Dear Readers, Imagine the scene. The year is 1843, the place is London, and you are Howard Staunton, the greatest player in the world, a player so great that people hundreds of years from now will demand to play only on sets named after yo...
Hello, I'm a USCF national master and one of the very best players in the history of southwest Arcata. Did I mention that I'm a national master? I did? Oh, OK. Because I am. As you might imagine, in my storied chess career I've played quite ...
Last Saturday I did an eleven board simul for the Dan Heisman Learning Center. It was fun, and the whole thing can be seen via my twitch channel at http://www.twitch.tv/zugaddict/c/4754890 I'll probably go over some of the games in depth later o...
Hello! My first official chess.com simul (broadcast at http://www.twitch.tv/zugaddict) was a great success for all involved except, well, me. The final tally was +4 =2 -4 in spite of several opponents being overcome by pity and offering either d...
Hello, and welcome to the final episode of “How to Make Master In Three Hundred Blunders or More”. In previous chapters I’ve relived some of my more unfortunate losses, including roughly a half dozen disasters whilst on ...
Hello, and welcome to the second to last installment of my increasingly epic saga of one man trying to somehow eek his way to 2200 USCF in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. In this episode I detail my experiences at the Oregon Summer Open ...
“Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make people want to shoot themselves.” - GargleBlaster *** Hello again, and welcome to the, er... actually, I've lost count of how many blogs/arti...
To those following the ups and downs of Nakamura’s often colorful chess career, yesterday’s collapse in Zurich against Carlsen was without question the most painful of the American’s now numerable reversals against the World Cham...
Hello. This blog entry is dedicated to all those out there above 2100 without a title. Let me say first and foremost that such players are treated with nowhere near the respect they should command. In general their ideas are scorned, opinions ...
To be fair, the reason Magnus Carlsen has yet to solve this chess puzzle is because he hasn't seen it yet. That said, "fair" is not really a term I'd used to describe this ridiculously difficult study. "Insane", perhaps, "cruel and unusual" might...
2013 was an eventful year in chess. Carlsen won the World Championship, Kramnik won the World Cup, Gelfand won the Tal and Alekhine Memorials, Karjakin won that thing in Norway, Kamsky won the U.S. Championship, a 9-year old made National Master,...
Hello, chess.com readers! In the previous two blogs about my 3000 day trek/slog/stumble to the USCF Master title I detailed some untoward experiences of mine in Baltimore and Philadelphia. This chapter deals with my move to the uttermost regions...
In the previous episode of "How to Make Master in Three Hundred Blunders or Less", I detailed some of my experiences in the city of brotherly love, like sleeping under a piano and being bad at chess. In this chapter things take a turn for th...
Hello, chess.com readers. The article or, rather, series of articles you are about to read is unlikely to improve your chess in any way - it is merely a story about how to get to 2200 USCF, attain a National Master's title, and reap the...
Will write more about this and how it came to be over the last several years. For now, here's the first of my ten games played at the just recently concluded American Open where this quasi-quixotic accomplishment occured.
I played five games up in Portland last weekend and, while it was mostly just/yet another Sisyphean exercise in chess futility, I did manage a fifth and final Candidate Master norm. Anyhow, I'll spare the gory details, as I think basically two pe...
As detailed in my previous blog, these are the games from the 1975 Fischer-Karpov match that didn't actually occur in our present timeline and therefore had to be dragged out of a nearby parallel universe for your enjoyment. Game 3: Fischer reve...
Greetings chess.com readers! I come from the future, or rather, the past. Well, sort of both, really. Allow me to explain - in the year 2055 humanity first discovers trans-dimensional travel, whereby parallel universes become accessable to our ...
Just a quick puzzle to solve from actual play - a good example of the practical difficulties you're confronted with during a real chess game.
Spectators were rumored to have tossed cat food onto the board in celebration of Grumpy Cat's victory.
The saga begins...
This game, between two relatively obscure English masters (though Frank Parr did win Hastings the following year) is arguably one of the finest attacking games on record. See if you can find the best moves (good luck!)...
It is a melancholy object to those fans of our most distinguished and cherished game of chess to see, in events both near and abroad, its image tarnished by petty miscreants employing the most base forms of mischief and subterfuge. The egregious ...
