Upcoming events plus more Oslo pics

This weekend a new chess event, the Western Chess Classic, will be held in the Bay Area. This is really exciting, because the Northern California chess schedule has been pretty sparse in recent years. The best northern California tournament, in fact, isn’t held...

Insta-Theory

I promise I will continue my series on the Bird Variation of the Ruy Lopez soon, but first I want to tell you about the Theoretical Novelty (TN) I played last night without realizing it! I met with my friend Gjon Feinstein to play some speed chess last night. Gjon is...

My wife’s crazy (smart?) idea

Last weekend my wife, who is a quilter, went to a weekend quilting retreat at Asilomar, a conference center/resort on the Monterey Peninsula about an hour’s drive south of Santa Cruz. It’s one of the most scenic spots you can imagine, with lots of ocean...

Karpov-Fischer

A couple nights ago I was browsing one of the Russian chess sites, www.64.ru, and came across an interesting article by Anatoly Karpov about the world championship match that never happened: Karpov vs. Fischer. The link is here if you want to test your Russian, but...