50 Years of Chess: Year 21B

January 23, 2021

In my last post, I gave up on trying to pick a “best game” from 1992 because there are three high-quality, or at least high-interest games that I wanted to show you. Today, I’ll show you my favorite single move ever. A few years ago, I picked it as “My Best Move” for the Chess […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 21A

January 16, 2021

As we move to 1992 in my retrospective look at my chess career, I face a dilemma. In 1990 and 1991 I had trouble finding any good games to show you, but in 1992 I have the opposite problem — too many good games. There’s one that, in my notebook, I call a “keepsake.” There’s […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 20

January 5, 2021

My second year in Ohio was a great time in my life, but not such a great time for my chess. Some of the good things: Kay and I had bought our first house, which was an easy one-mile walk from my office on campus. She was absorbed in sprucing the place up, repainting it, […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 19

January 1, 2021

Welcome to 2021! One of my resolutions is to somehow, some way, play chess against live, human, in-person opponents before the end of the year. Of course, that depends to a considerable extent on factors I can’t control — the progress of the epidemic and the vaccine — so perhaps I should consider it more […]

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Jessica Lauser, U.S. Champion

December 24, 2020

Two days ago I hinted at a piece of good news that I had to keep secret for the time being. I can now reveal what it is. This morning, the New York Times published my article about Jessica Lauser, the U.S. Blind Chess Champion. For people who like print, the article is also scheduled […]

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Short break, plus other news

December 20, 2020

For all the people following my “50 Years of Chess” series, I’m going to take a short, two-week hiatus for the holidays. One reason for the break is that I’ve come up to 1990, which is going to be a challenge because my records for that year are a mess. Until I got married in […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 18

December 19, 2020

The last year of the 1980s was a time of transition for me: from single to married, and from North Carolina, where I had lived very happily for six years, to Ohio. As I mentioned in my last post, I had fallen in love in 1988 and proposed to Kay at the end of the […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 17

December 13, 2020

In choosing a game to show you from 1988, I have a problem. My biggest tournament success that year was the Georgia Congress, which I won with a 5-0 score, my first-ever win in an open tournament and indeed my first time ever with a 5-0 score in any tournament (even when I played in […]

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50 Years of Chess: Limits to Growth

December 9, 2020

I have two fantasies about what happens when we die. My first fantasy is that we get to have three questions answered about our lives. We get unimpeachable, God’s-eye view answers to three things that we could never find out when we were alive. Maybe it would be a cosmic question like, “Is there other […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 16

December 7, 2020

The year 1987 was one when everything started coming together for me in chess. Even now, going over my games and results from that year, it’s gratifying to see the years and years of effort at improvement starting to bear fruit. Of course, there was plenty more for me to work on. In chess, there […]

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