by scribe | Feb 19, 2008 | openings, people, ruminations, tournaments
Another of the great pleasures of www.chesspro.ru is one of their regular writers, an international master named Ilya Odessky. I’ve found myself laughing out loud at his comments more often than any other chess writer I know. For an English-language comparison,...
by scribe | Feb 16, 2008 | openings, people, ruminations
The Russian-language chess website www.chesspro.ru has a really cool interview with David Bronstein, the former world championship candidate who died in December 2006. Mostly Bronstein talks about the differences between human and computer chessplayers. The...
by scribe | Feb 15, 2008 | Chess Lecture, games, openings, people, positions
In February, there is no question that the center of the chess universe is Russia. There are two huge events, back to back: the Moscow Open, with a prize fund of 5 million rubles ($200,000), and the Aeroflot Open. The Moscow Open “A” tournament, which...
by scribe | Feb 1, 2008 | chess clubs, games, openings, people, positions
That was the story of my game in chess club last night. After winning my first game, I played against Steve Sullivan. As usual, he played poorly in the opening, and I soon had all sorts of delightful winning chances. (See, for example, this post for another example...
by scribe | Dec 14, 2007 | chess clubs, games, openings, people, positions
When I was a graduate student, I once heard this story about one of the professors in the department, a world-famous mathematician who was originally from Japan. He was giving a lecture in an undergraduate course, probably calculus, and a student raised his hand and...
by scribe | Nov 27, 2007 | Chess Lecture, openings
In my post on November 9, I talked about my aversion to giving lectures on openings, because I think most people study openings too much. However, I just recorded the last lecture in my series on the Two Knights Defense, and I have to say I really enjoyed doing the...
