There is a famous saying among Grandmasters: “Marriage costs 50 Elo points”. I heard it as a teenager, and apparently, it was told to Vishy Anand after his wedding to Aruna in 1996. Of course, Anand’s rating has never dropped bel...
Do you remember in school or during further studies, the dilemma of deciding which edition of a textbook to buy? As a poor student, I always found it scandalous that the most recent edition carried a hefty price tag that, as far as I could tell, o...
Usually I write a post about my votes for Triple J's Hottest 100 music poll before the countdown is announced in late January. This year, I didn't get around to it, due to a combination of work/laziness/nappy-changing. The upside is that I can sha...
The time difference between London and Australia is a bit of a pain for watching the World Championship match. Luckily, one of the perks of being a new dad is that I occasionally wake up outrageously early, which sometimes allows me to catch the e...
One tournament is unequivocally the best event of the chess calendar: The chess Olympiad. Held every two years, it brings together thousands upon thousands of players, journalists, spectators, arbiters, organisers and chess celebrities from ...
Note: This is a cross post from my blog, which is somewhat better formatted, and follows Kenya, Part 1. While planning my trip to Kenya to research female genital mutilation, I realised I would have two or three days spare. My days of tryi...
[Note: This is a cross-post from my blog at www.davidsmerdon.com on my reflections in Kenya. Part 1 isn't about chess.] “Have you been to Africa before?” asked my taxi driver as we left the airport. “Yes,” I ...
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 l...
It's that time of the year again when Australia hosts the world's largest online music poll. The publicly-funded radio station Triple J is known as the nation's left-leaning, youth-centred, commercial-free station for cool tunes, with the main gen...
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...
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 i...
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 ...
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, n...
I don't know how I ended up becoming a chess book reviewer in my spare time, but it's certainly a fun hobby. It's gotten to the point that every now and then, I randomly receive a new chess book in the mail to take a look at - which, as any che...
(Note: I often post about all sorts of things on my own blog, www.davidsmerdon.com, which gets cross-posted here. This is a non-chess post.) One of the cool things about studying economics is that it teaches a new and exciting way o...
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 t...
I'm a dreamer. Literally; I dream almost every night, and I recall them vividly. They are often bizarrely creative, including the odd chess dream, though occasionally, during stressful work periods, more boring topics sneak in. But last night's ha...
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 ...
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 t...
The King’s Indian Defence is to chess what the piano is to music. It’s complex, rich and all the pros end up playing it eventually. Fischer, Tal and Kasparov are probably the Chopin, Beethoven and Mozarts of the opening, but other big ...
So, I finally wrote a post on my site to explain (sort of) my 8-month writing break. No chess content, but some insights into the weird world of economics academia: http://www.davidsmerdon.com/?p=1903
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 Najd...
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, w...
EDIT: Nigel Short responded with an addendum that “the Iran bid was not mentioned in the FIDE General Assembly Agenda. It was sprung on Delegates as a surprise.” This procedural anomaly is worth mentioning in light of my shielding FIDE...
Foar Part 1, click here. In the last article I described the basics of the chess Olympiad, and mentioned that it used to be dominated – almost tediously so – by the USSR. But the chess world is different now an...
