Today I would like to share with you an exercise I did at the end of 2011 to try to prepare for the events I would play in the next year. I logged 70 FIDE rated games in 2011. This is a decent but not huge sample size, and I decided to do a thorou...
I recently won the Northern California International, and I’d like to take you through what I believe were my three most important psychological decisions of the event. The first one came in round 3. I had won my first two games without much troub...
This is a quick guide to a video series. For other video series, go here. In this series we will break learning one of the most complicated and theoretically sound responses to 1.e4, the Najdorf Variation, into digestible parts. The en...
January 6, 2011 was a day I will remember well for a long time. I was currently playing in the Berkeley International, and I needed half a point from my next 2 games for my final GM norm. Although that day I lost to GM Erenburg and it wasn’t until...
The 4th Berkeley International concluded on Jan 8, 2011. This tournament, which was organized by Arun Sharma, was the strongest event in California since the disappearance of the Lone Pine events, with such stars as GMs Loek van Wely, Timur Gareye...
The 2010 US Junior Championship concluded a week ago. The tournament was held in St. Louis, side by side with the US Women’s Championship (for more on that event, check out WFM Zenyuk’s articles). The event was very well organized, as has beco...
The recent Chicago Class Championships was won by GM Dmitry Gurevich with a score of 4/5. My result was not amazing and I think fatigue was starting to settle in- I had played three nine round tournaments in a row and was not well rested. However,...
ed note: GM Bhat is in Brazil playing in the Contintental Championship. In his absence, who better to replace him than... a former student of his. IM Sam Shankland has two GM norms and is quite a strong player in his own right. In July he played 3...
