by scribe | May 31, 2011 | current news, games, people, tournaments
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...
by scribe | May 30, 2011 | current news, people, tournaments
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...
by scribe | May 27, 2011 | literature, people
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...
by scribe | May 25, 2011 | Crestbook, current news, tournaments
The interminable series of draws … finally terminated! In the last “classical” game of the final match to determine Viswanathan Anand’s next challenger for the World Championship, Boris Gelfand defeated Alexander Grischuk. Thus Gelfand wins the...
by scribe | May 23, 2011 | literature, off-topic
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...
by scribe | May 21, 2011 | games, openings, positions, tournaments
Because George Michael said so! In my last tournament I had a disappointing finish, a draw in the last round against a class-A player named Roberto Aiello. In this game, as White, I experimented with a variation of the King’s Indian Defense that I have never...
by scribe | May 16, 2011 | Chess Lecture, people, tournaments
Tomorrow I’m going to record a ChessLecture about Steven Zierk’s impressive victory in the final round of last month’s Far West Open in Reno. By now, the game has been analyzed online not only by me but also (very briefly) by Steven himself at his...
by scribe | May 15, 2011 | chess clubs, positions, tournaments
Yesterday I directed my annual tournament at the Aptos Public Library. This year we had a surprisingly low turnout: 14 players in all, 8 in the 10-and-older section and 6 in the 9-and-younger. Part of the reason was that I was unlucky with the date. Several of the...
by scribe | May 10, 2011 | current news, endings, games, positions, tournaments
The quarterfinal matches in the World Championship Qualifier are now complete, and my description of the tournament as “May Madness” is now even more appropriate than ever. First, just as in March Madness, upsets were the order of the day. The winner in...
by scribe | May 7, 2011 | Crestbook, current news, tournaments, translations
This week the World Championship Candidates’ Matches got underway in Kazan, Russia. Once upon a time the candidates’ matches were marathons: 12 games in the quarterfinals, 12 in the semifinals, 24 games in the finals. They took a year or more to complete....
