e4c5.net

I’ve had a few days off and I’ve moved this blog to e4c5.net. The new website affords me more freedom on the development of the blog as well as hosting my games in what I hope is a more organzed manner.

Please stop by e4c5.net for a visit and enjoy. If you feel like it, change your links and such to point to e4c5.net.

Sadly, the statement by Sir John Simon, “So far as I know it is the only game in the world in which it is impossible to cheat.” is no longer true as seen this summer with the cheating scandals that the World Open. On a more humorous note, Frank Pestaño has written an interesting column detailing famous accusations of cheating and chess. Enjoy.

Just released, David Shenk’s The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science and the Human Brain. Goodness, that could be the longest book title ever!

Still, much to my wife’s dismay, I got hooked. It is an intoxicating game that, though often grueling, never grows tiresome. The exquisite interplay of the simple and the complex is hypnotic: the pieces and moves are elementary enough for any five-year-old to quickly soak up, but the board combinations are so vast that all the possible chess games could never be played—or even known—by a single person. Other parlor games sufficiently amuse, entertain, challenge, distract; chess seizes. It does not merely engage the mind; it takes hold of the mind in a way that suggests a primal, hardwired connection.

Read more of the Introduction here. Looks like some interesting late night reading.