by scribe | Sep 8, 2017 | current news, endings, positions, tournaments
The playoffs of round 2 in the World Cup happened today, and as you’d expect with closer matchups and faster time controls, there were a few upsets. Probably the most notable one was Hao Wang over Boris Gelfand. Even though the rating difference wasn’t so...
by scribe | Sep 7, 2017 | current news, people, ruminations, tournaments
In round two of the 2017 World Cup, two more big names went down to defeat: former World Champion Viswanathan Anand (the #10 seed) and the most recent World Champion challenger, Sergei Karjakin (who was seeded #12 here). Things are getting real! Anand was completely...
by scribe | Sep 6, 2017 | current news, games, positions, tournaments
One of my favorite events of the chess calendar is here, and in fact the first round nearly got by me before I realized it. Yes, it’s the month-long chess orgy known as the World Cup. What I don’t like about the World Cup: It’s not a world...
by scribe | Aug 29, 2017 | current news, games, positions, tournaments
The 2017 U.S. Masters championship in North Carolina ended last weekend with a dramatic Armageddon game between GM Sam Shankland, the tournament’s highest seed, and GM Yaroslav Zherebukh, last year’s second-place winner. Curiously, neither Shankland nor...
by scribe | Jul 26, 2017 | current news, people, positions, PRO Chess League, tournaments
This title sounds like the beginning of a joke: The best way to beat a grandmaster… is ANY WAY YOU CAN. (This is spoken by somebody who has never done it.) Nevertheless, if I ever beat a GM, I would want to do it the way that IM Eric Rosen did today. At the...
by scribe | Jul 17, 2017 | Chess Life, current news, people, tournaments
After yesterday’s post in which I wrote about eleven of the top junior players in the U.S., of course I have to write about the U.S. Junior Championship, which concluded today. Six of the players I wrote about yesterday — Troff, Liang, Chandra, Li, Brown,...