Advantage for white, and yet...
White has a material advantage, but black's positional advantage is considerable.Black to move. How does white win?
Checkpoint chess
https://twitter.com/olliecarroll/status/1501045212210249729?s=20&t=BkyIO5lDnb7-hx15WQIm2Q
Ten years?!?
Yesterday was my ten year anniversary on chess.com. I'm grateful to this site and for all the good people with whom I've played chess on here.
FTW?
I can't seem to find a win for white in this position. (Black to move.)
Giving up something for Lent?
I've never taken on a Lenten practice, but on little more than a whim, I decided yesterday to try to abstain from... resigning! I actually resign quite a lot in live games. Pretty much any time I make a blunder (which is often), I resign immediate...
Thanks
I like to thank my opponent when a game ends, especially a live game. And while chess.com is an English-language website managed in the USA, we all know that the chess players on here are an international community. This is one of the many things ...
Victory
In today's Sterling Chess event, I took first place in the U1000 section. It's nice to win, though the best part of claiming a trophy is that my sons get more excited about chess when dad comes home with something shiny. Some thoughts: 1) I espe...
Food for thought
From Susan Polgar's website...
Tourney
Today I took second place in the Sterling Chess May Open in the U1000 section. First tourney I've been in for months -- how I've missed the highs & lows of OTB tournament play! Kudos to all who participated, and many thanks to TDs Caijun Luo a...
From hopelessness to hope
My opponent had a strong start thanks to my bungling, but things turned around, probably much to the surprise of both players (certainly to white!). Black was rather unsportsmanlike about the final outcome.
An oddity
I've posted on here in the past about my habit of adding quitters to my list of blocked chess.com members. I also will block anyone who's rude. (E.g., one guy made some remarks in his native tongue, a language unknown to me; let's just say that Go...
Progress (slowly but surely)
Yesterday I took home 2nd place in the Sterling Chess June Open in the U900 section. This was my first medal in an OTB tourney, and also the first OTB tourney in which I lost no games (I had 2 wins and 2 draws). Okay, I'm not a NM yet (nor am I li...
Real bad, and not so bad
I play a lot of ten-minute blitzes on here. Very often I play quite badly, as in this game: I did a bit better here, despite a rough start... perhaps my opponent, seeing how badly I was playing, got a bit careless?
318,979,564,000?
I have often heard it said that the total number of possible combinations in the first four moves of a chess game (that is, each player making four moves) is 318,979,564,000. I don't find this implausible, but I'm curious how this is calculated. D...
New York Times chess video
Here's a link to a cool vid from the New York Times about our favorite game: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/11/17/arts/design/100000001178611/from-elephants-to-bishops.html
Down with quitters!
Probably all of us have had the experience in Live Chess of facing an opponent who, recognizing his/her situation as hopeless, just lets the clock run out rather than acting honorably (fighting till the end or resigning). I move that we who are o...
O death, where is thy fianchetto?
A little nod to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. http://waynocartoons.blogspot.com/2011/08/these-cards-are-marked.html
Material gains vs. position
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Mark 8:36 Here's a kind of mistake I myself make very frequently. It was interesting for me to be on the other side of the equation of a player getting ...
An interesting mate
In a recent 10-minute blitz, I was on the receiving end of one of the more interesting checkmates I've seen in a while. Kudos, jonathan297.
My first OTB tourney
I learned to play chess here on chess.com not quite three years ago, and probably 99 ½ % of my chess experience has been on this wonderful website. So it was a real treat for me this past weekend to play in my very first OTB tournament — a Rated B...
The web
Yes, sometimes technology can deepen our isolation and create new problems. But my own experience with the internet is that it can be an extraordinary means of fostering deeper human interconnection on a global scale. This wonderful video illustr...
Being a Stoic good sport
In the six months that I've been a member of chess.com, I've played innumerable games, both live and correspondence, with people all over the world. Not only is this site a great place to learn about chess, it's also a wonderful venue to meet some...
