by scribe | Apr 25, 2008 | chess clubs, games, people, ruminations
Last night I went to chess club at Borders, for the first time since they moved their closing time to an hour earlier. This change has forced us to speed up the time controls, so that we now play three 15-minute games instead of three 25-minute games. From what I was...
by scribe | Apr 24, 2008 | Chess Lecture, ruminations, tournaments
Here’s an update that no one asked for, on the Santa Cruz Cup, aka The World’s Slowest Chess Tournament. We got started last October with an eight-man round robin, which finally concluded in March… almost. The trouble was that one game was still...
by scribe | Mar 21, 2008 | chess clubs, games, openings, ruminations
Last night, about five minutes before I left for chess club, I was talking with my wife, and I needed a word that means “a self-contradictory phrase.” I opened my mouth… and nothing came out! I couldn’t believe it. I knew that there is such a...
by scribe | Mar 4, 2008 | people, ruminations, tournaments
Okay, to get a little discussion going, today we’re going to talk about one of everybody’s favorite topics: ratings. What do you think about them? Are they a blight on the game of chess? A useful yardstick for gauging your own improvement? My own attitude...
by scribe | Feb 25, 2008 | games, positions, ruminations
A couple days ago, Dribbling made an interesting comment on my post “Bronstein on computers and humans.” He comments that he recently watched GM Nakamura (“Smallville” on ICC) playing bullet chess against a computer. Nakamura would deliberately...
by scribe | Feb 19, 2008 | openings, people, ruminations, tournaments
Another of the great pleasures of www.chesspro.ru is one of their regular writers, an international master named Ilya Odessky. I’ve found myself laughing out loud at his comments more often than any other chess writer I know. For an English-language comparison,...
