Welcome to the third name change for the weekly installment of chess news, reviews, and my personal game annotations here at OffMyChess.com! This column began earlier in the year as My Chess Week and soon morphed into OMC Weekly, which in-turn gave rise to the Off My Chess Quarterly publication. Unfortunately, after a few weeks of giving it a serious try, I am not certain that OMC Weekly catches the essence of what I am trying to do with the column. Therefore, I have renamed the weekly entry OffMyChess.com Weekend Review, or OMC Weekend Review for short. The format and intent of this column will remain the same.

This was a very busy week and chess playtime was at a premium. Work was exhausting, so there was little time at the end of the day in which I felt that I could effectively devote to playing. However, the nights that I was able to sit down and play some blitz games were much better than my previous efforts. I hit a blitz ELO high of 890 recently, but that was briefly before I watched my ELO plunge to a dismal 715. Fortunately, it has been slowly rising back up as I seem to have found my niche again and continue study my openings and work on my tactics.

In Other News…

♟ The first issue of Off My Chess Quarterly Review is out and available for free download.

♟ The FIDE Grand Prix is taking place this week in Baku, Azerbaijan this week as Fabiano Caruana remains dominant and continues to climb his way to the top of the chess world.

Chessbase Magazine #162 is out!

New In Chess has some amazing articles on the Trosmø Olympiad and is available from their official website.