BOTW: 2019.03.20
It's a Chess in the USA themed Best of the Web...
US Chess Championship
March 20 - March 31, 2019
Two 12-player RRs to decide the US and US Women's Championships at the St.Louis Chess Club.
The all-GM Open section has an average rating of 2682, and five players over 2700: Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So, Hikaru Nakamura, defending Champion Sam Shankland, and new addition to the US Federation Lenier Dominguez (formerly Cuba). It also has three teenagers: Jeffery Xiong, Sam Sevian (both 18) and Awonder Liang (15).
The Women's section is topped by seven-time US Champion GM Irina Krush, who has a 120+ point rating advantage over second-seed Anna Zatonskih. The women's section also includes three teenagers: Carissa Yip, Annie Wang and Jennifer Yu.
Live Games
With onsite commentary by WGM Jen Shahade and GMs Yasser Seirawan & Maurice Ashley
Homeless NY Chess Champ & Charity
Last week, an 8-year-old refugee living in homeless shelter won NY State championship. Tani Adewumi learned chess one year ago, and won the NY State championship K-3 on his first attempt this month. Tani and his family are Nigerian refugees, fleeing Boko Haram terrorists. Their refugee status is still TBD. His coach set up a GoFundMe campaign which in less than five days has already collected $191,000!
You can watch and read about him by following the links below:
Book Reviews: Where's Watson?
For years, the benchmark for English language chess book reviews had been IM John Watson: well written, historically informed, carefully researched. Watson's reviews were clearly research-level workloads, and the effort may have caught up with him: he has not posted a review since 2016.
So who is the next Watson?
GM Matthew Sadler, New in Chess magazine's book reviewer is one candidate. His reviews are are good, but not great. They definitley convey Sadler's enthusiasm: he does make you want to order those books. But he's less good at conveying the content of the books; perhaps for space or time reasons his reviews rarely have the detailed compairsons of variations in competing opening books which Watson often produced. They also reflect the skills and abilities of the near 2700-level GM that Sadler is -- perhaps to an extent that makes the reviews presuppose a skill level above the average NiC reader -- for example, Sadler regularly writes about following complex analysis in a book with few diagrams while commuting or at the beach, a blindfold skill few club players have. They may also be a bit too polite -- most books get 4 to 5 stars, others (presumably) pass unnoticed.
John Hartmann is the book reviewer for the USCF's Chess Life magazine. He is an untitled 50+ year old with a FIDE rating just under 1900. He is also the 2018 winner of the "Best Chess Column" from the Chess Journalists of America.
Hartmann clearly knows chess books: his review of Sam Shankland's 2018 book on pawn play references recent books on the topic like Flores's "Chess Structures: A Grandmaster Guide" and Hickl's "The Power of Pawns", as well as hard-to-find classics like Baburin's "Winning Pawn Structures" and Kmoch's "Pawn Power in Chess".
He also knows knows enough chess history to put books in their wider cultural context; see, for example, his discussion of chess funding during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union at the start of his review of Sakaev and Landa's books on the "Russian Chess School 2.0" in his May 2018 reviews.
He also has an eye for detail: noticing the similarity in layout of the recent translation of Keres' book on the 1948 World Championship to Quality Chess books, Hartmann traces it to the influence of Swedish IM Ari Ziegler, who typeset both. Not important, but a sign that the reviewer is alert and does his homework.
Hartmann mainly reviews books, but not exclusively: he regularly reviews videos, DVDs, software, and websites. For instance, his February 2019 review discusses coverage of the Carlsen - Caruana World Championship match, ranging from live online videos and analysis, to two "instant" books, to a video series with Carlsen seconds -- Gustafsson, Nielsen, and Fressinet -- on chess.24. Similarly, his January 2019 discusses ChessBase 15 and the Chessable website.
Hartmann's fully-edited reviews appear in Chess Life and are available only to subscribers, but his penultimate drafts (which are usually longer) appear for free on his wordpress blog.
His most recent review is from March 2019, which discusses Joel Benjamin's book "Better Thinking, Better Chess", and includes an example from the book of a game won by Shawn Rodriguez-Lemieux.
Links
- John Hartmann's Chess Book Reviews
- John Hartmann on Perpetual Chess podcast
- John Watson reviews on TWIC