Monster Mash

Today, in the PRO Chess League, the California Unicorns faced almost inconceivable odds in their match against the St. Louis Arch Bishops. The magnitude of the difficulty becomes quite apparent when you look at the two teams’ lineups. St. Louis: Fabiano Caruana,...

New Toy

Now I have both of my new toys — my new laptop and my new edition of Fritz 17 (together with ChessBase), so I am back to normal for blogging purposes. I might as well use this post for a quick review of Fritz 17. I have to say that the change I was looking...

Bagelization

Welcome to the first blog post written on my new laptop! I don’t have a chess program on my laptop yet, so I will have to do with some makeshift diagrams and no computer analysis. Maybe that will be a refreshing change! While I was away, the fourth season of the...

A Soggy New Year

Somewhat belatedly, this is my first post of 2020, so I wish a happy New Year to all of you who are (like me) about two weeks behind. The main explanation for the absence of new posts is that I spent ten days in Hawaii! For vacation? You might wonder. No, in fact I...

Quiescence

Yesterday Mike Splane hosted his last chess party of 2019. Though somewhat lightly attended (only eight people this time) it gave Eric Steger and me a chance to show our games from the last round of the Kolty Chess Club championship, in which we tied for first. Also,...