by scribe | Sep 6, 2017 | current news, games, positions, tournaments
One of my favorite events of the chess calendar is here, and in fact the first round nearly got by me before I realized it. Yes, it’s the month-long chess orgy known as the World Cup. What I don’t like about the World Cup: It’s not a world...
by scribe | Sep 3, 2017 | games, openings, people, positions
In 2014, GM James Tarjan returned to tournament chess after an absence of three decades, and I wrote a post about him called Rip Van Winkle Returns. Last week a friend’s Facebook post reminded me of another, less well-known “Rip Van Winkle” chess...
by scribe | Aug 29, 2017 | current news, games, positions, tournaments
The 2017 U.S. Masters championship in North Carolina ended last weekend with a dramatic Armageddon game between GM Sam Shankland, the tournament’s highest seed, and GM Yaroslav Zherebukh, last year’s second-place winner. Curiously, neither Shankland nor...
by scribe | Jul 30, 2017 | games, openings, positions
Inspired by Eric Rosen’s victory in the London System in my last blog post, I decided to give it a try against the computer. And guess what happened? I won my shortest game ever against Shredder. To be honest, the win had much more to do with Shredder’s...
by scribe | Jul 26, 2017 | current news, people, positions, PRO Chess League, tournaments
This title sounds like the beginning of a joke: The best way to beat a grandmaster… is ANY WAY YOU CAN. (This is spoken by somebody who has never done it.) Nevertheless, if I ever beat a GM, I would want to do it the way that IM Eric Rosen did today. At the...
by scribe | Jul 16, 2017 | current news, endings, people, positions, tournaments
Three years ago I wrote a post called The Seventh Samurai, which was motivated by the fact that I had looked at the list of the 100 top juniors in the world and saw seven Americans on the list. One of the names, Akshat Chandra, was unfamiliar to me then (though quite...
