by scribe | Apr 5, 2016 | current news, games, off-topic
This will be a mostly off-topic post, for which I apologize, but I’ll bring it back to chess at the end. If you’re a college basketball fan in the U.S., you know what the title is about. Every year, at the end of the NCAA men’s basketball...
by scribe | Mar 28, 2016 | current news, people, tournaments
In case you didn’t see it on any of the zillions of other chess news sites on the Internet, the Candidates Tournament in Moscow ended today with a clear winner: Sergei Karjakin. Karjakin and Fabiano Caruana entered the final round tied for first with 7½ points...
by scribe | Mar 27, 2016 | current news, people, tournaments
Let me start with an apology. I haven’t been following the Candidates’ Tournament in Moscow very closely — in particular, I haven’t been watching the live broadcasts, although I have been reading about the games on Chessbase.com afterwards. I...
by scribe | Mar 19, 2016 | current news, openings, people, positions, ruminations, tournaments
Leave it to Hikaru Nakamura to give us another lesson in how not to play chess. That is, literally, how not to pick up the pieces and move them. Last year, he taught us not to castle with both hands. (You might remember that in an Armageddon playoff game with Ian...
by scribe | Mar 17, 2016 | current news, off-topic, people, ruminations
My ISP had server problems the last couple days, so I wasn’t able to post in a timely fashion and the “news” is no longer news. The match between Lee Sedol, the top human go player, and AlphaGo, a new computer program developed by Google, ended in a...
by scribe | Mar 9, 2016 | current news, off-topic, people, tournaments
I am completely unqualified to talk about anything go-related, but still chess fans might relate to this news. In the first game of the match between AlphaGo (Google’s deep neural network-based AI) and Lee Sedol (generally considered the strongest go player in...