High-Class Abacus

December 22, 2014

In a comment on my most recent post, Hal Bogner used the delightful sobriquet “high-class abacus” to describe chess computers. Quoth Hal: “What’s with this worship of high-class abacus evaluations of positions in which their evaluations are in hundredths of a pawn?” Good question, Hal! In general I agree that you should not use a […]

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Doing Something vs. Doing Nothing

December 19, 2014

Doing something is always better than doing nothing, right? Don’t our chess teachers tell us always to have a plan? At Mike Splane’s latest chess party, we looked at a game that will have you seriously questioning that wisdom. The game was Miles-Huebner, Wijk aan Zee 1984. Mike thought that this would be a good […]

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Russian 101 (off-topic)

December 11, 2014

To anyone who wants to learn Russian, I have one small warning: One of the first words you’ll see is also the second-hardest word to pronounce. The word is “Hello,” or in Russian, “Zdravstvooeetye.” That’s the bad news. The good news is that once you’ve learned that word, all the other words (except one) are […]

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Khachiyan’s lecture, plus thoughts on my style

December 10, 2014

Thanks to Gjon Feinstein and Mike Splane for telling me that GM Melikset Khachiyan has posted a lecture on chess.com about the game that we played in the recent Reno tournament. If you’re a member of chess.com (and you should be, because membership is free), go and check out his lecture. My short description: It’s […]

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Bad Trap, Good Lesson

December 9, 2014

Today’s chess club at the Aptos Library was one of the best I can remember. We had 18 kids, and everybody seemed to find a good match to play against. In the lesson I talked about an age-old trap: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Nd4? 4. Nxe5?! Qg5 5. Nxf7?? Qxg2 6. […]

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Pop Goes the Kitty

December 8, 2014

I’m sure that some of you have noticed that I haven’t posted in a couple weeks. The main reason is that I’ve been pretty busy doing my real job. I have made some time for chess (studying the games from my last tournament, in Reno) but not for chess blogging. I’ve been a little bit […]

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Carlsen-Anand: Post Mortem

November 23, 2014

Today, as I expect most readers of this blog know already, Magnus Carlsen won the 11th game of his match with Viswanathan Anand to retain his world championship title. The final score of the match was 6½-4½ (+3 – 1 =7 for Carlsen). What can I say? I think the primary reaction of the chess […]

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Queen and Bishop versus Two Rooks

November 15, 2014

A couple days ago I read this in Wikipedia’s entry called Chess endgame: Queen and bishop versus two rooks. This was thought to be a draw [before computer tablebases — DM] but the queen and bishop usually win. It takes up to 84 moves. This got me curious. Like most players, I only know the […]

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Wrong Moves and Wrong Conceptions

November 12, 2014

At Mike Splane’s last chess party, the question came up: “Is one bad move enough to lose a game?” Of course the answer is yes, if the move is really, really bad, like hanging a rook or a queen. But in games between more or less experienced players, say above a 1500 rating, outright blunders […]

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Carlsen-Anand: A Mathematical Analysis

November 11, 2014

Today a seismic shift happened in the world championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Viswanathan Anand. Vishy finally won a game! Last year, you might remember, Carlsen defeated Anand without even losing a single game. Even though Anand went into the match as the world champion, he didn’t even look as if he was in […]

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