by scribe | Oct 25, 2009 | games, people, tournaments
After the first four rounds of the Western States Open, the two biggest stories are upsets and youth. Both of the two top seeds went down to defeat in the first two rounds. In round one, GM Jaan Ehlvest (seeded #2) blundered a piece against veteran master Andrew...
by scribe | Oct 4, 2009 | games, positions, tournaments
This weekend I played in the curiously named Adults Open in San Jose, the first NC-17 rated chess tournament. No, there was no hanky-panky going on. It’s just that tournament director Salman Azhar thought that some grownups might be more interested in a weekend...
by scribe | Sep 30, 2009 | games, openings, positions, US Chess League
Today I’m going to discuss a game that I already wrote about in Blogging from 32,000 Feet, but this time we’ll look at it from the viewpoint of my opponent! Tim Rogalski e-mailed me and said that he had written up some annotations for our game that he is...
by scribe | Sep 26, 2009 | Chess Lecture, games, people, positions, tournaments
In one of my very first posts in this blog, I profiled a Bay Area youngster named Erik Kislik, who at that time was an expert with a rating about the same as mine (2115). I described him as being an incipient chess hobo — a person who cares only about chess, who...
by scribe | Sep 8, 2009 | games, openings, positions, tournaments
Hello again!! Thanks to the miracle of modern technology I am writing my first blog post from midair — specifically from American Airlines flight 1861 from Dallas to San Jose. Another of the miracles of modern technology is that I just lost 15 minutes of work. I...
by scribe | Sep 7, 2009 | Chess Lecture, Chess Life, games, tournaments
On the final day of the U.S. Senior Open I completed my Summer of Disaster in appropriate style. In round 5 I played one of my favorite opening lines against Tim Rogalski: the Fritz Variation of the Two Knights Defense. As it turns out, Tim is an aficionado of the Two...
