Perhaps this is a morbid tradition I’m starting. This year we saw the passing of GM Vugar Gashimov, GM Dragoljub Ciric, Kurt Meier and Alisher Anarkulov. The last two were included on this list for the strange circumstances that occurred that lead to their deaths. Again there are no real plans to recreate obituaries for these people, I just want… Read more →
If you’ve been a diligent reader, you may remember the post from last year, “10 Games from 2013“. To maintain some consistency across this blog; I will attempt to re-create the same post this year. I also wanted to add a new section to this post that I am calling, “The Player of the Year”. I choose this player by… Read more →
It took me a while to create this post. I wasn’t sure what I should write. Did I play well? Eh, sort of. Did my opponents help? For sure. I suppose I should start at the beginning, a few weeks ago, I played in the first ever, “Central New York” Open. The tournament took place in Syracuse University (GO ORANGE!)… Read more →
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 →
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 →
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 →
Today was quite a dramatic day for the Chess Olympiad that saw quite a few upsets on both the team and individual level. As was the case yesterday I’m going to be very lightly annotating some games and discussing the results. You’ll note that of the first five teams with perfect scores none are from Eastern Europe; which is quite… Read more →