by scribe | Aug 4, 2015 | endings, games, positions
A fly is buzzing around your table and generally making a nuisance of himself. What is the best tool for getting him to leave you alone? (A) A flyswatter (B) A machine gun (C) A cup The answer is (C). A flyswatter won’t work, unless he is unusually slow or you...
by scribe | Jun 22, 2015 | current news, endings, people, ruminations, tournaments
This weekend, at the National Open in Las Vegas, I finally returned to the chess Valhalla: a rating of 2200, the minimum (and only) requirement to be a National Master. Never mind that I’ve been rated 2200 before. Never mind that I am already, in fact, a Life...
by scribe | Jun 5, 2015 | current news, endings, positions
In my last post I wrote about the amazing 2N versus P endgame that Hans Niemann won recently at the Chicago Open. In that post, with help from the computer and especially the Nalimov tablebase, I wrote about the “Niemann maneuver” and generally gave the...
by scribe | Jun 1, 2015 | current news, endings, people, tournaments
I’ve written before about the Four Endgames of the Apocalypse — the four rare endgames that all chess players dread, which occur just often enough (like once or twice a lifetime) that you really ought to know them. They are: K+Q vs. K+R K+B+N vs. K K+Q+RP...
by scribe | May 26, 2015 | Chess Lecture, endings, openings, people, ruminations
Yesterday I got a terrific comment on a very old post, one that also happens to be a favorite of mine: Jerry Hanken on Reshevsky vs. Fischer (2010). That was a post about the aborted Reshevsky-Fischer match from 1961 and how it fell apart, and it ended with a...
by scribe | May 24, 2015 | endings, games, positions
I wrote recently about my new training idea: playing 10-minute games against the computer, with the condition that I can take one “time-out” of unlimited duration during the game to analyze the position better. One of my readers, I forget whether it was...
