by scribe | Oct 15, 2010 | current news, ruminations, tournaments
These are four words that I never thought I would get a chance to say. But now the US Chess Federation has gone and changed the rules! As many of you probably know, the USCF used to have a Life Master title that was based on rating: if you played 300 games with your...
by scribe | Sep 29, 2010 | current news, people, tournaments
… or at least that is what the official website of the World Chess Olympiad says. After all the political and legal machinations, the vote was not all that close. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov won re-election as president of FIDE, the international chess federation, by...
by scribe | Aug 9, 2010 | Chess Life, current news, people, tournaments
As fans of American Idol and other reality-TV shows know, the “results show” is an interminably long episode each week where the producers take a ridiculously long time to tell you something they could have told you in 30 seconds — which of the...
by scribe | Aug 8, 2010 | current news, endings, games, openings, positions, tournaments
The penultimate round of the 2010 US Open was a very strange one for me. The last two rounds are being played on a one-a-day schedule, so I had to wait around all day (until 7:30 pm) to play my game. And then it took all of 14 minutes to play! My opponent blundered a...
by scribe | Aug 7, 2010 | Chess Lecture, current news, positions, tournaments
Yesterday was a good news/bad news day for me at the US Open, but the bad left a deeper impression. I won my morning game, a nice King’s Gambit (I was White) with Westerinen’s line 1. e4 e5 2. f4 ef 3. Bc4 Nf6 4. Nc3 c6 5. d4 Bb4. I lectured on that once...
by scribe | Aug 4, 2010 | current news, endings, games, positions, tournaments
It’s still too early to say much about how the tournament is going — one one round finished out of nine! But Cailen, Thadeus and I were all disappointed in different ways by our first games. I was paired against a class B player named Ken Ivens. Once again...
