My First Tournament (Part One)

This summer I am passing two big anniversary milestones: the 40th anniversary of my first official chess tournament and the 500th post of this blog. To celebrate both of these anniversaries, I’m going to post a recap of my first tournament, which I wrote back in...

Decision Making

Yesterday, at Mike Splane’s latest chess party, WFM Uyanga Byambaa showed us one of her games from the Norcal Chess Invitational, played in March 2012.  There’s one position that I felt was super-instructive, although the conclusions I drew from it are a...

Ohio memories

As some of you might have noticed, I took a short break from blogging and from chess in general for the last two weeks. My wife and I went back to North Carolina and Virginia to see (respectively) her family and my family. It was our first trip together to the east...

All Tactics All The Time

Yesterday I got together with Gjon Feinstein, Cailen Melville and Thadeus Frei for some skittles chess and analysis. Cailen showed us one of his recent games. As so often happens, we got completely sidetracked by analyzing variations that never happened. It usually...