Winning the Exchange

This year’s Aptos Library chess tournament for kids was the biggest and most successful ever! I organize and direct this tournament every year in May. Usually we get around 16 to 20 players (last year we had only 14), but this year 37 people participated! It was...

Origin of chess cleared up

The Time Lords invented it! That’s what Doctor Who said on TV last night, and if you can’t trust a fictional time-traveler, well then, whom can you trust? For those readers who haven’t watched BBC or followed science fiction for the last 50 years,...

Mixup Explained

I don’t know if anybody noticed this, but on Friday a new lecture of mine, called “Learn From Your Fellow Amateurs, Episode XXXIII,” went live on ChessLecture. It was a lecture I was particularly excited about, because I thought that it was a game...

ChessLecture Milestone

I didn’t even notice it until this morning, but ChessLecture hit a pretty big milestone three weeks ago — we now have more than two thousand recorded lectures! As of today (April 24) there are 2015, in fact. The two thousandth lecture was a very...