by scribe | Sep 12, 2015 | current news, tournaments
The second day of the World Cup was a pretty bad day for the Americans and a pretty good day for favorites. The top six seeds all advanced to the second round, so the highest-seeded player who has not yet punched his ticket to round two is #7 Alexander Grischuk, who...
by scribe | Sep 11, 2015 | current news, endings, games, people, tournaments
There’s no question in my mind what the game of the day was on the first day of the 2015 FIDE World Cup. But first, let’s review what happened. Even though none of my prognostications can actually go wrong on the very first day, because every player who...
by scribe | Sep 10, 2015 | current news, tournaments
Tomorrow the FIDE World Cup chess tournament begins in Baku, Azerbaijan, the birthplace of former World Champion Garry Kasparov. I’ve gone from being a detractor to a fan of the World Cups. I hated them when they were masquerading as a world championship. I...
by scribe | Sep 9, 2015 | current news, people, tournaments
Thanks to my blog readers for all their helpful comments on my last post. Especially I’d like to give credit to Todd Bryant, who figured out that my 60th move against Bryon Doyle was just fine. In fact, 60. Rxh6 is the most natural move there, and several people...
by scribe | Sep 7, 2015 | current news, endings, people, positions, tournaments
It’s right there in the French name of the game: échecs. Failures. Except that now, in the Internet era, we just call them “fails.” So in the CalChess Labor Day Championship I had four epic fails. Loss against Kostya Kavutskiy. loss against Michael...
by scribe | Sep 2, 2015 | Chess Life, current news, people
Last year I wrote a post called The Seventh Samurai, in which I talked about the fact that the U.S. had seven people on the list of top 100 juniors (under age 21) in the world. Six of them were players I had heard about, but one name was unfamiliar. Akshat Chandra is...
