One Day in Reykjavik

by | Sep 2, 2022 | Chess Life, literature, people, ruminations

My diary, 9/1/1972 Sadly, I was rooting for the wrong guy. This month’s Chess Life has an interesting 50-year retrospective on the Fischer-Spassky match. I thought that the most insightful article was a short interview with IM Anthony Saidy, who hosted Fischer...

Chess, Capitalism, and Chess.com

by | Aug 28, 2022 | current news, people, ruminations

To take my mind off my recent “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad” chess tournament, here are some thoughts on other things going on in the chess world… My friend Gjon Feinstein has alerted me several times to a YouTube channel called “Chess...

Epic Success and Epic Fail

by | Aug 25, 2022 | current news, people, ruminations, tournaments

For the last week I have been in Minnesota, playing in the Minnesota International Chess Festival, which was organized superbly by Alex Betaneli. It may have been the strongest event held in Minnesota since the HB Global Challenge in 2004. But that event was done in...

Summer of ’72

by | 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...

Mutual Delusion

by | Jul 24, 2022 | games, people

A couple weeks ago I wrote about an online game that I played against Grandmaster Mackenzie Molner. We agreed to play a second game with the same conditions: game in 30 minutes, 5 second time delay per move, and each of us would write our comments on the game for the...