A Fine Rook Endgame, Part 4

by | Dec 22, 2022 | endings, games, literature, positions

Today I’m going to finish my series of posts on one of the classic rook-and-pawn endgames: the endgame with balanced pawns on the kingside, and with one player enjoying an outside passed pawn on the queenside. The prototypical position is number 367 in Reuben...

Sifting through the Rubble

by | Sep 18, 2022 | games, openings, positions, tournaments

For the last month, since I got back from my disastrous tournament in Minneapolis, I haven’t shown any games from it because I thought they would be too embarrassing. But in order to learn from a failure, you have to face it and ask what happened and why. So now...

Mutual Delusion

by | Jul 24, 2022 | games, people

A couple weeks ago I wrote about an online game that I played against Grandmaster Mackenzie Molner. We agreed to play a second game with the same conditions: game in 30 minutes, 5 second time delay per move, and each of us would write our comments on the game for the...

Mackenzie v. Mackenzie

by | Jun 22, 2022 | current news, games, people

Last month I received a surprise e-mail from Mackenzie Molner, a grandmaster who is launching a “chess academy” at grandmastermac.com. He asked if I would be interested in having him write a guest post for my blog, as a way of cross-promoting both my blog...

50 Years of Chess: The Grand Finale

by | Jun 11, 2022 | current news, games, openings, people

With this post, I bring to a close my pandemic project for this blog: a retrospective of all 50 years of my chess career (so far). I had intended to end the series with a game from 2021, my fiftieth calendar year of tournament chess. Unfortunately, the pandemic did...