by scribe | Sep 16, 2018 | games, literature, positions, ruminations
Sometime in my early twenties, I read Alexander Kotov’s famous book Think Like a Grandmaster, which revolutionized how chess players think about thinking. From Kotov I learned the idea of making a list of candidate moves, and analyzing each move once and only...
by scribe | Apr 3, 2017 | off-topic, positions, ruminations
For the last six months I haven’t been posting as much as usual to my blog, because I’ve been working on a (non-chess) book. I’m glad to say that I sent the first draft of the book to my editor today. Though there is still a lot to do, I feel as if I...
by scribe | Sep 25, 2015 | games, openings, positions
So I won a Matrix chess game against Shredder on my computer (game/10, I get one time-out of arbitrary length, Shredder’s rating was set for this game at 2298) and was feeling pretty good about myself until I went over it with Rybka. Ugh! Position after 21....
by scribe | May 11, 2015 | games, positions, ruminations
In my last post I complained about the futility of playing against computers. I got some excellent comments, one of which inspired me to try a new experiment. I decided to play a 10-minute game against Shredder where I get one “time-out” per game. The idea...
by scribe | Jul 16, 2012 | chess clubs, games, people, positions
Yesterday, at Mike Splane’s latest chess party, WFM Uyanga Byambaa showed us one of her games from the Norcal Chess Invitational, played in March 2012. There’s one position that I felt was super-instructive, although the conclusions I drew from it are a...
