by scribe | Oct 17, 2011 | chess clubs, endings
This weekend I played (and botched) a pretty cool endgame. Here’s the scene: I’m playing tandem chess at one of Mike Splane’s chess parties. I’m Black, and my teammate is Richard Koepcke, a National Master. Our opponents are Gjon Feinstein...
by scribe | Oct 14, 2011 | off-topic, ruminations
For various reasons I hauled out a trunk yesterday that I had not opened in about ten years. I wasn’t even entirely sure what was in it any more. It turned out that about a third of the trunk consisted of souvenirs from my semester in Russia. I studied in...
by scribe | Oct 9, 2011 | games, openings, people, positions
Yesterday I got together with Cole Ryan (see my post from last week) and Gjon Feinstein for some game analysis and speed chess. We played 8-minute games with lots of analysis between, so we only had time for five games, which went more or less as you would predict....
by scribe | Oct 7, 2011 | Chess Life, current news, literature
Earlier this week I reviewed the SmartChess app, which went up for sale on iTunes last week. There’s also a review of it in Chess Life this month, if you want another opinion (a generally positive one). I pointed out in my review that the value of SmartChess...
by scribe | Oct 5, 2011 | chess clubs, games
When I give chess lessons at the Aptos Public Library, it’s always a challenge to make them concise enough. For this age group (roughly 6 to 12) I have found that 15 minutes is about the limit of their attention span, or 20 minutes if the lesson is going well....
