Today was Memorial Day in the U.S., a holiday that is often considered the informal beginning of summer. The Memorial Day weekend is an ideal time for three-day chess tournaments, which range in size from huge (the Lina Grumette Memorial Day Classic in Los Angeles) to gargantuan (the Chicago Open). A few states have their championships this weekend, too–Louisiana, Texas, Massachusetts, Washington.<\/p>\n
I didn’t play in any of those tournaments. But I did play in a little tournament near to where I live, in Santa Clara. It wouldn’t even be worth mentioning, except that it was the first half-decent tournament I’ve played in a long time. In fact, I won my first\u00c2\u00a0cash prize since the 2006 Western States Open<\/a>. I finished in fourth place with a 3\u00c2\u00bd-2\u00c2\u00bd score (two wins, one loss, two draws and a half-point bye), and won $60. The entry fee was $59, so my net winnings for the tournament were one dollar. So we’re not exactly talking about headline news here. Still, it was nice to do something right for a change.<\/p>\n A slight digression: People who aren’t from California usually don’t know the difference between Santa Clara and Santa Cruz. Among those people I include myself. In my last year in Ohio, when I applied to the Science Communication Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, I began my letter to the program director by telling him how excited I was to learn about this program at\u00c2\u00a0“the University of California at Santa Clara.” He must have had a pretty good laugh at that one. (There is no University of California at Santa Clara.)<\/em><\/p>\n Here are\u00c2\u00a0seven other ways to tell Santa Cruz and Santa Clara apart:<\/em><\/p>\n Anyway, getting back to the chess tournament… The two games that I won were both King’s Gambits\u00c2\u00a0where I played\u00c2\u00a0White. One of them was kind of boring; I won a pawn and ground out the endgame. But the other was a really nice game. It was the first tournament game where I can really say that my win was attributable to the things I have learned by giving lectures. In fact, there were two that I learned from. I won’t go over the game in detail here, because I want to save it for a future ChessLecture. But if you want to prepare ahead, review my lectures on\u00c2\u00a0“King’s Gambit Declined: Inspiration from David Bronstein” (1\/15\/2007) and “Tactical Motifs 202: Reversing the Move Order” (7\/13\/2007).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today was Memorial Day in the U.S., a holiday that is often considered the informal beginning of summer. The Memorial Day weekend is an ideal time for three-day chess tournaments, which range in size from huge (the Lina Grumette Memorial Day Classic in Los Angeles) to gargantuan (the Chicago Open). A few states have their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,11,12],"tags":[391,5,386,388,389,387,74,390],"class_list":["post-195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chess-lecture","category-games","category-tournaments","tag-fog","tag-kings-gambit","tag-memorial-day","tag-monarch-butterflies","tag-redwoods","tag-santa-clara","tag-santa-cruz","tag-surfers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n