Don’t Overlook the Penguins

January 3, 2014

After three rounds of the Bay Area International, I have one loss and two draws. The loss was against John Bryant in round 1, not too surprising as he is over 2400 FIDE. The two draws were against masters in the 2200 range, Leon Piasetski and Hayk Manvelyan. In the game against Manvelyan I definitely […]

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Magnus Carlsen coming back to Bay Area

December 30, 2013

Just over a year ago, Magnus Carlsen made his first appearance in the Bay Area, an (apparently) hastily arranged and under-promoted event that left chess players wishing for more. Well, our wish has come true. Magnus is coming to Silicon Valley in January, and he has at least one public event scheduled. You can read […]

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Looking ahead to Bay Area International

December 26, 2013

In one week the Bay Area International will start, and if this isn’t the most fantastic tournament ever held in this area, I don’t know what is. It will have 68 players, including 15 Grandmasters and 19 International Masters. In other words, half of the players will be IM’s and above! IM Ricardo de Guzman, […]

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More Silly Computer Chess

December 20, 2013

Ordinarily a twelve-move draw isn’t something I write a blog post about, but this was kind of a surprise to me. I was playing Shredder again yesterday, which usually wins about twenty (or fifty?) games against me for every draw it gives up. We played a familiar opening, the Symmetrical Variation of the English: Shredder […]

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Shredding and Being Shredded

December 16, 2013

Lately, over the last month or so, I have been playing more chess against the computer. This training technique (if you can call it that) needs to be employed with the utmost caution, if at all. The reason is that it’s so easy to become discouraged and get forced into an ultra-defensive mindset. However, some […]

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Prodigy Update

December 13, 2013

It’s pretty cool when I am surfing a website that has nothing whatsoever to do with chess, and up pops an article that’s not only about chess but about somebody I know! I wrote about Luke Harmon-Vellotti here back in 2008, when I managed to defeat him in a game at the Western States Open […]

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Simple Chess, plus Incurable Optimism

December 9, 2013

The December version of Mike Splane’s chess party turned out to be a small affair. Usually we get 12 to 15 people at the parties, but this is a month when people have lots of other things to do. So only five people were there this time: Gjon Feinstein, Jim Bennett, Juande Perea, myself, and […]

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The cheating coach redux

December 6, 2013

A few of you might remember a post I wrote last year about a really cool math problem that a friend sent to me. For those who don’t remember, here it is again: Two chess teams are going to play a chess match. The best players on each team are supposed to play on board […]

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Anatomy of a Meltdown

December 3, 2013

Today I’d like to show you one of my two time-pressure meltdowns from last weekend. This was the worst one, because it caused me to lose a game that I should have drawn and maybe even could have won. And as is often the case, the seeds of my defeat were planted long before the […]

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The De Guzman Effect

December 2, 2013

This weekend I played in the California Class Warfare Tournament, and for me it was a forgettable weekend. I started out well enough, with a half-point bye in round one and a win with Black in round two. However, after that my old nemesis, time pressure, returned. I lost two games as White (rounds three […]

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