by scribe | Mar 12, 2022 | games, positions
First, let me say that the title of this post is not literally true. However, it’s something that I like to tell my students, and it’s not as far-fetched as it seems. It’s intended to correct a very harmful mindset that starts affecting players as...
by scribe | Oct 17, 2020 | games, off-topic, openings, ruminations, tournaments
After spending three posts on 1978, a huge year in my chess life and my personal life, let’s move on to 1979. It was my last year of college (spring) and first year of graduate school (fall), and a very strange year. Coming back from Russia to America, I felt...
by scribe | Oct 14, 2020 | endings, games, tournaments
In my last post I wrote about the semester I spent in Russia in the winter of 1978. Even the people who lived in Leningrad said it was an brutally cold December. I experienced -25 degrees Fahrenheit (-32 degrees Celsius) for the first time in my life, and farther...
by scribe | Jul 11, 2018 | chess clubs, current news, games, tournaments
After six rounds of the Tuesday Night Marathon at the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco, I realized something kind of odd. I hadn’t played a single sacrifice in any of my first five games (in one round I took a half-point bye, so obviously no sacrifices in...
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...
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