by scribe | Nov 22, 2020 | games, literature, openings, people, tournaments, Uncategorized
The next year in my retrospective, 1985, was my busiest year ever, with 60 tournament games, so there are lots of games to choose from. And it was the year that I won the title of North Carolina state champion for the first time, which of course I consider to be one...
by scribe | Nov 8, 2020 | chess clubs, people, ruminations, tournaments
In the spring of 1983 I earned my doctorate from Princeton University, and after a somewhat nail-biting job search I landed a one-year position in the math department at Duke University. After a year it turned into a tenure-track position, and I ended up staying at...
by scribe | Nov 5, 2020 | endings, games, tournaments
By the end of 1982, it was starting to look as if my two-year sabbatical to focus on math instead of chess had been a good decision — not only for my math dissertation, but also for my chess game! My rating was up to 1989, the closest I had ever been to the...
by scribe | Oct 31, 2020 | 2012 world championship, chess clubs, games, openings, tournaments
After two years of not playing any rated chess games, I returned to the tournament scene in 1982 at the U.S. Amateur Team East championship. This was my introduction to one of the most popular and fun tournaments in the American chess calendar — the only...
by scribe | Oct 17, 2020 | games, off-topic, openings, ruminations, tournaments
After spending three posts on 1978, a huge year in my chess life and my personal life, let’s move on to 1979. It was my last year of college (spring) and first year of graduate school (fall), and a very strange year. Coming back from Russia to America, I felt...
by scribe | Oct 14, 2020 | endings, games, tournaments
In my last post I wrote about the semester I spent in Russia in the winter of 1978. Even the people who lived in Leningrad said it was an brutally cold December. I experienced -25 degrees Fahrenheit (-32 degrees Celsius) for the first time in my life, and farther...