by scribe | May 16, 2021 | games, openings, tournaments
What a strange year 2005 was for me over the chessboard. It had some really high highs and some really low lows. In April, I won the biggest cash prize (up to that point) of my life, taking first place in the Expert section at the Far West Open in Reno. In May I...
by scribe | May 8, 2021 | games, people, positions, tournaments
Step right up for round two of the Emory Tate versus Dana Mackenzie show! If you didn’t catch round one, you can go back and read it in my Year 31 post. Technically, today’s game is round four, because we had played three games before this one, with two...
by scribe | May 5, 2021 | Chess Lecture, games, off-topic, positions, ruminations
It’s still inspiring to look back at my diary for 2003. So many great things were happening that year. My first book, The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be, was published in April, and like any first-time author I was alternating between the heights of...
by scribe | Apr 25, 2021 | games, openings, people
The chess world is finally warming up again after the Pandemic Year. I feel a little bit guilty not writing about the 2020-21 Candidates Tournament, the longest tournament in history (?), which is nearing a conclusion more than a year after it began. Ian...
by scribe | Apr 13, 2021 | chess clubs, endings, games, openings, people
The year 2001 is one I’ll always remember for two trips, neither having anything to do with chess. The first one was a trip to Santa Fe, where I was scheduled to interview Stuart Kauffman for Discover magazine. This was a super exciting opportunity, as Discover...
by scribe | Apr 3, 2021 | chess clubs, games, openings, people
Two posts ago I wrote about the Santa Cruz chess “scene” as it was when I first moved here, in the late 1990s. I didn’t mention that Monterey also had a little bit of a chess scene. A forty-five minute drive away, on the other end of the Monterey Bay...
