by scribe | May 12, 2008 | games, tournaments
Yesterday I played against Dan Burkhard in my second playoff game for the Santa Cruz Cup, and I lost again. This eliminates me from contention for first place, and ends my three-year winning streak. It feels like karma. Over the last three years I had lots of good...
by scribe | May 4, 2008 | endings, games, positions, tournaments
How did J. K. Rowling know? Here is someone who has probably never played a chess game in her life, never had the gut-wrenching experience of losing a game she should have won … and yet she describes perfectly how it feels. When the dementors come to visit Harry...
by scribe | Apr 30, 2008 | Chess Lecture, Chess Life, games, literature
… or double your misery, or whatever. I now simultaneously have an article in Chess Life (which arrived in the mail yesterday) and a lecture on ChessLecture. As longtime readers of this blog know, the Chess Life article has been in the works since last fall....
by scribe | Apr 25, 2008 | chess clubs, games, people, ruminations
Last night I went to chess club at Borders, for the first time since they moved their closing time to an hour earlier. This change has forced us to speed up the time controls, so that we now play three 15-minute games instead of three 25-minute games. From what I was...
by scribe | Apr 21, 2008 | Chess Lecture, games, positions
I just finished watching Jesse Kraai’s second lecture on one of my games from Tucson, the game with Jacob Berger that I wrote about here. I found this one slightly less satisfying than the first, but it’s no fault of Jesse’s. The way I played the...
by scribe | Apr 14, 2008 | Chess Lecture, endings, games
For any of you who are subscribers to ChessLecture, Jesse Kraai’s analysis of my game with John Bick is now online. All I can say is, it’s fascinating. I am blown away by how different his understanding of several positions was from mine. You would think...