by scribe | Oct 31, 2020 | 2012 world championship, chess clubs, games, openings, tournaments
After two years of not playing any rated chess games, I returned to the tournament scene in 1982 at the U.S. Amateur Team East championship. This was my introduction to one of the most popular and fun tournaments in the American chess calendar — the only...
by scribe | Oct 26, 2020 | Chess Life, off-topic, people
No chess in this post. In 1980 and 1981, I took a two-year sabbatical from chess while real life clobbered me over the head. I actually did play in one tournament in January 1980 (six games, but I only have the moves for four of them). I thought of showing one of the...
by scribe | Oct 17, 2020 | games, off-topic, openings, ruminations, tournaments
After spending three posts on 1978, a huge year in my chess life and my personal life, let’s move on to 1979. It was my last year of college (spring) and first year of graduate school (fall), and a very strange year. Coming back from Russia to America, I felt...
by scribe | Oct 14, 2020 | endings, games, tournaments
In my last post I wrote about the semester I spent in Russia in the winter of 1978. Even the people who lived in Leningrad said it was an brutally cold December. I experienced -25 degrees Fahrenheit (-32 degrees Celsius) for the first time in my life, and farther...
by scribe | Oct 7, 2020 | chess clubs, Chess Life, off-topic, people, ruminations, tournaments
In the fall of 1978, I joined a group of 35 American students for a semester abroad in Leningrad, Russia. I had been studying the Russian language since my junior year of high school, and chess was one of the main reasons (at first). When I was at Phillips Academy, I...
