All About Chess...

Man vs Machine January 31, 2015 at 9:27am 4th Negros Closed Chess Championship   2014 Rd.5  Acaling  vs  Fritz 12     Kings Indian Defense For the first time in four years, the championship of our Province included an engine. The sponsors of the event wanted to test the mettle of our players against an engine in a standard time control. Only three players managed to draw. FM Severino, CM Abanco and yours truly. 1.d4 The last time I played 1.d4 in a tournament was 14 years ago .  Against an engine, you need to play as solidly as possible, so 1.d4 or 1.Nf3 is in my view, the only way to go.  1..g6 2.e3 Bg7 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.c4 O-O 5.Nc3 Honestly, during the game, I had no idea what kind of opening have we gotten into. One thing I know is that Black had constructed some kind of a King's Indian Defense. I only found out days later that this opening is in fact KID. 5..c5 6.Be2 cxd4 7.Nd4 I...

Sometime during the summer of 1980, I was vacationing in my Grandma's house together with my parents, uncles, aunties and a number of my cousins. Then one day my cousins decided to play a game called chess. This was the very first time I ever laid my eyes on a board game with curious looking pieces played in a 64 squared board with alternating white and green squares. I was just an observer that time, intrigue by how the pieces moves. After a while somebody won (or was it a draw), and then they decided that they had had enough, so they put back the pieces inside the foldable chess board and stored it somewhere. That was my first ever encounter of a game that will soon made the biggest impact in my life. But it took me another three years before I finally learned to play the game. Fast forward to June of 1983, it was just the first few days after the opening of the classes and everyone was still on a cleaning mode and we hardly had any classes at all, just the basic orientation...