by scribe | Aug 11, 2018 | chess clubs, current news, games, positions
Master of Business Administration, Master of Chess, … All of these titles describe Mike Splane, but I would like to add a new one to them: Master of Improvisation. Mike sent around an e-mail yesterday with a game he had just played at the Kolty Club on Thursday night....
by scribe | Jul 21, 2018 | chess clubs, current news, positions, tournaments
Before I started playing in the Tuesday Night Marathon, I told myself that I wouldn’t care too much about my result. The goal was simply to get back into form after two years of no tournament chess, and I didn’t really know how I would do. For the first...
by scribe | Jul 11, 2018 | chess clubs, current news, games, tournaments
After six rounds of the Tuesday Night Marathon at the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco, I realized something kind of odd. I hadn’t played a single sacrifice in any of my first five games (in one round I took a half-point bye, so obviously no sacrifices in...
by scribe | Jul 9, 2018 | current news, off-topic, people, positions
Last Friday I got a really surprising message on Facebook. “Hi Dana!” it started. “I hope that everything is going well. I just moved to Santa Cruz…” and it was signed Steven Zierk. My regular readers will remember that I just wrote a...
by scribe | Jul 7, 2018 | current news, off-topic, people, ruminations, tournaments
For poker players, this is one of the biggest weeks of the year — the week of the “Main Event” at the World Series of Poker. And even though there are a million reasons why I don’t play poker, I thought it would be fun to catch up on some...
by scribe | Jul 4, 2018 | chess clubs, current news, endings, games, positions, tournaments
Round six of the Tuesday Night Marathon at the Mechanics Institute was another hard-fought draw. I really don’t mind draws, even against lower-rated players, as long as good chess was played on both sides. In this game, my opponent made a really strange mistake...
