by scribe | Sep 3, 2017 | games, openings, people, positions
In 2014, GM James Tarjan returned to tournament chess after an absence of three decades, and I wrote a post about him called Rip Van Winkle Returns. Last week a friend’s Facebook post reminded me of another, less well-known “Rip Van Winkle” chess...
by scribe | Aug 29, 2017 | current news, games, positions, tournaments
The 2017 U.S. Masters championship in North Carolina ended last weekend with a dramatic Armageddon game between GM Sam Shankland, the tournament’s highest seed, and GM Yaroslav Zherebukh, last year’s second-place winner. Curiously, neither Shankland nor...
by scribe | Aug 10, 2017 | Chess Lecture, games, openings
Eight years ago, when I was still recording for ChessLecture, I gave a lecture called “My New Favorite Trap.” I talked about a 100 percent risk-free trap in the Center Counter Opening that should be especially effective against players who are...
by scribe | Jul 30, 2017 | games, openings, positions
Inspired by Eric Rosen’s victory in the London System in my last blog post, I decided to give it a try against the computer. And guess what happened? I won my shortest game ever against Shredder. To be honest, the win had much more to do with Shredder’s...
by scribe | Jul 4, 2017 | games, openings, people
In my last post I showed a game between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Sam Shankland where “Nepo” played a favorite opening line of mine and won brilliantly. Curiously, this is not the first time he has done that! Here is a game that Nepo won against Anish Giri in...
by scribe | Jul 1, 2017 | current news, games, openings, tournaments
This week the most exciting news in chess for me was that the American team got trounced by the Russians in the World Team Championship, 4-0. Come again? Well, the real news was the Ian Nepomniachtchi beat Sam Shankland, and while I would ordinarily make me very sad,...
