by scribe | Jun 23, 2015 | chess clubs, current news, people, ruminations, tournaments
So many things going on at once, and I’d like to write a separate post on each of them but then it would take too long. So here are three separate, unrelated pieces of news at once. This My rating graph since 1991, downloaded from the USCF website. It’s...
by scribe | Jun 22, 2015 | current news, endings, people, ruminations, tournaments
This weekend, at the National Open in Las Vegas, I finally returned to the chess Valhalla: a rating of 2200, the minimum (and only) requirement to be a National Master. Never mind that I’ve been rated 2200 before. Never mind that I am already, in fact, a Life...
by scribe | May 26, 2015 | Chess Lecture, endings, openings, people, ruminations
Yesterday I got a terrific comment on a very old post, one that also happens to be a favorite of mine: Jerry Hanken on Reshevsky vs. Fischer (2010). That was a post about the aborted Reshevsky-Fischer match from 1961 and how it fell apart, and it ended with a...
by scribe | May 13, 2015 | chess clubs, current news, off-topic, people, ruminations
This is a mostly off-topic post, but it starts in chess club. At the Aptos Library Chess Club yesterday, a gray-haired woman comes in and starts talking with me. “Oh, I didn’t realize there was a chess club here!” she said. For a little while we chat...
by scribe | May 11, 2015 | games, positions, ruminations
In my last post I complained about the futility of playing against computers. I got some excellent comments, one of which inspired me to try a new experiment. I decided to play a 10-minute game against Shredder where I get one “time-out” per game. The idea...
by scribe | Apr 15, 2015 | current news, off-topic, people, ruminations
I wondered recently whether anyone has ever gotten both a 2400 (perfect) SAT score and a 2400 (not perfect, but pretty darn good) chess rating. This isn’t the same thing exactly, but I ran across an interesting discussion at reddit.com: Would you rather have a...
