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 | Jul 12, 2020 | games, positions, ruminations
Have you ever had a game that you won and you didn’t understand why? I call it a Billy Preston game, in honor of the singer who had a #1 hit in the 1970s called “Will It Go Round in Circles.” The lyrics go: “I’ve got a story ain’t...
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 | May 31, 2020 | current news, off-topic, ruminations
Thanks to Cathy Perlmutter for the groovy face mask! There will be a short-lived pause (which you won’t even notice) in this blog as I de-chessify. The reason is that I’ve gotten entirely too much sucked into playing against Fritz on my computer. My wife...
by scribe | May 23, 2020 | games, positions
I’m glad that I got a couple of comments on my last post, “What’s the Best Move?”, saying that my readers found the positions just as hard as I did. It makes me feel better, because most of them were positions where I was playing against the...
