by scribe | Sep 25, 2015 | games, openings, positions
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....
by scribe | Sep 23, 2015 | chess clubs, current news, positions, tournaments
Yesterday, like every Tuesday, was chess club day at the Aptos Public Library. We had a good turnout of 18 kids, from April to Zoey. Lately we’ve had an unusual number of girls, which I’m pleased to see. I think we had eight this week, which has to be an...
by scribe | Sep 20, 2015 | current news, endings, games, positions, tournaments
In today’s fourth round of the FIDE World Cup, there were two big upsets: #16 Peter Svidler over #1 Veselin Topalov and #19 Shakhriyar Mamedyarov over #3 Fabiano Caruana. Two other games were won by the favorite: #2 Hikaru Nakamura over #16 Michael Adams and #8...
by scribe | Sep 18, 2015 | current news, endings, games, positions, tournaments
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...
by scribe | Sep 7, 2015 | current news, endings, people, positions, tournaments
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...
by scribe | Aug 26, 2015 | games, positions, tournaments
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...