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My Chess Career

Submitted by DrDave on Sat, 25/09/2010 - 17:28
I always dream of playing smooth positional games where I beat strong players to the cheers of the adoring crowds, but even my best efforts seem to have huge holes in them, and the rest seem to be dominated by cheapos, blunders and swindles. But who can claim more? I hope you are entertained at least by these humble efforts.

  I do like my opponents to resign when I'm winning, but I can't blame them for not doing so when you see how often I get swindled by others. When Nabokov refers to the "abysmal depths of chess", you may assume he had games like these in mind.

  In recent years, despite the embarrassing evidence below, I have taken on coaching of adults and juniors, using canonical examples. One of the things that makes me do this is the number of games that I win because I remember something I've seen in a GM game - for example, in my one and only correspondence game. At times like this, a club player can (in some sense) play like a master. The other thing is, coaching is a way of paying tribute to people like Tom Briggs, who were kind to me when I was starting out.

Dr.Dave - Swindled!
Dr.Dave's Adventures at East Devon
Dr.Dave's Adventures with the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit
Dr.Dave's Best Games
Dr.Dave's Cheapos
Dr.Dave's Early Games
Dr.Dave's Good Games
Dr.Dave: Blunders and Swindles
Dr.Dave: Playing like a Grandmaster

Chess Quotes

[cool blue cat says:]

 COOL TIP: What does Reti mean? He was one of the strongest players of his day, but surely grandmasters are superb calculators! Yes, they are, but often they do not need to calculate something from scratch, because they recognise the type of position they are in, and they know what to play in that sort of position. All the calculating has been done before by someone else, and once you are shown how it works, you can use it and apply it in your own games.
— Dr. Dave.