by scribe | Oct 23, 2011 | current news, ruminations, tournaments
Extra! Read all about it! The Western States Open concluded tonight in relatively predictable fashion. Sergei Kudrin, who was leading after round four (see my previous post) played two draws that must have lasted about twenty minutes total. That gave him a 5-1 score....
by scribe | Oct 21, 2011 | off-topic, ruminations, tournaments
I arrived in Reno last night, and I will be playing in the Western States Open chess tournament beginning about three hours from now. But today I won’t write about chess: I’ll write about something I saw last night that surprised the heck out of me. Last...
by scribe | Oct 14, 2011 | off-topic, ruminations
For various reasons I hauled out a trunk yesterday that I had not opened in about ten years. I wasn’t even entirely sure what was in it any more. It turned out that about a third of the trunk consisted of souvenirs from my semester in Russia. I studied in...
by scribe | Aug 13, 2011 | chess clubs, people, positions, ruminations, tournaments
Last night I met with Gjon Feinstein, Mike Splane and Dan Burkhard to go over some recent games. Mike and Dan had just finished playing in the seven-round Kolty Chess Club championship. Dan tied for fourth, with three wins and four draws, and he was very eager to show...
by scribe | Aug 9, 2011 | Chess Lecture, off-topic, ruminations
The last of my long-time animal companions has passed away. Willie, our dog, lived to be just shy of 17 years old. He was in very fragile health for the last three months. He started having seizures in May, probably due to a brain tumor. He also was bothered by a...
by scribe | Jul 27, 2011 | Chess Life, people, ruminations, US Chess League
As many of you probably know, Google uses a measure called PageRank to evaluate the “importance” of Web pages. It’s a simple scale that goes from 0 to 10, with 0 being the least important and 10 the most. I found out only a couple weeks ago that you...
