Mackenzie v. Mackenzie

Last month I received a surprise e-mail from Mackenzie Molner, a grandmaster who is launching a “chess academy” at grandmastermac.com. He asked if I would be interested in having him write a guest post for my blog, as a way of cross-promoting both my blog...

50 Years of Chess: The Grand Finale

With this post, I bring to a close my pandemic project for this blog: a retrospective of all 50 years of my chess career (so far). I had intended to end the series with a game from 2021, my fiftieth calendar year of tournament chess. Unfortunately, the pandemic did...

Bittersweet Return

After two years and three months of not playing any tournament chess, I finally returned to action this weekend in the 2021 (not a typo) CalChess State Championship. Short summary: I was glad to be back. My first goal was to say “f you” to the coronavirus....

Coming Back to Life!

My chess calendar is finally starting to get busy again! Next weekend I will play in my first chess competition since February 2020, the last month of the Before Times. I’ll be playing in the 2021 CalChess Open State Championship, and yes, you read that right....