by scribe | Sep 29, 2010 | current news, people, tournaments
… or at least that is what the official website of the World Chess Olympiad says. After all the political and legal machinations, the vote was not all that close. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov won re-election as president of FIDE, the international chess federation, by...
by scribe | Sep 16, 2010 | off-topic, tournaments, US Chess League
§ 1. “Various and sundry” is an idiom my mother used to say a lot … I haven’t heard it in years and years, and then it popped into my head as a title for today’s post. It’s a phrase that probably started as a joke (because the two...
by scribe | Sep 6, 2010 | games, tournaments
My chess catastrophes continued this weekend at the CalChess Labor Day Classic. I scored ½ point in the first 4 rounds (one draw, three losses) and was so discouraged that I felt it was necessary to withdraw early. I couldn’t bring myself to get up early and...
by scribe | Sep 3, 2010 | Chess Lecture, ruminations, tournaments, US Chess League
Tomorrow I will start playing in the Cal Chess Labor Day Open, which is a 3-day, 6-round Swiss. It also serves as the northern California state championship, which has been won by Sam Shankland the last two years. With Sam now “retired” (except for the...
by scribe | Aug 9, 2010 | Chess Life, current news, people, tournaments
As fans of American Idol and other reality-TV shows know, the “results show” is an interminably long episode each week where the producers take a ridiculously long time to tell you something they could have told you in 30 seconds — which of the...
by scribe | Aug 8, 2010 | current news, endings, games, openings, positions, tournaments
The penultimate round of the 2010 US Open was a very strange one for me. The last two rounds are being played on a one-a-day schedule, so I had to wait around all day (until 7:30 pm) to play my game. And then it took all of 14 minutes to play! My opponent blundered a...
