by scribe | Dec 30, 2017 | current news, games, people, positions, tournaments
This morning I got a reminder in Facebook of a blog post I wrote exactly two years ago, called How to Beat a Grandmaster. My friend Robin Cunningham, a FIDE Master, was at that moment playing in the Hastings Masters tournament in England, which traditionally bridges...
by scribe | Dec 26, 2017 | chess clubs, people
I guess, in retrospect, it was silly to think that anybody would come to chess club on the day after Christmas. Even though I told several parents last week that we would be open for business, I think that everyone is just too much in the holiday spirit to think of...
by scribe | Dec 21, 2017 | chess clubs, games, literature, people, ruminations
In the most recent meeting of the Aptos Library chess club for kids, I decided to show them a position from a game that I played against Shredder, the computer. (Usually my lessons are taken from the excellent book Tactics Time by Tim Brennan and Anthea Carson, but...
by scribe | Dec 18, 2017 | literature, openings
First let me explain the title of this post: I don’t really do book reviews in my blog. And I especially don’t do reviews of technical opening repertoire books. However, I have to make an exception when one of my friends has a new book published, a labor...
by scribe | Dec 15, 2017 | current news, games, literature, openings, positions
So far I have looked at three games from the AlphaZero-Stockfish match: #5, #9, and #10 from the ten games provided in the arXiv preprint. All three are amazingly similar, and at the same time they are amazingly unlike almost any other game I’ve ever seen. In...