{"id":266,"date":"2008-08-26T21:11:03","date_gmt":"2008-08-27T05:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=266"},"modified":"2008-08-26T21:14:55","modified_gmt":"2008-08-27T05:14:55","slug":"the-doctor-is-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=266","title":{"rendered":"The doctor is *in*"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>But are the patients? I guess we&#8217;ll see!<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m now (mostly) done with those pesky real-world commitments that kept me away from this blog for a while. This weekend I will play in my first chess tournament since May, the CalChess Labor Day Classic. This is northern California&#8217;s version of a state championship. Usually I enter the open section, but this year I decided to swallow my pride and enter the expert (under-2200) section. Why?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I haven&#8217;t played or opened a chess book for the last month.<\/li>\n<li>I have to get real. Until I&#8217;m playing well and confident about my chess, I shouldn&#8217;t be playing against masters.<\/li>\n<li>The Western States Open in Reno is next month. That&#8217;s the tournament where I really want to\u00c2\u00a0play in the open section, because it&#8217;s FIDE-rated. One of my long-term projects is to get my FIDE rating back up to 2200.<\/li>\n<li>Did I mention that I&#8217;m not prepared?<\/li>\n<li>Oh, and I almost forgot &#8212; it&#8217;s a little easier to win prizes in the expert section than in the master section. That would be nice.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Interestingly, the last time I played in the expert section in this tournament, there were more class-A players than experts! That was the year I played against Nicholas Nip and had the somewhat discouraging experience of losing to an 8-year-old in front of a huge throng of people. Well, okay, maybe 10 or 15 people,\u00c2\u00a0but that\u00c2\u00a0feels like a huge throng when they&#8217;re all watching and rooting for you to lose. Now Nip is 10 years old and a master, so I won&#8217;t have to worry about playing him.<\/p>\n<p>I will think positive, happy thoughts all weekend. For one thing, I will\u00c2\u00a0make sure\u00c2\u00a0to eat at least once at <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.tommysjoynt.com\/\">Tommy&#8217;s Joynt<\/a>, which is the best restaurant I know of\u00c2\u00a0in San Francisco. It&#8217;s the only place where you can stuff your face with home-cooked-style comfort food for under $6. Tommy&#8217;s Joynt is almost the only thing I remember from my first visit to San Francisco in 1984, and it hasn&#8217;t changed a bit since then.<\/p>\n<p>So, dear readers, what have you been doing for the last month? With no blog entries to read, I&#8217;m sure that you have had lots of spare time. \u00c2\u00a0 \ud83d\ude0e<\/p>\n<p>Have any of you played any good games or tournaments recently, or gone on any interesting trips? I know that Andy Hortillosa has an announcement that he wants to make, so Andy, here is your chance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>But are the patients? I guess we&#8217;ll see! I&#8217;m now (mostly) done with those pesky real-world commitments that kept me away from this blog for a while. This weekend I will play in my first chess tournament since May, the CalChess Labor Day Classic. This is northern California&#8217;s version of a state championship. Usually I [&hellip;]<\/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":[12],"tags":[521,524,523,522,520],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tournaments","tag-comfort-food","tag-happy-thoughts","tag-real-world","tag-san-francisco","tag-tommys-joynt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","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=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}