50 Years of Chess: Year 12

By the end of 1982, it was starting to look as if my two-year sabbatical to focus on math instead of chess had been a good decision — not only for my math dissertation, but also for my chess game! My rating was up to 1989, the closest I had ever been to the...

50 Years of Chess: Year 7 (Part 3)

In my last post I wrote about the semester I spent in Russia in the winter of 1978. Even the people who lived in Leningrad said it was an brutally cold December. I experienced -25 degrees Fahrenheit (-32 degrees Celsius) for the first time in my life, and farther...

50 Years of Chess, Year 7 (Part 1)

When you put a call out to the universe, sometimes the universe answers! A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I did not have the scores of any of my games from 1976. But then I got an e-mail from an old friend I hadn’t heard from for many years: Macon Shibut, who...

50 Years of Chess: Year 6

Today we’re going to have a bit of deja deja vu vu: a game that I’ve already annotated once in my blog. It is still one of my favorites, and much more interesting than the other two games I have kept from 1977. But I will do it with one ground rule:...