Musings on chess, and lesser things
Posts on chess
By now, you’ve probably heard of AlphaZero, Google’s incredible chess project. Last year, it took the chess world by storm. Using ‘artificial intelligence’ – at least that’s what the news articles claimed – AlphaZero taught itself chess in less than a day and then demolished the world’s strongest chess engine in a 100-game match. There …
2017 was a pretty big year for me: A wedding, a degree, a new country, a new job, then a new continent… Looking back on all the changes, I was moderately successful with my major 2017 New Year’s resolutions (such as “working out which country to move to”), but wholeheartedly unsuccessful with pretty much all the minor …
Over the past few months, I’ve had to ask myself a lot of tough questions about my chess. Am I past my peak? Is my priority performance or enjoyment? Should I keep working on trying to stay above 2500? Is it even worth trying to improve now? And if so, how can I best maximise …
A couple of months ago, I received a curious email: Hello, Mr. Smerdon, I recently published an innovative book on chess knowledge/evaluation, ‘The Secret of Chess’. It is written very much in the vein of Nimzovich’s and Kmoch’s works, but is of much larger scope and accuracy of assessment… Please, try to take a …
I’ve started collecting chess swindles for a new book [so if you have any good ones, please send them to me!]. Over the weekend, I visited a great little weekender on the Gold Coast and saw first-hand a fantastic swindle take place – or, rather, nearly take place. Liu-Wohl was played on board 2 in …
When you play often enough on an online chess server, you start to see the same usernames popping up as your opponents. It makes for a weird social network. I recall a story where some Australian chess players met the famous Hikaru Nakamura at a tournament. Among them was a shy, timid junior called Moulthun …
In the provocatively titled “Can Anand Be The Federer Of Chess?“, Chess.com’s Mike Klein brings up the question of whether chess players can really keep performing at the top level as they age. Proponents of this view typically note that chess is not subject to intense physical stresses, that it depends a lot more on …
These days, the extent of my chess career seems to be the odd blitz game on the net during my lunch break. It’s more virtual escapism than serious training of course, but I get to try out some fun openings. One I’ve been enjoying a lot lately is the Wing Gambit, considered dubious at best …
The recent strong chess open in the German town of Bad Wiessee was won by my Werder Bremen teammate, the Ukrainian GM Alexander Areshchenko. Areshchenko is perhaps best known as being currently the world’s best expert on playing the Najdorf, though perhaps Maxime might have something to say about that. Areshchenko finished in a massive seven-player tie …
I recently read two opening books that deserve a joint review. Both of the above titles are aimed at providing a black repertoire against the ‘flank’ openings, which is a broad term that usually means anything except for 1.e4 or 1.d4. They made quite interesting reading, …