by scribe | Nov 28, 2008 | games, tournaments
This weekend I’m playing in the Bay Area Chess Thanksgiving Festival (see www.bayareachess.com). This is the second tournament I’ve played in that was organized by Salman Azhar; I also played in the Memorial Day Festival earlier this year. He found a much...
by scribe | Nov 26, 2008 | people, ruminations, tournaments
While I’m working on my series of posts about the Bird Variation of the Ruy Lopez, I shouldn’t ignore the rest of the chess world. So I’ve just spent the last half hour catching up on the Chess Olympiad, which concluded yesterday in Dresden, Germany....
by scribe | Nov 11, 2008 | chess clubs, Chess Life, tournaments
Last weekend my wife, who is a quilter, went to a weekend quilting retreat at Asilomar, a conference center/resort on the Monterey Peninsula about an hour’s drive south of Santa Cruz. It’s one of the most scenic spots you can imagine, with lots of ocean...
by scribe | Oct 22, 2008 | ruminations, tournaments
Michael Aigner’s comment on my last blog post jogged a few memory cells for me. Specifically, he felt that he had a fairly rotten tournament in Reno, and he lost rating points, and yet he actually won some prize money. That reminded me of some tournaments I had...
by scribe | Oct 21, 2008 | Chess Lecture, endings, games, tournaments
In my last post I promised to show you the endgame from my last-round game at the Western States Open. It was the last game in the entire tournament to finish, and by winning this game I managed to tie for second place under 2300. In this endgame miracle, I somehow...
by scribe | Oct 20, 2008 | endings, games, tournaments
Many years ago there was a cartoon in The New Yorker that shows a frumpy old housewife with permed hair, standing in a house that is the epitome of depressing: a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling, a flea-bitten dog, a bald husband with a t-shirt and a beer...
