50 Years of Chess: Year 37

June 13, 2021

After my all-time best game, my win over IM David Pruess in 2006, I was invited by IM (and soon to be grandmaster) Jesse Kraai to record a lecture about the game for ChessLecture.com. The lecture instantly hit their top-ten list, and it was so popular that I was invited to be a regular commentator […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 36

June 5, 2021

In 2007, I had my first and only slight brush with celebrity, when I appeared on national television for the first time. I was interviewed for a new television show called “The Universe,” which aired for four or five season on the History Channel. In the first season they had an episode that was, appropriately […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 35

May 29, 2021

What can I possibly do for an encore after showing you my game with David Pruess from the 2006 Western States Open? That was a once-in-a-lifetime game, probably the only chess game I will be remembered for after I’m gone (if I’m remembered for anything). A game where everything went right, where I was in […]

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50 Years of Chess: One for the Ages

May 24, 2021

Many of you know the game I’m going to write about today. Don McLean doesn’t play a concert without “American Pie.” And I’m not going to write a lifetime retrospective of my chess games without my game against David Pruess. It’s already been published in lots of places: Chess Life, Chess Informant, Jonathan Speelman’s Agony […]

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50 Years of Chess — Year 34

May 16, 2021

What a strange year 2005 was for me over the chessboard. It had some really high highs and some really low lows. In April, I won the biggest cash prize (up to that point) of my life, taking first place in the Expert section at the Far West Open in Reno. In May I played […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 33

May 8, 2021

Step right up for round two of the Emory Tate versus Dana Mackenzie show! If you didn’t catch round one, you can go back and read it in my Year 31 post. Technically, today’s game is round four, because we had played three games before this one, with two wins for Tate and one draw. […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 32

May 5, 2021

It’s still inspiring to look back at my diary for 2003. So many great things were happening that year. My first book, The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be, was published in April, and like any first-time author I was alternating between the heights of jubilation and the depths of despair: “Nobody’s […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 31

April 25, 2021

The chess world is finally warming up again after the Pandemic Year. I feel a little bit guilty not writing about the 2020-21 Candidates Tournament, the longest tournament in history (?), which is nearing a conclusion more than a year after it began. Ian Nepomniachtchi seems to be on the verge of winning and earning […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 30

April 13, 2021

The year 2001 is one I’ll always remember for two trips, neither having anything to do with chess. The first one was a trip to Santa Fe, where I was scheduled to interview Stuart Kauffman for Discover magazine. This was a super exciting opportunity, as Discover was the highest-profile magazine I had written for yet […]

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50 Years of Chess: Year 29

April 3, 2021

Two posts ago I wrote about the Santa Cruz chess “scene” as it was when I first moved here, in the late 1990s. I didn’t mention that Monterey also had a little bit of a chess scene. A forty-five minute drive away, on the other end of the Monterey Bay from Santa Cruz, it had […]

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