Blog

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By CCSCSL Staff

It's time for another installment of Chess Club Puzzlers! See if you have what it takes to solve the problems presented here. Start honing your tactical skills now, and you'll be amazed at how your game will improve.

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By Yasser Seirawan

This past week was quite a trip down memory lane.  It started with my coaching session for the Lindenwood University Chess team.  At the instigation of one of the team members, Nolan, he suggested it might be fun to go over some of my games against the world champions and to share my thoughts, stories, emotions as well as the variations that I had calculated during the games…

A week earlier we had looked at some of my games versus Tal and Karpov. For this session I asked the team if they would like to focus upon one game in particular…  A game I had played against Kasparov in Sweden during the Grandmaster Association’s World Cup tournament.  Why not?  And so for the next four hours (!) our focus became this one game…  But what a game!  To my mind this single game was the pinnacle of my career.  Not because I played brilliantly and won.  I didn’t.  Not because it was a hard fought draw.  It was.  Rather because the battle involved some of the longest, sharpest, most combinative lines of play that I’ve ever calculated and had to calculate in a single game.

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This article was originally published on stlpublicradio.org on February 27.

By Mike Wilmering

Carissa Yip, 10, has already felt the first pangs of heartbreak.

This past December at the World Youth Chess Championships in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, Carissa was one win away from securing a gold medal and a World Championship title. She was even closer than that, really.

Carissa achieved a winning position in her final game before the exhaustion of a long-tournament set in. Her position crumbled, and she had to offer her opponent a draw in the final round, which put her in a tie for second place. But when the oh-so cruel tiebreaks kicked in, Carissa finished out of medal contention in fourth place overall.

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By Mike Wilmering

Obviously the most recent developments at the Chess Club and Scholastic Center and the World Chess Hall of Fame have firmly planted Saint Louis as a major player in the chess world, but countless organizers and enthusiasts have helped maintain the interest in Saint Louis over the years.