A few weeks ago, I competed in the 19th Arkport Open. The Arkport Open is a small four round tournament held in Arkport, NY. This tournament has a special place in my chess career because it was the first “big” tournament that I played in when I returned to chess SEVEN years ago. Fred Harris who is also responsible for… Read more →
I recently competed in the fifth Hartford Open located in Windsor Locks Connecticut at the Bradley International Airport. I played good chess and attribute a lot of my success to my diet choices. I believe the main contributing factors were the English breakfast tea (which I’ve started drinking) and honey crisp apples. I don’t ordinarily drink tea but find that… Read more →
I recently accomplished one of my goals/resolutions that I had been working on for the last two years. I finally achieved my rating goal, which was to break 2100. For the uninitiated, in chess you receive a rating based on your prior performances. Arpad Elo created the initial framework for the chess rating system (now known as an “ELO” rating).… Read more →
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of once again playing in the 136th New York State Championship. I did a bit worse than last year and lost rating points but I felt I played well and was a few moves away from winning in both of the games that I drew. In one particularly painful example, I outplayed… Read more →
Greetings everyone; I wanted to try something a bit new for this post. This post is about fantasy football, if you have no interest in fantasy football, the rest of this post is going to be boring for you. I’m going to try to do this weekly so I will likely be a week behind the actual NFL season. There… Read more →
On Fourth of July weekend, I had the pleasure of playing in my first international tournament held in Canada. My play was poor and I lost many FIDE points but my experience in Canada was quite positive. I corresponded via email with the organizer Graeme, who was helpful and organized. I was able to do a bit of sightseeing in… Read more →
Hello everyone, this is probably going to be my last update on the Olympiad. I’ve had a lot of fun bringing you the upsets and the latest news regarding the Olympiad. It’s been quite challenging and quite entertaining, but alas vacation is calling and I need to answer. As far as the chess for this round goes I want to… Read more →
Hello everyone, the picture of the girl that you all see is Luzia Pires (courtesy of David Llada), the legend from the third round who beat a WIM in 8 moves. I would like to offer an apology, I made an omission yesterday that I would like to clear up today. In what could possibly be the shortest victory in… Read more →
Welcome to the fourth edition of the Olympiad Recap here at LifeZugzwang. I realized yesterday that I will not be able to cover the last few rounds of the Olympiad due to a scheduled and much needed vacation to French Canada. Unlike yesterday I didn’t see any games that I thought were worthy of mentioning outside of the upsets that… Read more →
Another exciting day in Tromso, France managed to eek out a victory over a tough Armenian team and (much to my chagrin) the Americans lost to the Dutch. The Russians managed to climb to the top five once again after thoroughly dominating wily team from Macedonia (FYROM – Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia). As to be expected there were many… Read more →