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...
NOTE: This was supposed to be a small note, but once I assembled all the questions I’ve been asked over the years, it quickly turned into quite a long article. So I’ve broken it up into two parts, vaguely along the li...
BOOK REVIEW: “Insanity, Passion and Addiction: A year inside the chess world” (Danny Gormally) Most chess books are more or less the same. An opening treatise, an instructional book on endgames or middlegames, a t...
How many seconds have you been alive in your life? Seriously, take a guess. Just pick the closest number that feels right. What did you think? One million? Ten million? A hundred million?! This question is hard. As humans, we're not used...
No, I'm not talking about my girlfriend (though she also counts). Last weekend was the final installment of the German chess league, which is the strongest in the world. After each weekend I can't resist quickly going through the 64 games (which i...
Recently someone asked me what I did "when you're not playing chess." I found the question quite comical because I'm not playing chess the vast majority of the time. Still, occasionally I get mistaken for a professional player (albeit a weak one)....
Here's a quick little chess coincidence from the weekend. As I was strolling around to look at the other games in the German Bundesliga matches in Mulheim, I noticed a cute endgame finish in the Dortmund-Emsdetten clash. Black seemed to be holding...
The World Chess Candidates tournament was awesome. Action-packed, drama-filled, and suspense-ridden right up until the end. I've read a lot of reports from the chess side, and naturally about Karjakin's fabulous win. But I haven't read anything ab...
I'm going to again run a live blog of the final round of the Candidates today. If you're interested, head to www.davidsmerdon.com (or here) to read some random thoughts about the games as we move closer to finding out who'll challen...
Book Review: “Playing 1.e4 e5 – A Classical Repertoire”(Nikolaos Ntirlis, Quality) You’ve probably not heard of Nikolaos Ntirlis. But you should! Ntirlis may not have a FIDE rating (at least as far as I could t...
EDIT: Good work Dave; today's a rest day! Oh well. I'll pick up again tomorrow (Tuesday) at 12.oopm GMT. Also gives FIDE 24 hours to tell me if I'm doing anything wrong :)EDIT #2: I got the all-clear from World Chess for the live blog....
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 ...
BOOK REVIEW: Chess Informant 125 / Chess Informant 126 Tl;dr version: The old Chess Informant series is back with a new groove, and your author was suitably impressed. In terms of high-level analysis for a chess periodi...
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, "Si...
“You know, you’ve only got a day to go to write a certain annual post, mate.” So said my mate Fitzy at breakfast this morning. I’m on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, a serenely picturesque region that encompasses glorio...
The worst thing about taking a long hiatus from a blog is all the spam. That aside, I'm back, and looking forward to a big year. It's always nice when the chess and regular olympics coincide, and in a leap year no less. I was trying t...
Book review: “1.e4 vs The Sicilian II” – Parimarjan Negi (Quality Chess) 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 ...
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 opportu...
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...
The Queen's Gambit Accepted: A Black Repertoireby 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 se...
*** 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 artic...
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 kee...
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 socia...
The fact that I knew every single movie reference does suggest I should be spending more time on my studies...
