Musings on chess, and lesser things
Posts on chess
I generally try to avoid the Chessbase news site, as experience has demonstrated that reading its articles generally leads to me hitting my own head more than is considered healthy. But this morning I stumbled across what on the surface seemed an incredible article. Azlan Iqbal, a senior lecturer at the Universiti Tenaga Nasional in …
BOOK REVIEW: Chess Informant 125 / Chess Informant 126 Tl;dr version: The old Chess Informant series is back with a new groove, and your …
Towards the end of one of my recent economics tutorials at university, I asked my students if there were any questions. There was a brief discussion (in Dutch) among three boys in the front row and then one shot up his hand and said, “Sir, can you help us?” while waving his iPhone with the other hand. …
Book review: “1.e4 vs The Sicilian II” – Parimarjan Negi (Quality Chess) (click to buy from Amazon) Even after all these years, I still get a kick when I receive a new chess book. But there’s something special about getting a Negi book. Perhaps it’s knowing that the pages are full of exciting and practical novelties, …
Check out this awesome video from the London Chess Classic where the participants take turns describing their fellow competitors in one word. So entertaining! Honestly, I wish organisers did this sort of thing more often. They have such an opportunity with so many top players gathered in one place, basically at their command, and yet …
The TCEC superfinal between Komodo and Stockfish is currently taking place. I have the games (a 100-game match I believe!) running in the background while I work, kind of like test-match cricket. It’s somehow soothing, a silicon version of Enya if you will. I bet noone’s ever used that analogy before. Yesterday, in game 22, …
The Queen’s Gambit Accepted: A Black Repertoire by A.Delchev and S. Semkov I recently got my hands on a couple of new opening books by Chess Stars, the Bulgarian publishing house perhaps best known for the Openings For White According to Anand series. After the subsequent Openings For White According to Kramnik range, the guys decided to branch out with their …
*** EDIT: The ’50 Moves’ guys have kindly decided to make the webinar FREE!! So register here. Well, the attention my Nakamura/Mcshane post received was overwhelming, with my website getting over ten times the normal number of comments for an article – some constructive, some hilarious, and a couple of ‘bizarros’. The post got picked up by most major chess news …
I love following this Millionaire Chess tournament. It’s really quite a spectacle: untitled players can pick up tens of thousands of dollars, one top player gets to go home with $100,000, and there’s even the bizarre “Win a million” lottery to keep us interested. And with so many ‘novelties’, it’s not surprising that there’s always …
I’ve had the opportunity to play a couple of rapid tournaments recently, in a weak attempt to shake off the rust before the European league season starts. There was a nice ‘holiday’ rapid in Luxembourg, whose chess community is super fun and social, as well as the eighth edition of the Amstelveen Brainwave Rapid. Both tournaments …