by scribe | Jul 20, 2011 | current news, literature, openings
Did you know that July 20 is International Chess Day? If you’re wondering, the significance of July 20 is that it is the day, in 1924, when FIDE came into existence. It’s not entirely clear that this is a reason for celebration, but there you have it...
by scribe | Jul 6, 2011 | games, openings, positions
This must be Computer Chess Month for me, because I’m going to write my third entry in a row about that topic. This afternoon I played another interesting … no, change that, mind-bending game against Shredder 12. This one I lost on time, but I had kind of...
by scribe | Jun 19, 2011 | Chess Lecture, current news, games, openings
Many of you have probably already seen the game from earlier this month where Viswanathan Anand destroyed Alexei Shirov (as Black!) in 17 moves. However, I feel as if I should say something about it because it is an ultra-rare appearance in top-level chess of an...
by scribe | May 21, 2011 | games, openings, positions, tournaments
Because George Michael said so! In my last tournament I had a disappointing finish, a draw in the last round against a class-A player named Roberto Aiello. In this game, as White, I experimented with a variation of the King’s Indian Defense that I have never...
by scribe | Feb 21, 2011 | literature, off-topic, openings, ruminations
Ok, I’ve been waiting to do this for a couple months. Today I finally checked out Google’s “Ngram Viewer,” which lets you see how the frequency of use of various words or phrases in the English language (and other languages) has changed over...
by scribe | Feb 18, 2011 | Chess Lecture, openings, ruminations
When I first started recording lectures for chesslecture.com in 2006, I used to check the popularity of my lectures almost religiously. I no longer do, because the list of the most popular lectures almost never changes. To understand why, imagine what it would be like...
