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.

Tarrasch Chess GUI running on OS X

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.

Your Greed Will Find You

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.