The Agony and the Ecstasy

I just got home from the CalChess Labor Day Championship, a tournament that for me had plenty of both agony and ecstasy. The short summary is that I went 3½-2½ in the Expert section, a result that for me is not very good. I almost certainly lost a few rating points....

All Tactics All The Time

Yesterday I got together with Gjon Feinstein, Cailen Melville and Thadeus Frei for some skittles chess and analysis. Cailen showed us one of his recent games. As so often happens, we got completely sidetracked by analyzing variations that never happened. It usually...

Merely Dead, or Really Most Sincerely Dead?

Yesterday I got together with two old friends and one new one for some chess at Barnes and Noble in San Jose. The “old friends” were Gjon Feinstein and Cailen Melville, and the “new friend” was Uyanga Byambaa, a student from Mongolia whom Gjon...

A great position for a quiz

Today I’m going to write about yet another team chess game. This is one that I played last night, playing Black with Thadeus Frei against Cailen Melville and Gjon Feinstein. We were using new experimental rules. The time control was 7 minutes for both sides, and...

Shankland is again state champ

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...