by scribe | Sep 11, 2015 | current news, endings, games, people, tournaments
There’s no question in my mind what the game of the day was on the first day of the 2015 FIDE World Cup. But first, let’s review what happened. Even though none of my prognostications can actually go wrong on the very first day, because every player who...
by scribe | Sep 10, 2015 | current news, tournaments
Tomorrow the FIDE World Cup chess tournament begins in Baku, Azerbaijan, the birthplace of former World Champion Garry Kasparov. I’ve gone from being a detractor to a fan of the World Cups. I hated them when they were masquerading as a world championship. I...
by scribe | Sep 9, 2015 | current news, people, tournaments
Thanks to my blog readers for all their helpful comments on my last post. Especially I’d like to give credit to Todd Bryant, who figured out that my 60th move against Bryon Doyle was just fine. In fact, 60. Rxh6 is the most natural move there, and several people...
by scribe | Sep 7, 2015 | current news, endings, people, positions, tournaments
It’s right there in the French name of the game: échecs. Failures. Except that now, in the Internet era, we just call them “fails.” So in the CalChess Labor Day Championship I had four epic fails. Loss against Kostya Kavutskiy. loss against Michael...
by scribe | Aug 26, 2015 | games, positions, tournaments
This weekend I was reviewing the games from my last tournament, the National Open, in preparation for my next one. I had thought that my win in the fourth round was not very interesting, but actually there was more to learn from it than I expected. I was playing Black...
by scribe | Aug 18, 2015 | games, people, positions, ruminations, tournaments
This weekend a circle in my life closed, in a very strange way. One of my Facebook friends posted a link to an obituary of his former next-door neighbor in Atlanta, a man he lived next to for six years but never really knew. The one thing that jumped out at me was...
