July 20 is International Chess Day, so I entered a marathon 5 3 tournament on lichess (rather than do the housecleaning for which I set the weekend aside). Against a 22-year-old Brazilian CM, I played like I was 30 again:
Month: July 2025
Laurence Faust, please pick up the white courtesy telephone
LeBron’s in the news because at least one team would rather wait for his Lakers contract to end than acquire him now. I scrolled through LeBron’s basketball-reference page, trying to find some way to summarize what the chap has accomplished. He has four spots of gold ink, signifying the all-time career leader in that metric. LeBron has four. Kareem has four. Michael has one. Wilt has five. Perhaps LeBron figures with another 80 or 200 more games, he can tack on another spot of gold ink — from *this* era. The bb-ref algorithm for figuring one’s Hall of …
Bought, for $111
Bob Long was a chess publisher who knew what club-level players needed to read. One of the smartest things he ever did was to buy the rights to Cecil Purdy’s work. Purdy was the best chess teacher for students and average players. There are really two levels of chess teacher: The teachers who turn masters into grandmasters, and bad players into good players. Chessplayers are delusional halfwits who think they need the books written by the first type of teacher, when what they actually need is the material written by the second. Cecil John Seddon Purdy was the best of …