Sifting through the Rubble

For the last month, since I got back from my disastrous tournament in Minneapolis, I haven’t shown any games from it because I thought they would be too embarrassing. But in order to learn from a failure, you have to face it and ask what happened and why. So now...

Summer of ’72

Fifty years and one week ago I completed my first USCF-rated chess tournament, the U.S. Booster Championship in Chicago, Illinois. I’ve never really considered this to be my “first tournament,” because I had played earlier that summer in the 1972...

50 Years of Chess: The Grand Finale

With this post, I bring to a close my pandemic project for this blog: a retrospective of all 50 years of my chess career (so far). I had intended to end the series with a game from 2021, my fiftieth calendar year of tournament chess. Unfortunately, the pandemic did...

Catastrophes in the Nimzo

When you play the move 1. d4 as White, you’re generally saying that you want the game to be a sumo match rather than a sword fight. You’re tired of all the sharp tactics of 1. e4, whether it’s the Sicilian Defense or the open games. You want to just...