Thirty-Two Stories

Once every year I take off my chess player and chess coach hat and put on my chess organizer hat. This weekend I directed an unrated chess tournament for kids at the Aptos Public Library. As always, I got a huge amount of help from the library, which provides the...

Checkmate with a King… Almost

Maybe I show too many computer chess games in this here blog… but here we go again. I love playing against Shredder, because we get some of the wildest positions I’ve ever seen. This week I was able to threaten one of the rarest moves in chess – checkmate with a king!...

More Anniversaries

Yesterday I celebrated another anniversary, and a pretty big one this time: the thirtieth anniversary of my wedding! Kay has been my rudder and my guiding light for all this time. She claims to be pretty satisfied with me too, although I’m not sure how much to believe...

One Year On

Although I recently had a small reminder of the value of humility, today I’m going to soldier on in my immodest way and celebrate the first anniversary of one of the most exciting days of my life, the publication day of The Book of Why. Being a writer,...