by scribe | Nov 8, 2020 | chess clubs, people, ruminations, tournaments
In the spring of 1983 I earned my doctorate from Princeton University, and after a somewhat nail-biting job search I landed a one-year position in the math department at Duke University. After a year it turned into a tenure-track position, and I ended up staying at...
by scribe | Sep 26, 2020 | games, people, tournaments
Today we’re going to have a bit of deja deja vu vu: a game that I’ve already annotated once in my blog. It is still one of my favorites, and much more interesting than the other two games I have kept from 1977. But I will do it with one ground rule:...
by scribe | Jul 19, 2020 | Chess Lecture, endings, games, positions
For every good, instructive game that I play against the computer, there must be two or three really awful games. Here’s one that I played this morning that is so bad that it’s good. I’m playing White, Fritz (with its rating set to 2025) is playing...
by scribe | Sep 16, 2018 | games, literature, positions, ruminations
Sometime in my early twenties, I read Alexander Kotov’s famous book Think Like a Grandmaster, which revolutionized how chess players think about thinking. From Kotov I learned the idea of making a list of candidate moves, and analyzing each move once and only...
by scribe | Jun 27, 2018 | current news, games, positions, tournaments
Last night at the Tuesday Night Marathon I played a thrilling draw against Greg Sarafian, a high class-A player. As you’ll see, this was a game where all three results were possible. In the immediate aftermath I was very relieved because I felt I had escaped...
