50 Years of Chess: Year 16

The year 1987 was one when everything started coming together for me in chess. Even now, going over my games and results from that year, it’s gratifying to see the years and years of effort at improvement starting to bear fruit. Of course, there was plenty more...

Addendum: Tiebreaks

As you know from my last post, I tied with Eric Steger in the 2019 Kolty Chess Club Championship, both of us scoring 6-1. At the time I thought that it was very likely that Eric would win the tiebreaks, but I was mistaken. Wolfgang Behm, the tournament director, sent...

Olympiad Karma

Two years ago, American chess fans were justifiably proud and thrilled when our team brought home the gold in the 2016 Chess Olympiad. However, it’s worth remembering that we actually won by the slimmest possible margin on tiebreaks; the outcome of one game on...

U.S. Wins Olympiad!

Did I call it or what?! You might recall that in yesterday’s post I wrote about the upcoming U.S.-Canada match: I think the one weak link for Canada is board one. Evgeny Bareev is a strong GM for sure, but board one is a really tough assignment and he has only...