by scribe | Jun 13, 2021 | Chess Lecture, games, openings, people, tournaments
After my all-time best game, my win over IM David Pruess in 2006, I was invited by IM (and soon to be grandmaster) Jesse Kraai to record a lecture about the game for ChessLecture.com. The lecture instantly hit their top-ten list, and it was so popular that I was...
by scribe | May 24, 2021 | Chess Lecture, games, literature, openings, people
Many of you know the game I’m going to write about today. Don McLean doesn’t play a concert without “American Pie.” And I’m not going to write a lifetime retrospective of my chess games without my game against David Pruess. It’s...
by scribe | May 16, 2021 | games, openings, tournaments
What a strange year 2005 was for me over the chessboard. It had some really high highs and some really low lows. In April, I won the biggest cash prize (up to that point) of my life, taking first place in the Expert section at the Far West Open in Reno. In May I...
by scribe | Apr 25, 2021 | games, openings, people
The chess world is finally warming up again after the Pandemic Year. I feel a little bit guilty not writing about the 2020-21 Candidates Tournament, the longest tournament in history (?), which is nearing a conclusion more than a year after it began. Ian...
by scribe | 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...
by scribe | 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...
