50 Years of Chess: Year 30

by | Apr 13, 2021 | chess clubs, endings, games, openings, people

The year 2001 is one I’ll always remember for two trips, neither having anything to do with chess. The first one was a trip to Santa Fe, where I was scheduled to interview Stuart Kauffman for Discover magazine. This was a super exciting opportunity, as Discover...

50 Years of Chess: Year 29

by | Apr 3, 2021 | chess clubs, games, openings, people

Two posts ago I wrote about the Santa Cruz chess “scene” as it was when I first moved here, in the late 1990s. I didn’t mention that Monterey also had a little bit of a chess scene. A forty-five minute drive away, on the other end of the Monterey Bay...

50 Years of Chess: The Santa Cruz Scene

by | Mar 23, 2021 | chess clubs, people, ruminations

Before I go too much farther in my chess chronicle, I should say a little bit about the chess scene in Santa Cruz, which was very lively when I moved here in 1996 and very moribund now. When I moved here, you could play 5-minute chess any day of the week at the Santa...

50 Years of Chess: Year 25

by | Feb 28, 2021 | chess clubs, games, openings, people

We’ve come to the halfway point in my chess narrative, and it’s the year of a big change: my move to California. During the first 25 years of my chess career I lived in several different places: Indiana, Virginia, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio. In the...

50 Years of Chess: Year 22

by | Feb 6, 2021 | chess clubs, games, openings, ruminations

We come now to 1993, the middle year of my seven years in Ohio. It was a year of satisfaction and disappointment for me, and a year when storm clouds were gathering, even if I didn’t see them. The biggest thing by far that year was that Kay and I gave up on...