Thursday, October 19, 2006

The Chess Mind is Officially Closed

One of the best chess blogs ever, Dennis Monokroussos' The Chess Mind is now closed, so I suggest you get over there and read, in case he decides to take it down someday.

I met Dennis briefly at one of the first Western States Opens in Reno about 20 years ago, when he was an ebullient young master of 20 or so; his annotations of a game of his in the bulletin have served me well in the King's Indian Exchange Variation ever since!

Dennis put up so much good material at The Chess Mind that all I can do now is say, "Thanks so much for a job well done!"

Friday, October 13, 2006

Hiatus Over!

I haven't been playing chess or posting much here lately, but that's about to change--the blogging as of now, and the playing in a couple of weeks. also, I've been elected Sergeant-at-Arms of the Reno Chess Club!

Apparently, in the past the job has consisted mainly of saying "Quiet please!" during tournament games; I intend to expand my activity and impact in the club and help make the meetings and tournaments better than ever.

A whole lot has been going on in chess, around my city and around the world; last weekend the Western States Open in Reno was won by GM Sergey Kudrin (2592) with 5.0-1.0, a half point clear of a very impressive field. The results are available on the Reno CC site by clicking on 'Western States' on the sidebar. One of the things I'm going to work on is getting the Reno CC site set up so that all the entries have unique urls and blogs can link directly; another is getting annotated games by the strong and friendly players at the club here on the blog.

My model is the marvelous Michael Goeller and his Kenilwothian, now on hiatus for awhile. I may need to learn some more about HTML and get some software or some help, but I hope that our club and this blog, or a new one, can become another example of how it ought to be done.

Meanwhile, if you want some actual chess to enjoy right now check out the final game of the just-concluded World Championship match between Kramnik and Topalov, as annotated by the excellent Dennis Monokroussos of The Chess Mind. A well-deserved victory, game and match, for Kramnik. I may have more to say about the rather bizarre protests and circumstances of the match later, but I'm making a concentrated effort these days to just enjoy the games and let the antics slide.

I'm excited about chess and chess blogging again! More to come....