Huge youth movement at U.S. Championship

May 13, 2013

Although I wrote my last post about something fictional, in fact there is real chess news to report! Today Gata Kamsky won his fourth U.S. Chess Championship in an exciting playoff against Alejandro Ramirez that went to an Armageddon game. Without wishing to minimize Kamsky’s hard-fought victory, I think the biggest story of the tournament [...]

Print Friendly
Read the full article →

Origin of chess cleared up

May 12, 2013

The Time Lords invented it! That’s what Doctor Who said on TV last night, and if you can’t trust a fictional time-traveler, well then, whom can you trust? For those readers who haven’t watched BBC or followed science fiction for the last 50 years, Doctor Who is the longest-running science fiction show on earth and [...]

Print Friendly
Read the full article →

Questioning Assumptions

May 8, 2013

In my last post I wrote about one of the most ubiquitous kinds of mistakes, in life as well as chess: the kind of mistake where you assume you know what is going on, and the assumption seems so obvious to you that you aren’t even aware of making it. Here’s a nice chessboard example [...]

Print Friendly
Read the full article →

Mixup Explained

May 7, 2013

I don’t know if anybody noticed this, but on Friday a new lecture of mine, called “Learn From Your Fellow Amateurs, Episode XXXIII,” went live on ChessLecture. It was a lecture I was particularly excited about, because I thought that it was a game where a nine-year-old (CL subscriber Advait Patel) defeated a 2300-rated player [...]

Print Friendly
Read the full article →

New book published! (Not chess.)

May 1, 2013

Going off topic today, for obvious reasons… Yesterday the UPS deliveryman left a heavy box on my doorstep. Sender: American Mathematical Society. I knew immediately what it was: the complimentary copies of my new book, What’s Happening in the Mathematical Sciences, Vol. 9. As you can tell from my Web page, What’s Happening (or WHIMS [...]

Print Friendly
Read the full article →

Right place, right time

April 30, 2013

A while ago I sent in a submission to Chess Life for their column “My Best Move,” which appears on the last page of every issue. In this column, famous and semi-famous players share their favorite moves from their entire chess careers. I felt a little bit presumptuous putting myself in the company of players [...]

Print Friendly
Read the full article →

ChessLecture Milestone

April 24, 2013

I didn’t even notice it until this morning, but ChessLecture hit a pretty big milestone three weeks ago — we now have more than two thousand recorded lectures! As of today (April 24) there are 2015, in fact. The two thousandth lecture was a very appropriate one: a lecture on “Anand’s Immortal Game” by David [...]

Print Friendly
Read the full article →

Kitten season begins!

April 22, 2013

I know most of my readers don’t come here for cute kitten videos … but you get them anyway! At least this one has some chess involved (as you’ll see beginning about 1:25 in the video). You can also watch it on YouTube if you prefer. The gray kitten is named Misty, and she is [...]

Print Friendly
Read the full article →

Magnus Carlsen on Time 100

April 19, 2013

This week TIME magazine published its annual list of “the 100 most influential people in the world,” and guess who was on it? Oh, I guess the title of this post gave it away. Magnus Carlsen made the list, and got a nice one-paragraph bio from Garry Kasparov, who wrote, “his intuitive style conserves the [...]

Print Friendly
Read the full article →

Chess on the radio!

April 18, 2013

On my recent trip, I was surprised when a friend asked me if I had heard of Webster University and their chess coach, a woman from “somewhere in Eastern Europe.” In fact, I had just read the Chess Life article about the Pan-Am Intercollegiate tournament only a couple days earlier. The CL article was my [...]

Print Friendly
Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →