by scribe | May 13, 2014 | Chess Lecture, current news, openings, people, tournaments
Over the weekend I spent a lot of time studying a fascinating game from the first round of the U.S. Women’s Championship, won by a 13-year-old girl from the Bay Area, Ashritha Eswaran. Eswaran is the lowest-rated player in the tournament and a relative newbie to...
by scribe | Apr 25, 2014 | current news, people, ruminations, tournaments
It seems like forever since my rating has been over 2200. How long has it been, exactly? Well, take a look at this graph. The last time I was over 2200 was after the World Open in 1995, before I even moved to California. For the longest time my rating just seemed to...
by scribe | Apr 17, 2014 | current news, people, tournaments
Round zero is complete here in Reno, and everybody is still tied with 0 points out of 0! The main job on Thursday is just to get here, which was no problem this year because the weather was beautiful. I picked up a passenger en route. Yes, that’s Jesse Kraai...
by scribe | Apr 13, 2014 | Chess Lecture, off-topic, people, ruminations, tournaments
This week I recorded a ChessLecture that should come out in a month or so, called “How to Tell When the Moment is Right.” The question I was looking at in the lecture is, how do you tell when it’s time to calculate detailed variations, and how do you...
by scribe | Feb 5, 2014 | current news, games, people
… But some speed chess games stick with you more than others. I just found out via Facebook that there’s a video on YouTube of a 5-minute game that Vinay Bhat played against Magnus Carlsen during the latter’s visit to the Bay Area on January 14....
by scribe | Jan 9, 2014 | chess clubs, Chess Lecture, current news, openings, people, tournaments
The Bay Area International is now in the books, and it ended in a similar way to the North American Open the preceding week: with a huge logjam of people at the top. Six people — grandmasters Anton Kovalyov, Wei Yi, Sam Shankland, Bartlomiej Macieja, Daniel...
