by scribe | May 6, 2014 | endings, openings, ruminations
Two so-called “problems” that some people have with chess: (1) Too many draws. (2) A confusing stalemate rule. Note: I didn’t say that these are problems for me. I’m happy with chess the way it is. Nevertheless, some people aren’t and it...
by scribe | Jan 3, 2014 | current news, games, positions, tournaments
After three rounds of the Bay Area International, I have one loss and two draws. The loss was against John Bryant in round 1, not too surprising as he is over 2400 FIDE. The two draws were against masters in the 2200 range, Leon Piasetski and Hayk Manvelyan. In the...
by scribe | Mar 5, 2013 | literature, positions
This morning I had a really cool puzzle idea: Can you create a chess version of rock-paper-scissors? To state the puzzle more precisely, I need to use the old-fashioned English Descriptive Notation, rather than algebraic. The advantage of English Descriptive —...
by scribe | Oct 29, 2011 | endings, games, tournaments
The Four Endgames of the Apocalypse are the most notorious “common” endgames in chess, endgames where normal chess concepts go out the window and which lead otherwise sane chess players (??) to pound their heads in frustration. They are: K+Q versus K+R...
by scribe | Feb 21, 2011 | literature, off-topic, openings, ruminations
Ok, I’ve been waiting to do this for a couple months. Today I finally checked out Google’s “Ngram Viewer,” which lets you see how the frequency of use of various words or phrases in the English language (and other languages) has changed over...
