Last week’s poll “What’s the matter with Magnus?” ended in a narrow win for “Lack of Motivation” but “Nothing – it’s variance” seemed in the lead for most of the week. Clearly, opinions vary on this question. This week, big time chess returns to the UK, with the London Classic kicking off on Friday. So […]
Who will win the London Classic? Read Post »
I played a couple of games of chess last weekend in the first rounds of the 4ncl in Birmingham. This is newsworthy because, before this, my most recent competitive game was the final round of last season’s 4ncl, six months ago. My inactivity is due, in part, to being busy with work, including nearing a
This is a temporary post. We were talking about the upcoming World Cup and got a bit excited to be honest. So we decided to have a little competition. We are working on the questions at the moment. They will be available Tuesday morning at some point. The deadline for entry will be 1 hour
The World Cup – A competition Read Post »
In the recent 4NCL I had the honour of playing first board for Wood Green with Black in two games. As I am entirely out of shape and blunder in more or less every rare game I play, my goal was to make draws, eliminate their best players and hope that the team would win
In 2010 I changed back to the Danish Federation after some disappointments with Chess Scotland (though certainly not the players). Federations are imperfect everywhere, but it did allow me to play the Danish Championship with a lot of friends from my early years with good conditions. And it did not stop me from becoming Scottish
Two games against members of the Scottish team Read Post »
I took the liberty of cutting these unedited paragraphs from the coming book Positional Decision Making in Chess by Boris Gelfand. Levon Aronian is of course one of the greatest players of our time. However, in team events he is usually even stronger. Due not least to his spirit and leadership, the Armenian team managed
Gelfand on Levon Aronian Read Post »
The following position is from a game of mine at the 4ncl last Saturday. J. Shaw – J. Pitcher, England 2014 I have played a few decent moves to reach this position. I sacrificed a pawn (possibly temporarily) to free my wonder bishops. But my queen is under attack. So what should I play?
Working on Boris Gelfand’s book Positional Decision Making in Chess, I came across a rather fascinating combination in one of the notes to his beautiful win against Grischuk in Beijing last year. The game deals a lot with changes in pawn structure, but at this point, White has won the strategic battle, fixing the f5-pawn