but one name was unfamiliar. Akshat Chandra is by now […]

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Unplanned but Effective

August 26, 2015

This weekend I was reviewing the games from my last tournament, the National Open, in preparation for my next one. I had thought that my win in the fourth round was not very interesting, but actually there was more to learn from it than I expected. I was playing Black against Travis Guenther from Texas. […]

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“Grandmaster” Beau

August 18, 2015

This weekend a circle in my life closed, in a very strange way. One of my Facebook friends posted a link to an obituary of his former next-door neighbor in Atlanta, a man he lived next to for six years but never really knew. The one thing that jumped out at me was that he was a […]

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Pace of Play, Easy versus Hard Moves

August 17, 2015

I was away for a few days at a science meeting in Seattle, but now I’m back. I had a chess-ful weekend. First, Eric Montany invited me and the Usual Suspects to a birthday party at his house. There were, like, real people at this party, not just chess players, and so Eric was too […]

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Things That Make You Go Hmmm…

August 5, 2015

As some of you may have noticed, when I write about games against kids in this blog I often quote their age-group ranking, as in “Yesterday I beat John Doe, the #48 14-year-old in the country.” Mike Splane noticed this and said, “Why don’t you tell them that I’m the #3 61-year-old?” Busted! I have […]

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