Shankland is again state champ

The last day of the CalChess State Championship was kind of strange for me (I’ll get to that below), but it went about as expected for Sam Shankland. The tournament’s only Grandmaster surged at the finish, winning his last two games to go 5-1 and win the...

CalChess State Championship, round 4

This weekend I’m playing in the CalChess State Championship, in Fremont. I’m a little bit puzzled because the state championship (for northern California) is usually held on Labor Day weekend. However, this year’s edition has been organized for the...

Norman Alliston, who were you?

This morning I went on another of my time-wasting Internet meanders and landed in another unlikely place. Courtesy of Google Books, I found myself looking at the 1901 volume of British Chess Magazine, scanned from the Harvard Library collection, featuring an enormous...

The accolades keep rolling in…

I’m going to go off-topic for just a second here to do a tiny bit of self-promotion. That’s permissible in a blog, isn’t it? My vast underground network has informed me that my first book, The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be, was recently named...