by scribe | Feb 26, 2015 | openings, ruminations
About 50 years ago, the Yugoslav chess magazine Chess Informant introduced a new classification system for chess openings. For chess players it was like the invention of the metric system: it systematized the nomenclature that varied wildly from country to country....
by scribe | Feb 16, 2015 | openings, ruminations
What do you think? Good? Bad? Ridiculous? It seems to me that with the move 1. a3, White is saying to his opponent, “I will agree to play Black, and I believe that in any opening you might choose to play, I will be able to find a variation in which a3 is a...
by scribe | Feb 11, 2015 | games, literature, off-topic, people, positions, ruminations
Last week I finished reading a military-history book called Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War. I am totally not a military history buff, but recently it bothered me to realize that I do not know a single battle of the American Revolution,...
by scribe | Feb 4, 2015 | off-topic, people, ruminations
Sorry I’ve been away for a couple days… I went to an undisclosed top-secret location, where they’ve just had 19 inches of snow, and began the process of turning into a Borg. See? Resistance is futile. Anyway, when I got home I read in my Facebook...
by scribe | Jan 16, 2015 | current news, people, ruminations
I wasn’t completely happy with my post yesterday about the top chess states, because the measure I used (number of players over 2500) is skewed to the very high end of the spectrum of chess players. Half of the states don’t even have a player rated 2500....
by scribe | Jan 15, 2015 | people, ruminations
What do you think are the strongest chess states in the country? I think that most chess players would be able to guess the top state, maybe even the top two or top three. But what surprises me is how close the competition is. Fifty years ago, it would have been New...
