by scribe | Oct 17, 2017 | games, literature, people, positions
(A post in the Halloween spirit.) Last night I was playing chess against Shredder, the computer program, and set its rating at 2220. At that very moment, through a glitch in the time-space continuum, the ghost of Aron Nimzovich was summoned and possessed my computer....
by scribe | Sep 23, 2017 | current news, endings, positions
In my last post, I looked at the K and Q versus K and R endgames, one of the four endgames of the Apocalypse, which occurred in both of the semifinal matches of the World Cup, and I introduced a couple of new ideas or at least new terminology, the “seesaw...
by scribe | Sep 21, 2017 | current news, endings, literature, positions, tournaments
Watching the World Cup is just like watching a master class in endgames! We’ve already had three matches decided by very difficult K+R versus K+B endgames, with equal pawns on both sides. Today, in the semifinal round, the masters decided to teach us a class in...
by scribe | Sep 14, 2017 | current news, games, positions, tournaments
Every landslide begins with one little pebble. And then another, and then a few rocks, and then a boulder, and then a whole hillside is moving … That’s what it must have felt like for Alexander Grischuk when he was on the receiving end of an overwhelming,...
by scribe | Sep 9, 2017 | current news, games, people, positions, tournaments
In a fairer world, we would all be talking about Xiangzhi Bu today. At the World Cup, he just defeated the World Champion, Magnus Carlsen, in a game straight out of the nineteenth century. Bu played a daring bishop sacrifice on move 15; Carlsen accepted his challenge...
by scribe | Sep 8, 2017 | current news, endings, positions, tournaments
The playoffs of round 2 in the World Cup happened today, and as you’d expect with closer matchups and faster time controls, there were a few upsets. Probably the most notable one was Hao Wang over Boris Gelfand. Even though the rating difference wasn’t so...
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