by scribe | Jun 14, 2020 | Chess Life, endings, games, literature
In the past I’ve mentioned the “Four Endgames of the Apocalypse,” the four supposedly “elementary” yet ferociously difficult endgames that even grandmasters screw up sometimes: K+Q versus K+R; K+B+N versus K; K+R+B versus K+R; and K+Q+RP...
by scribe | Dec 26, 2019 | current news, endings, positions
In my last pre-Christmas post I wrote about the game Magnus Carlsen – Levon Aronian, in which Carlsen played a beautiful rook sacrifice that enabled him to promote a pawn. However, when all was said and done he still found himself in a fiendishly difficult endgame to...
by scribe | Sep 21, 2019 | 2020 world championship, current news, positions, tournaments
Okay, bad pun, but now is the time to get on the Jeffery Xiong train! It’s currently boarding passengers in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, and the next stop is Yekaterinburg, where next year’s World Championship Candidates tournament will be held. All aboard!...
by scribe | Dec 15, 2017 | current news, games, literature, openings, positions
So far I have looked at three games from the AlphaZero-Stockfish match: #5, #9, and #10 from the ten games provided in the arXiv preprint. All three are amazingly similar, and at the same time they are amazingly unlike almost any other game I’ve ever seen. In...
by scribe | Sep 23, 2017 | current news, endings, positions
In my last post, I looked at the K and Q versus K and R endgames, one of the four endgames of the Apocalypse, which occurred in both of the semifinal matches of the World Cup, and I introduced a couple of new ideas or at least new terminology, the “seesaw...
