by scribe | Sep 7, 2015 | current news, endings, people, positions, tournaments
It’s right there in the French name of the game: échecs. Failures. Except that now, in the Internet era, we just call them “fails.” So in the CalChess Labor Day Championship I had four epic fails. Loss against Kostya Kavutskiy. loss against Michael...
by scribe | Sep 2, 2015 | Chess Life, current news, people
Last year I wrote a post called The Seventh Samurai, in which I talked about the fact that the U.S. had seven people on the list of top 100 juniors (under age 21) in the world. Six of them were players I had heard about, but one name was unfamiliar. Akshat Chandra is...
by scribe | Aug 18, 2015 | games, people, positions, ruminations, tournaments
This weekend a circle in my life closed, in a very strange way. One of my Facebook friends posted a link to an obituary of his former next-door neighbor in Atlanta, a man he lived next to for six years but never really knew. The one thing that jumped out at me was...
by scribe | Aug 17, 2015 | chess clubs, games, openings, people, ruminations
I was away for a few days at a science meeting in Seattle, but now I’m back. I had a chess-ful weekend. First, Eric Montany invited me and the Usual Suspects to a birthday party at his house. There were, like, real people at this party, not just chess players,...
by scribe | Aug 5, 2015 | chess clubs, people, ruminations, tournaments
As some of you may have noticed, when I write about games against kids in this blog I often quote their age-group ranking, as in “Yesterday I beat John Doe, the #48 14-year-old in the country.” Mike Splane noticed this and said, “Why don’t you...
by scribe | Jul 24, 2015 | literature, off-topic, people, ruminations
I was doing some random web-surfing today, when I ran into a jaw-dropper of a thread on Google Groups, from 2002. Wrote Larry Tamarkin (a master from New York) in rec.games.chess.politics: Having played some of the great young talents of the last 20 years, I can give...
