by scribe | Oct 7, 2020 | chess clubs, Chess Life, off-topic, people, ruminations, tournaments
In the fall of 1978, I joined a group of 35 American students for a semester abroad in Leningrad, Russia. I had been studying the Russian language since my junior year of high school, and chess was one of the main reasons (at first). When I was at Phillips Academy, I...
by scribe | Sep 26, 2020 | games, people, tournaments
Today we’re going to have a bit of deja deja vu vu: a game that I’ve already annotated once in my blog. It is still one of my favorites, and much more interesting than the other two games I have kept from 1977. But I will do it with one ground rule:...
by scribe | Sep 7, 2020 | chess clubs, games, literature, people, tournaments
As we move forward through the years, we come to an unexpectedly sad entry. It’s not that 1973 was a bad year. Quite the opposite! It was a great year, in which I played four tournaments, won three trophies, scored 14-6 (close to my best year ever), and advanced...
by scribe | Sep 2, 2020 | endings, games, openings, tournaments
That was so much fun, let’s do it again! In my last post I started a year-by-year retrospective of my (almost) fifty years of tournament chess, with the year 1971. I called that Year Zero because I actually wasn’t quite into tournament chess yet. My chief...
by scribe | Mar 26, 2020 | 2020 world championship, current news, ruminations, tournaments
This morning FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich announced that he was suspending the 2020 Candidates Tournament, which had just reached the halfway mark. As most or all of my readers probably know already, this was the tournament to select a challenger to Magnus Carlsen...
by scribe | Mar 25, 2020 | 2020 world championship, Chess Lecture, current news, games, positions, tournaments
The only significant sports event in the world got a little bit more interesting today! In the seventh round of the 2020 FIDE Candidates tournament, the two leaders faced off against each other, and chess fans were rewarded with an exciting and decisive game. Maxime...
