The Apple Theory

So I won a Matrix chess game against Shredder on my computer (game/10, I get one time-out of arbitrary length, Shredder’s rating was set for this game at 2298) and was feeling pretty good about myself until I went over it with Rybka. Ugh! Position after 21....

Eljanov 6-0!

Before round three of the FIDE World Cup began, I wrote that one of the interesting matches would be Eljanov-Grischuk, because Eljanov so far had been the “irresistible force” (he had gone 4-0 to that point), while Grischuk had been the “immovable...

Fails

It’s right there in the French name of the game: échecs. Failures. Except that now, in the Internet era, we just call them “fails.” So in the CalChess Labor Day Championship I had four epic fails. Loss against Kostya Kavutskiy. loss against Michael...

Unplanned but Effective

This weekend I was reviewing the games from my last tournament, the National Open, in preparation for my next one. I had thought that my win in the fourth round was not very interesting, but actually there was more to learn from it than I expected. I was playing Black...