by scribe | Jul 31, 2022 | off-topic, openings, people, ruminations, tournaments
Fifty years and one week ago I completed my first USCF-rated chess tournament, the U.S. Booster Championship in Chicago, Illinois. I’ve never really considered this to be my “first tournament,” because I had played earlier that summer in the 1972...
by scribe | Apr 27, 2022 | current news, literature, off-topic, ruminations
What I did during the pandemic. One of the best things about being a writer is the moment when you first hold a book in your hands that has your name on the cover. I think that it may be similar to becoming a parent. You spend months and months anticipating something...
by scribe | Jun 5, 2021 | chess clubs, Chess Life, games, off-topic, ruminations, tournaments
In 2007, I had my first and only slight brush with celebrity, when I appeared on national television for the first time. I was interviewed for a new television show called “The Universe,” which aired for four or five season on the History Channel. In the...
by scribe | May 5, 2021 | Chess Lecture, games, off-topic, positions, ruminations
It’s still inspiring to look back at my diary for 2003. So many great things were happening that year. My first book, The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be, was published in April, and like any first-time author I was alternating between the heights of...
by scribe | Mar 13, 2021 | games, off-topic, people, tournaments
And now let us begin the downward half of my chess chronicle! I jest, of course. The last 25 years, since I moved to California, have been the best of my life, both in chess and otherwise. On July 29, 1977, I wrote in my diary, “Daddy asked me what I thought...
by scribe | Mar 5, 2021 | chess clubs, off-topic, people, ruminations
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” That’s a line from John Lennon’s song “Beautiful Boy,” released in 1980 on the Double Fantasy album, and it’s always been one of my favorite song...
