Category: Campfire Chess Page 4 of 9

As I mentioned in my post from earlier this week, I am more than happy to see August become a distant memory. As if my 9 wins during the month wasn’t bad enough, the stress of other things caused me to stop writing my recaps for the Sinquefield Cup mid-tournament. Fortunately, only six days into September and my record is already showing signs of recovery. So far, September has blessed me with 5 wins out of 7 games including an excellent victory last night that I will probably have to annotate for a future edition of Campfire Magazine since it put me back over the 1000 ELO mark for the first time since middle of the Summer.

I am also anxiously awaiting the worldwide release of Pawn Sacrifice in a couple of weeks and remaining hopeful that it will arrive at one of the many theaters here in San Antonio. If not, it might be worth driving to a nearby city to see it.

I am pleased to announce that the latest edition of Campfire Chess Magazine has been published here on the site! In last quarter’s edition I transitioned the magazine from its traditional PDF format to an HTML/JavaScript combination format that added interactivity and better scalability to the product as a whole. CM06 shows the refinements and advancements I have made to the format over the last few months including graphics improvements and support for Apple’s retina displays. In addition, this is one of the largest volumes of Campfire Chess Magazine ever published!

In addition to the articles and product review features, Campfire Chess Magazine features interactive chess boards with game commentary and PGN collections for three of the last major tournaments including:

• Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival
• Norway Chess 2015
• FIDE Women’s World Championship 2015

View Campfire Chess Magazine #6 here or visit the publications archive to view magazine back issues.

I am very excited that the Sinquefield Cup is in full swing at this very moment! It is one of my favorite tournaments throughout the year! Unfortunately, my own chess games have taken a dramatic turn for the worse in recent weeks. This accounts for my lack of blogging activity as I have largely returned to the books and to working on tactics puzzles to help me solve some of the problems I have been having. As you will see in the game below, I have struggled to maintain adherence to basic chess principles when faced with tough decisions over the board. This is something that takes time and practice. To help myself understand these difficulties a little better, I annotated the following game move-by-move to analyze what went wrong and what could have gone right.

As you can see, there were many opportunities during the game for me to successfully convert sacrifices into gains but I was just not able to think that fast on my feet. Much of it has to do with mental exhaustion and distraction I have felt lately due to some work stress. Now that much of that is subsiding and I have spent some time in the books, I am hoping that things will start to return to the positive for me in my chess.

Next weekend marks the beginning of the 2015 Sinquefield Cup in Saint Louis! As you might recall, last year’s event was dominated by Fabiano Caruana in his 7-game winning streak that crushed his opponents, including World Champion Magnus Carlsen. This year’s event brings some changes to the playing field that should add some interesting dynamics to the competition.

• Magnus Carlsen (ELO 2863)
• Fabiano Caruana (ELO 2802)
• Hikaru Nakamura (ELO 2798)
• Veselin Topalov (ELO 2798)
• Alexander Grischuk (ELO 2794)
• Viswanathan Anand (ELO 2791)
• Anish Giri (ELO 2790)
• Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (ELO 2762)
• Levon Aronian (ELO 2770)
• Wesley So (ELO 2778)

It is very exciting that for the first time in history, the United States will have 3 players from the FIDE Top 10 represented! If you are in the Saint Louis area from August 22 to September 4, I highly encourage you to stop by the World Chess Hall of Fame and the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis to catch some of the greatest chess players of our time battling it out in what has become a highly prestigious American tournament. In the meantime, take a moment to enjoy the games from the 2014 Sinquefield Cup and relive the exciting battles before the players arrive in Saint Louis!

In addition to the festivities of the Sinquefield Cup, the American premier of Pawn Sacrifice will take place at the Chase Park Plaza in Saint Louis on September 3rd with a private VIP party featuring the players immediately following the film’s premier. For details, check out the official event page.

This has been an incredible whirlwind of a week! Unfortunately, very little of the week involved chess because I was promoted this week and spend much of my time preparing for the ceremony honoring the event. However, I did manage to keep up occasionally with the Biel Chess Festival in Switzerland where GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave won in elegant style against GM Richard Rapport.

Over the past few weeks I have stopped playing regular blitz on Chess.com and focused more on 15 minute standard games with 10-second increments. The results of these games have been much more fulfilling than the countless blitz games that I lost miserably or won through time troubles or fundamental mistakes by my opponents. In addition to focusing more on my standard time control chess, I have also been working on some projects to create a fully Mac chess experience. As I have written about numerous times in the past, finding good chess software for the OS X platform can be a daunting task. One such project is a distributable OS X edition of the Tarrasch Chess GUI.

This simple little program has been popular with Windows users for years and has been ported by other OS X and Linux users, according to the site’s development blog. My goal is to create a distributable package for OS X where users can download the file from Campfire Chess or other websites without having to go through the tedious process of installing a wine skinner, finding appropriate themes and settings, and hoping that everything works OK. I hope to have it available for download in the coming weeks.

The following game was played with standard 15|10 time controls on Chess.com in July. My opponent was rated about 100 points lower than me, but it was quite a struggle between the two of us. I chose Your Greed Will Find You as the headline for this game commentary because the endgame demonstrates the peril of always wanting to capture a piece that appears unguarded.