The Perils of Opening Preparation II

March 9, 2014

Continuing my series of posts of favorite games from the Santa Cruz Cup…   The third Santa Cruz Cup, in 2005, was a really weird one for me. I finished first, but only because of unbelievable blunders by my two main rivals, Ilan Benjamin and Juande Perea. First, a word about the format. After the […]

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The Perils of Opening Preparation I

March 7, 2014

At Mike Splane’s last chess party, about two weeks ago, I was excited to see two people who have been almost absent from the Santa Cruz chess scene for six years: Eric Fingal and Juan Diego (Juande) Perea. In Eric’s case the reason for his absence was personal events that I probably shouldn’t write about. […]

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Tabiyah Time!

March 3, 2014

A “tabiyah” is an opening position that arises when both sides play their “most natural” moves, or a position that can arise from a multitude of different move orders. In many cases it is arrived by mutual consent, although this doesn’t have to be the case. And it’s usually a position where one side or […]

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Survivor Reality Check, Part 2

February 27, 2014

Last night the new season of Survivor premiered, and once again we have a contestant claiming to be a chess player. Some of you might remember a guy named Marty a few years back who claimed to be a grandmaster. Then I went and checked and there are no grandmasters named Marty. This time we […]

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Conceptual Problem

February 26, 2014

Yesterday I was thinking over possible lessons for my kids at the Aptos Library Chess Club, and I thought, “Why not ask them about this position?” FEN:rnbqkbnr/8/pppppppp/8/2BPPB2/2N2N2/PPP1QPPP/R4RK1 w kq – 0 1 This is not a position any readers of this blog will ever see in a tournament game, but it’s something that could very […]

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Comments Back Online

February 20, 2014

My ISP tells me it’s been more than 24 hours since the last spam from my account. They think (knock on wood) that the problem has been fixed. So you can once again submit comments and you shouldn’t get taken to a nasty-looking “Forbidden” page. If that does happen, please let me know. Sorry about […]

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Spam woes continue

February 19, 2014

I’ve been told that the spam coming from my account started up again, and so my Internet service provider has once again been forced to block comments on my blog. The blog does appear to be the source of the problem, because the spam stops when they put up the block. So it’s starting to […]

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US Amateur Team West

February 18, 2014

President’s Day weekend can only mean one thing in U.S. chess — it’s time for the U.S. Amateur Team championship! I didn’t play this year, but I went to the tournament site on Sunday afternoon to spectate. It was another great success for tournament organizer Salman Azhar, with 52 teams entered. That’s an improvement over […]

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Accidental Endgame Study

February 16, 2014

Today Gjon Feinstein and I were going over a wonderful game between Wei Yi and John Bryant from the recent Bay Area International, a game that I’m planning to lecture on for ChessLecture. There’s one variation that I wasn’t quite sure how to evaluate, and as often happens we ended up playing about twenty moves […]

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Comments Working Again

February 15, 2014

There was a period of about 24 hours when comments were disabled on my blog. What happened is that somebody figured out a way to send out spam that appeared to be from my blog. To get to the root of the problem the comments had to be disabled for a while. The problem is […]

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