by scribe | Sep 11, 2022 | current news, endings, people, ruminations
The latest news that has blown up the chess Internet came in two waves last week. First, at the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis, world champion Magnus Carlsen lost a game to a young but rapidly improving American grandmaster, Hans Niemann. Hans grew up in the San...
by scribe | Sep 2, 2022 | Chess Life, literature, people, ruminations
My diary, 9/1/1972 Sadly, I was rooting for the wrong guy. This month’s Chess Life has an interesting 50-year retrospective on the Fischer-Spassky match. I thought that the most insightful article was a short interview with IM Anthony Saidy, who hosted Fischer...
by scribe | Jul 31, 2022 | off-topic, openings, people, ruminations, tournaments
Fifty years and one week ago I completed my first USCF-rated chess tournament, the U.S. Booster Championship in Chicago, Illinois. I’ve never really considered this to be my “first tournament,” because I had played earlier that summer in the 1972...
by scribe | Dec 1, 2020 | current news, literature, off-topic, people, ruminations
Taking a one-post break from my retrospective series to jot down my thoughts on “Queen’s Gambit,” the television series on Netflix. I know I’m way behind, because I like to take my television in small doses, so everyone else has already...
by scribe | Sep 2, 2020 | endings, games, openings, tournaments
That was so much fun, let’s do it again! In my last post I started a year-by-year retrospective of my (almost) fifty years of tournament chess, with the year 1971. I called that Year Zero because I actually wasn’t quite into tournament chess yet. My chief...
