Winning the Exchange

This year’s Aptos Library chess tournament for kids was the biggest and most successful ever! I organize and direct this tournament every year in May. Usually we get around 16 to 20 players (last year we had only 14), but this year 37 people participated! It was...

Simultaneous queen sacs!

Last weekend Mike Splane showed me a sensational game that he recently played at the Kolty Chess Club. It features a position where his opponent could have played a queen sacrifice, to which the best defense would have been a counter-queen sacrifice! The only slight...

ChessLecture Milestone

I didn’t even notice it until this morning, but ChessLecture hit a pretty big milestone three weeks ago — we now have more than two thousand recorded lectures! As of today (April 24) there are 2015, in fact. The two thousandth lecture was a very...

Magnus Carlsen on Time 100

This week TIME magazine published its annual list of “the 100 most influential people in the world,” and guess who was on it? Oh, I guess the title of this post gave it away. Magnus Carlsen made the list, and got a nice one-paragraph bio from Garry...

Chess on the radio!

On my recent trip, I was surprised when a friend asked me if I had heard of Webster University and their chess coach, a woman from “somewhere in Eastern Europe.” In fact, I had just read the Chess Life article about the Pan-Am Intercollegiate tournament...