by scribe | Aug 21, 2016 | current news, people, tournaments
Today Jeffery Xiong of Texas completed one of the greatest accomplishments ever by a U.S. junior chess player, winning the World Junior Championship by a full point and doing it at age 15. Xiong clinched the title with a round to spare and coasted in with a draw in...
by scribe | Oct 3, 2015 | current news, literature, people
This afternoon, a week or two after everybody else, I finally got a chance to watch Pawn Sacrifice, the movie about the Bobby Fischer – Boris Spassky match starring Tobey McGuire. I know that any chess player can easily find flaws with the portrayal of chess and...
by scribe | Mar 1, 2015 | people, ruminations
Today I’m going to show you the two most fascinating chess graphs I’ve ever seen. Of course, they’re also the only chess graphs I’ve ever seen, but still I found them utterly remarkable. A statistician named Rob Weir did a principal component...
by scribe | Nov 25, 2013 | Chess Lecture, current news, people, tournaments
I just had a conversation fifteen minutes ago with my next-door neighbor Dave, who has never shown any interest in chess previously but had heard something somewhere about a new world champion. This conversation reminded me of an obvious fact: more than anything else,...
by scribe | Feb 9, 2013 | current news, off-topic, positions, ruminations
When people find out that I am both a mathematician (at least in a former life) and a chess player, they sometimes ask me if mathematics gives me an advantage in playing chess. The answer, alas, is emphatically no. There is a relation between math ability and chess...
