50 Years of Chess: Years 45-47

September 1, 2021

As the finish line of my retrospective approaches, we’re going to put on a “finishing kick” and cover three years in one post. The reason is that I have almost no games to show you from the years 2016 to 2018. I played in only one tournament, with 5 games, in 2016; no tournaments in […]

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50 Years of Chess — Year 44

August 22, 2021

I want to thank the people who wrote to me here or by e-mail or on Facebook after Mike Splane’s death. In this blog, I’ve been privileged to have the opportunity to steal — oops, um, er, I mean “write about” — many of his ideas. Although I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: […]

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Mike Splane, Farewell and Legacy

August 12, 2021

Last night I received a very unexpected e-mail from Ken Case, one of the regulars at Mike Splane’s chess parties. Ken said that Mike has passed away. Mike has been in poor health for at least the last two or three years. The source of some but not all of his problems was diabetes. Mike […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 43

July 31, 2021

I’d like to interrupt my retrospective to mention an event that is going on in the chess world here and now: the 2021 World Cup. Principally, I’d like to congratulate Sam Shankland for advancing farther than any other American contestant, all the way to the “elite eight,” as they would call it in basketball. As […]

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50 Years of Chess: Almost Another One for the Ages

July 27, 2021

In Year 35 of this retrospective, I wrote a post called One for the Ages, in which I showed my lifetime masterpiece, Mackenzie-Pruess. In that game I debuted a new opening variation, the Bryntse Gambit (which had been played before in correspondence chess but never, to my knowledge, in OTB chess). The Bryntse Gambit is […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 42

July 18, 2021

Wow! We’re moving on up to 2013 in this retrospective, and in this year I have a rich selection of interesting games to show you. But — here’s the catch — I’ve already written about almost all of them on this blog. Here are some of the “greatest hits” from that year: Zildzic-Mackenzie: I sacrificed […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 41

July 11, 2021

Recently I wrote a post in which I listed my best and worst tournaments by rating improvement or rating loss. But one of the highlights of my chess career was a tournament where I gained only 2 rating points! I also didn’t win any prize money or beat any USCF masters. (I did, by a […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 40

July 4, 2021

We’re on the home stretch now! For so long the games in this rear-view mirror have been so old that it seems almost as if they were played by a different person. But now we’re up to the year 2011, which doesn’t seem like that long ago. As I mentioned in my last post, 2011 […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 39

June 26, 2021

In 2010, according to the USCF online database, my rating hit its lowest point ever. At the 2010 CalChess Labor Day Classic (the northern California state championship) I withdrew after four rounds with a score of 0.5-3.5, culminating in a loss against a player rated more than 200 points below me. This came after a […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 38

June 19, 2021

As I’ve mentioned before, we have moved into the part of my 50-year retrospective that has already been covered in my blog. So it’s not too surprising that my best game from 2009, and the one that I want to show you today, is a game that I already analyzed once before in this blog. […]

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