by scribe | Sep 7, 2017 | current news, people, ruminations, tournaments
In round two of the 2017 World Cup, two more big names went down to defeat: former World Champion Viswanathan Anand (the #10 seed) and the most recent World Champion challenger, Sergei Karjakin (who was seeded #12 here). Things are getting real! Anand was completely...
by scribe | Sep 3, 2017 | games, openings, people, positions
In 2014, GM James Tarjan returned to tournament chess after an absence of three decades, and I wrote a post about him called Rip Van Winkle Returns. Last week a friend’s Facebook post reminded me of another, less well-known “Rip Van Winkle” chess...
by scribe | Jul 26, 2017 | current news, people, positions, PRO Chess League, tournaments
This title sounds like the beginning of a joke: The best way to beat a grandmaster… is ANY WAY YOU CAN. (This is spoken by somebody who has never done it.) Nevertheless, if I ever beat a GM, I would want to do it the way that IM Eric Rosen did today. At the...
by scribe | Jul 17, 2017 | Chess Life, current news, people, tournaments
After yesterday’s post in which I wrote about eleven of the top junior players in the U.S., of course I have to write about the U.S. Junior Championship, which concluded today. Six of the players I wrote about yesterday — Troff, Liang, Chandra, Li, Brown,...
by scribe | Jul 16, 2017 | current news, endings, people, positions, tournaments
Three years ago I wrote a post called The Seventh Samurai, which was motivated by the fact that I had looked at the list of the 100 top juniors in the world and saw seven Americans on the list. One of the names, Akshat Chandra, was unfamiliar to me then (though quite...
by scribe | Jul 4, 2017 | games, openings, people
In my last post I showed a game between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Sam Shankland where “Nepo” played a favorite opening line of mine and won brilliantly. Curiously, this is not the first time he has done that! Here is a game that Nepo won against Anish Giri in...
