This is part 2 of a series ruminating on the process of learning to play Starcraft II at age 58, and what it might tell us about learning and teaching chess (with a little aikido thrown in for good measure). "But teacher, you said--" When I'm ...
As a programmer and a chessplayer, I've followed the exploits of the chess AI AlphaZero with great interest: I even gave a talk on its algorithm at work. So when my son told me that the team which made AlphaZero had also created an AI ...
Quads are four-player round robins. They're a common way to hold a one-day tournament in the US: you make as many foursomes as you can, starting at the top of the rating list, and put the remaining players into a small Swiss system tou...
The Fall Open was played at the temporary home of the Seattle Chess Club, Orlov Chess Academy on Green Lake. Having gotten a taste of playing face-to-face at the Women's Championship, I couldn't resist. The tournament has traditionally been ...
I've wanted to win the WA Women's since I first played in it in 2015. The closest I came was sitting on second board hoping for a particular result on first board; didn't happen. Several times I've played exceptionally badly, because S...
This blog entry covers the camp tournament: for the camp lessons, see the previous installment. The instructions for participants laid out the camp tournament protocol in detail. For each of the seven days, we needed to organiz...
In the early summer things got interesting in my day job. My boss' scientific paper came back from the reviewers with positive reviews, but they wanted to see an experiment to show that the computational method worked. Unfortunately, t...
After the National Tournament of State Senior Champions I played two absolutely terrible tournaments, the Oregon Open and the WA Women's Championship. The latter was crowned by a game where I took a pawn with my rook and the young woman inst...
Winning the (online) Washington State Senior Championship qualified me for travel support to the National event, which was scheduled alongside the US Open in August 2020. I was unsure whether I wanted to go, to be honest, and felt relieved w...
The WA State Senior has been running for several years now, but I'd never played in it before: I don't find adult-only tournaments particularly exciting. But this year the organizers asked nicely--it was proving difficult to find playe...
I had left the first weekend of the State Championship with a disappointing 1.5/4, but thanking my lucky stars I didn't have to deal with the rules dispute. Unfortunately, a few days later I received an email asking me to serve on an ad hoc ...
The Washington State Championship is a two-weekend, nine-round tournament in four sections, of which the top section gives the title--the other three are mainly an excuse to have a bigger event, though winners do get automatic entry to the next-hi...
I returned to tournament chess after a very long absence in 2014. USCF gave me a provisional rating based on my 2100 FIDE rating (I don't know what happened to my previous USCF rating) and it promptly crashed to around 1800--no wonder, as I'...
As I said when I wrote this tournament up last year, no one pays any particular attention to the Seattle Championship; it's just a fancy name for an ordinary weekend Swiss. For reasons that will become apparent, I'm a bit sorry I said that. ...
In my previous two visits to Reno I'd been within striking distance of the hefty Class A prize both times. This time, though, I couldn't shake the memory of multiple bad tournaments in a row, and I wasn't optimistic. I might have chick...
The Washington State Championship is a two-weekend, nine-round tournament, with four sections of ten players each. I had watched anxiously for over a month to see if I would even get in, as my rating was near its low-water mark and the compe...
Yes, this blog is nine months late. Work has been making me crazy, and also I found these games particularly difficult to annotate--or indeed to look at. I've decided to present it with incomplete annotations, as otherwise it might be ...
The Washington Class Championship is traditionally a big tournament, the second-biggest of the year, and is held in Lynnwood, a suburb about 20 miles north of Seattle. Normally I've commuted, but this year my husband suggested I get a hotel ...
I knew that I was facing a crisis at work in December through March--a new class to teach, a grant submission deadline, and a realistic chance of needing a new job--but I snatched some time in October to go to the Western States Open in Reno, Neva...
The Women's Championship consisted of twelve girls and three women, which is pretty typical of chess in Seattle.... Last year's champion, WFM Chouchanik Airapetian, was on hand to defend her title; we expected that WIM Naomi Bashkansky (fron...
A nine round tournament. Why do we do this to ourselves? Playing for five days straight is exhausting, keeping in playing form becomes a real struggle -- I don't know why I love this format, but I do. This iteration was graced by the...
