Carlsen-Nepomniachtchi Retrospective

December 10, 2021

Magnus Carlsen won his fifth world championship in resounding fashion today, beating Ian Nepomniachtchi in the eleventh game to close him out by a score of 7 1/2 – 3 1/2. Congratulations to him on a really well-deserved victory! He is now turning in to one of our most durable world champions. As pretty much […]

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Another Excellent Training Game

November 21, 2021

In recent weeks, as I mentioned before, I have been playing a series of training games against one of my students from the Aptos Chess Club, Atlee, who I think is about a 1500-rated player. Given the disparity between our ratings it’s no surprise that I have won every game so far, but the margin […]

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Life in the Genius Factory

November 10, 2021

Today I found out that my lifetime total of International Masters defeated had increased by one… and I didn’t even have to lift a finger! The catch is — as everyone knows — that the best time to defeat a chess genius is when they are still young and have not come into their full […]

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Playing against a Student

October 27, 2021

This summer and fall I’ve been playing a series of training games with one of my students from the Aptos Library Chess Club, Atlee, who is about 1500 strength (my estimate). Even though I have won all of the games so far, I’ve been quite impressed with his play. His openings are solid, and he […]

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“Fantastic!” — A Remembrance

October 23, 2021

Last Sunday, my father Walter Nance passed away at the age of 88. Walter taught me to play chess when I was about 7 years old, and I can still remember how excited I was when I beat him for the first time when I was 9 years old. He was a pretty strong player […]

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Out of the Blue

October 10, 2021

An incredibly nice surprise came in my e-mail yesterday. It was from Joshua Anderson of the Chess Journalists of America, informing me that I had won an award for the Best Online Blog in 2021. (The award was shared with Ray Linville, whose blog is at chess.com.) Even better was the way that I won […]

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House of Cards

October 9, 2021

Some of you might wondering, “When are you going to write Year 50 of your 50 Years of Chess series?” Patience! We are still in year 50. Actually, I had a plan that went awry. I was going to play in the “Real Bay Area Championship” in Santa Clara this weekend, which would have been […]

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Hook and Ladder in the Meltwater Champions Tour

October 3, 2021

Okay, I admit that I have not been following this extravaganza called the Meltwater Champions Tour, which Magnus Carlsen has now won with two rounds to go. (Yawn…) Mostly I don’t care about it because it’s rapid chess (game/15 with 10 seconds per move). Don’t get me wrong. I love to see players like Magnus […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 49

September 28, 2021

When Mike Splane asked me to play on his team (the Kolty Club team) at the 2020 U.S. Amateur Team West tournament, I enthusiastically said yes. He had been trying to get me to play on their team for years, and now that I was officially the club champion it made sense for me to […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 48

September 13, 2021

The last five years of my retrospective are kind of hard to write because (a) they are so recent that anybody who has been following this blog has seen the games before; and (b) I also haven’t been playing much. One tournament in 2016, none in 2017, two in 2018, two in 2019, and one […]

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