A Visit from the Dementors

How did J. K. Rowling know? Here is someone who has probably never played a chess game in her life, never had the gut-wrenching experience of losing a game she should have won … and yet she describes perfectly how it feels. When the dementors come to visit Harry...

Jesse’s second lecture

I just finished watching Jesse Kraai’s second lecture on one of my games from Tucson, the game with Jacob Berger that I wrote about here. I found this one slightly less satisfying than the first, but it’s no fault of Jesse’s. The way I played the...

Games from Tulsa (round 2)

So far I have had time to thoroughly analyze only two of my games from the U.S. Championship Qualifier, and I’m part way through the third. I had an unusual number (by my standards) of very interesting and competitive games, and I think that I will eventually...

The Making of a Chess Lecture

A lot of you know already that I give regular lectures at www.chesslecture.com, a subscription website with some of the best chess instruction on the Web! But I think this blog is getting more and more readers who aren’t subscribers to ChessLecture, and so for...

Nicholas Nip — youngest master ever!

Today I read, first on www.uschess.org and then on Michael Aigner’s blog, that we have a new holder of the title of youngest National Master ever in the U.S. His name is Nicholas Nip, and he is 9 years and 11 months old. Aigner’s blog says that Nicholas...

An Extraordinary Game

If I ever write that book of amateur games told in “story” fashion (or “melodramatic,” a word some of our readers took issue with), here is one that I will have to include. This was the game between Dan Burkhard (White) and Jeff Mallett (Black)...