Impulse Control

After my epic fail yesterday against Josiah Stearman… number two 10-year-old in the country Josiah Stearman, that is… I just had to go over the game and see what I did wrong. It’s actually a very complicated question. But let’s get to the...

Training with Shredder

Lately I’ve been playing more frequently against the computer program Shredder, with a purpose. After my last tournament I had a feeling that I was not getting enough practice in winning superior positions. In fact, playing against Shredder set at its maximum...

Anatomy of a Miracle

At yesterday’s chess party at Mike Splane’s house, Bryon Doyle showed one of his two miraculous wins from the recent Sacramento Championship, where he tied for first place with his girlfriend Uyanga Byambaa. (Uyanga was also at the party and showed one of...

What Might Have Been

Last week Gjon Feinstein asked me, “Can we go over a couple of my games on your computer?” This request was a surprise to me. He is a chess teacher, so he knows full well that computer analysis can be fool’s gold. I don’t think he even owns a...

Unique Opportunities

Yesterday Mike Splane hosted another chess party that was devoted specifically to endgames. Uyanga Byambaa brought a fascinating game that she played in the recent U.S. Women’s Open in Las Vegas. She was Black against an unrated (!) player named Elena Rodriguez,...

Ill Legal Mates

Yesterday I played a blitz game against Gjon Feinstein that featured not one but two Légal Mates! One of them was the standard one, the other was a modified version that I had n0t seen before. Both of them remained only in the annotations — they didn’t...