Category Archives: chess

Fagernes GM 2022

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I had not played a tournament since just before Christmas when I arrived in Fagernes mid April, and feelings of have-I-forgotten-how-play(?) kept me company, and were enhanced by the fact that I had a terrible form-dip around the beginning of the year. Last year’s edition of the tournament was slightly weaker than usual, due to the covid restrictions, and I played well enough to win it. This year the line-up was much stronger, with names the like of Sasikiran and Donchenko, and my main ambition was to get to a place where I would get to play the top of the field. In the first round I had to fight hard to win against much lower rated, very young, and obviously talented German player, Bennet Hagner, and I got so immersed in the game that I never got the time to walk around and see other games. But next to us another strong youngster, who I had only heard of before, played a game that I did like:

I believe Dvoretsky would have enjoyed seeing such a game, where the bishop pair eventually emerge victorious. But, perhaps he would have preferred to see one of them exchanged, “at the right moment”. 🙂

Random challenge to self – part 2

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When I entered the site for the first time in a year, I found that I had prepared a game, but forgot to publish it, so here it is, another game chosen from a random selection of games. It is time to start anew.

Random game challenge to self

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I wash my hands of the notion that I have stopped writing. Rather I’m working towards a point where, with a good conscience, I can say that the opposite is true. There is the problem of what to write about. I do not know half as much as I would like to about that which I care most about, and although I value my opinion no less (“rather more”, I hear you who know me think) than the average guy, I wish not to be yet another opinionated dilettante. There are enough of those already; the pornographers of truth. Still, in these times of a global epidemic, I find it hard not to be opinionated and to keep my stuff in private. There is so much information, so many curves, diagrams, predictions and colored schematics, that it is hard not to be sucked in and carried away. I mean, have you heard about the Danes? (In the south of Sweden we ask ourselves this on a regular basis, so nothing new there.) (…and the Danes do the same with us.) What about the Swedish Government doing nothing, the Orange Bozo doing less, some countries going all in and some just crumbling? I heard it’s true. It’s disturbing, and all over Youtube. My keyboard is coughing. Perhaps I have been digitally infected?

In order to avoid setting Poe’s law in motion I will stop there. Instead I will share a game which I chose from a set of 10 randomly picked games:

I went through them all and decided on the second most lazy option:

Tomorrow I will give an internet seminar on the topic of “traffic jam on the weak squares”, for ChessPlus (in Swedish). If you would be interested in attending such a seminar in english or spanish, then please contact me through the menu on the left.

First instincts

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I just returned from Barcelona where I participated in “XXI Open Internacional d’escacs, Hostafrancs i la Bordeta”. It is a lovely tournament, not the least because it is held in Barcelona. I cannot get enough of the food, the cafĂ©s, the abundance of trees, the parakeets and bats (murcielagos in Spanish, such a beautiful word) that come with the trees and all those things that that a city of that size with +2000 years of history has to offer.

The only downside to being in Barcelona was the heat, with temperatures soaring above 30 degrees in the days and I would not really have minded if I had not got a room at the top of a building, with windows facing to the south. This turned out to be more of a problem as days went by. I thought I would be able to deal with it, so I didn’t ask for a different room. Perhaps my hubris originated from that, earlier this summer in Brussels, I had managed to take a 8-kilometer long walk on a day when it was 37 degrees (Celsius) in the shadow, without being less sane at the end of it than at the start. But the problem was not the heat in the days. In the beginning of the tournament I had around 28 degrees in my room when I got back from the rounds, and by the end of the tournament it went up to around 30. In short, discovered that I can sleep when it is 27-28+, but that 29-30+ is too much.  With the help of two strong fans I was able to get the temperature down a few degrees by 3 o’clock in the mornings, so that I did manage to get around 5 hours of sleep every night and it was just about enough until it wasn’t. For the first time in more than 20 years I lost my ability to calculate, completely. Before the last round I managed to get a meager 2 hours of sleep and I played it all on instincts. It was quite educational; especially my 20:th move tells me how little I care about material (and how important it is that I sometimes have the ability to override my instincts):

Really, it wasn’t such an awful game, but it would have been nice to see a bit more. I would love to play in Barcelona again, but next time I’ll take the heat more seriously.