by scribe | Sep 18, 2022 | games, openings, positions, tournaments
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...
by scribe | Jul 31, 2022 | off-topic, openings, people, ruminations, tournaments
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...
by scribe | Jul 12, 2022 | chess clubs, Chess Life, current news, games, literature, openings, people
Mike Splane, Life Master, Five-time Kolty Club Champion, and first posthumous author of “My Best Move” If you look through the July 2022 issue of Chess Life, you might find a familiar name on the last page. Mike Splane, whom I have mentioned many times on...
by scribe | Jun 11, 2022 | current news, games, openings, people
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...
by scribe | Jun 2, 2022 | current news, games, openings, tournaments
During the pandemic I wrote a long retrospective of my chess career, in which I analyzed one game from each of my 50 years of tournament chess. Actually, I had to make a couple of exceptions, because there were two years when I didn’t play any games and a couple...
by scribe | Jan 16, 2022 | chess clubs, games, openings
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...
