Sunday, February 25, 2007

Today's Chess Columns


Chua-Vigorito, USATE 2007
Black to play and win.
I read two newspaper chess columns on Sunday.

The first is always The New York Times's chess column by Dylan Loeb McClain, who has proven an excellent successor to GM Robert Byrne. I especially like to see more current and local games in his columns than had been the case previously. Today's piece is titled "At Amateur Team Tournament, Having a Good Costume Helps" and features Chua-Vigorito, USATE 2007, which is one of the few master games I have seen from the event. It opens with the ever-wild Botvinnik Variation of the Anti-Meran Semi-Slav. Unfortunately for students of the opening, the game only diverges from theory on move 19 (see the diagram above), and its 19th move is probably not the most incisive (see my notes).

The second article I always read is The Newark Star-Ledger's chess column by Pete Tamburro and Steve Doyle. I was hoping they would have a USATE game today and expect they will have several in the coming weeks (as they typically do following the event). Instead, today they feature the excellent game Grasso-Stoyko, NJ Open 2006, which we annotated shortly after the event in a blog article titled "FM Steve Stoyko at the NJ Open."
I am glad that these papers feature these excellent writers and hope their columns are never completely supplanted by us bloggers....

2 comments:

Chess Coroner said...

I posted the Stoyko win in an Advance French thread at the NJSCF board last week.

http://njscf.proboards2.com/index.cgi?board=amate&action=display&thread=1171793367

backgammon said...

Though a number of things change from year to year at the annual New Jersey Open Chess Championship (including the location, round times, and attendance), there is one thing you can count on: FM Steve Stoyko will not only play but he will compete closely for the top prize. Steve has been playing in the tournament since the late 1960s and has won the event twice, in 1973 and 1983.