Hikaru Junction

Hikaru Junction

Chess Blog

A Brief Summary of Volunteer Instruction

Hello–
In my absence, one of the things I’ve been working is my high school’s service-learning project; or, more correctly, I’ve been working on an essay I’ve done in place of my high school’s service learning requirement this year. It comprises my thoughts on the continuation of a program at my school in which volunteers taught chess to underprivileged children, and the optimal methods of its implementation. In particular, it explains the most important topics to teach beginning chess players, and how they might be conveyed to a group of students. I thought this might be interesting to read, given the topic; as always, I welcome any comments, which I reiterate here as it’s a topic with potential impact if I’m missing something obvious.

Without further ado, below follows the reforma...

Boxing and Blitz

Hello readers of the Junction,

Today we’ll be following up on last week’s dissertation with a dissection of the actual chess games from several relatively high-profile chessboxing matches (i.e. the ones which were filmed online with a board.) First up is coverage of the most recent tournament I have video of from the London Chessboxing page: the International Chessboxing Brexit Belt.

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Ville “Jukola” Makinen – Guy Cohen, International Chessboxing Brexit Belt 2017 ...

The Boxing Day Mystery

I started my journey armed with two critical facts: It was Boxing Day, and the Wu-Tang Clan make excellent music. If you can’t see where this is going, stop and listen to the below. Or, even if you can.



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There was only one problem, I discovered, as I attempted to piece together a chessboxing-themed blog: it’s really hard to find any actual chessboxing games. Substantial-time-Googling hard. I emailed several supposed governing bodies of chessboxing, the majority of which didn’t respond, although I did get one email back several months later (02–20–2019, for those of you keeping score,) from London Chessboxing. I posted in several chess forums, including this site’s, and got a few leads over in r/chess. It was on. ...

The Delayed Exchange

Hello all, and welcome to Hikaru Junction. While I was looking through my few binders of chess scoresheets, I happened upon something rarer than a game score. I came across an original Orion masterwork, stuffed in amongst the myriad records of past tournaments.

The below is several years old, the opening half-page of a chess comic I was going to write and draw. Unfortunately, it comes from the time before I allowed myself to accept I was skilled at neither.

My Chess Comic


Although this may be of great archeological significance, I’m nevertheless forced to turn us from these diversions towards the main topic of the blog– the games which I was searching for in my Romney-esque ‘binders full of chess games.’ ...

A New Junction

Hello readers,

Last time around I went in hard on the introduction. This week I’ll only mention that one of my favorite tournaments, the London Chess Classic, is currently being played, and you should check it out. The format is a knockout this year, unfortunately, but games between Caruana, Nakamura, Karjakin, Aronian (at least, from three of them) aren’t ones you’ll want to miss.

With that housekeeping completed, let’s dive into what you’re (presumably) here to see: the games from the second day of the tournament weekend. (The first day’s, you ask? 404 Look no further.)

Orion LE (1713) – Craig B Roll (2257) MCC Open
1. e4 c5 2. d4 {I respond to Craig’s Sicilian with my trademark (or, soon to be, anyway) Smith-Morra Gambit.} cxd4 3. c3 dxc3 {He accepts.} 4. Nxc3 {The speedy d...

Return of the Junction

Hello all,

Magnus Carlsen’s back, and so, apparently, am I. What is it that I usually do here? Claim I’m the only chess blog on the internet that does something? Apparently, I’m the only chess blogger that routinely loses a train of thought, since I wrote “I’m working on a bigger project for next week” in an introduction three months ago, and have since completely forgotten what that could have been.

I do have a new thing I’m working on now, though, and that brings me to my next point: In my absence, I’ve tried to re-evaluate my attitude towards chess. For some time, I’ve been a little discouraged, I think, partially because of the below rating graph.

last few years
...

Writing Chess in Fiction

Hello, and welcome to the only chess blog on the internet that’s written in the school library.

Still working on some other stuff, and since it’s post-Labor Day here in the States, it’s been a little busy. As I think I’ve mentioned on here, I’m an amateur writer, and this week I thought I’d put up a post I originally wrote elsewhere on writing fictional scenes with chess in them.


–––––––––––––––––––
...

Yippee-ki-yay,

Hello all, and welcome to Hikaru Junction, the only chess blog on the internet that must have missed 60 Minutes. I’m working on a bigger project for next week, but for the sake of consistency I’ve dug up the games from my most recent tournament.

For those diehard fans among you, I’ll have to apologize and defer the topic to a later date, leaving you instead with

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Now, then, I could talk about industrialization and men's fashion all day, but I'm afraid work must intrude… ...

Aronian: Turn Off the Dark

Hello all, and welcome to Hikaru Junction,

the only chess blog on the internet whose author produced the startlingly insightful commentary “I think most likely is Aronian, for experience, consistency, and his recent superb form…Caruana is one of the stronger contenders, but he doesn't seem to play as aggressively, which I think will hurt him.” (176208)

As I’m sure you know, Aronian then proceeded to make me look like a fool by scoring 4.5/14, and Caruana doubled Aronian’s score to win the tournament.

In this handy-dandy graph I made, Aronian is the line far below everyone else’s. ...

Tournament (Redux)

Hello all, and welcome to the only chess blog on the internet that saw that ludicrous display last night– the blog I had been back-burner-ing was scuppered by the necessity to get my computer fixed. Regular service should be resumed next week, but instead this week we’ll take a look at a tournament I played during my last long absence.

I started off the tournament paired against a stronger opponent, and although it didn’t show in my play, it did in my scorekeeping– deciphering what I had meant by the following scoresheet, four months after the fact, proved immensely difficult.

Bad scorekeeping

Look at this mess! Not only did I make several scorekeeping mistakes in the first few moves, I marked down which color I was to pl...
    Last Post
    30 Jun '19
    Posts
    58
    Blog since
    27 Mar '15

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