By Hikaru on 9/14/2008 12:26 PM

Hello, this will be a rather brief blog as I am about to head off to Balcarra National Park in a short while. I now have the list of questions from all the members, and I would like to thank them. All of the questions look interesting, so I hope that after the interview everyone will be pleased with the answers.

Hikaru

By Hikaru on 9/11/2008 4:08 PM

Greetings to everyone from sunny Vancouver! Last night I played my first game for the Seattle Sluggers in the US Chess League. When I played last year for the New York Knights, I must admit that it did not go particularly well as I started out with a loss against GM-elect Vinay Bhat. After that traumatic loss in my first round, I never really was able to get on track as I only won 1 game against IM Eli Vovsha and drew the rest. One of the major issues which I found at the time was that playing on a computer made it much more difficult to focus and I tended to treat the games less seriously. Therefore, I made a conscious decision to not play solely on the computer this year. Fortunately, Seattle has DGT boards which allow players to make moves on a normal board while being relayed to ICC.

In the first game of the season for me, I was paired against GM Joel Benjamin with White. I started off with 1.g3 and we reached a relatively standard position after about 7 moves. The game then took a ... Read More »

By Hikaru on 9/5/2008 11:55 AM

Hello again! Once again, I find myself apologizing for not keeping up with the blog during the tournament, but I was quite busy. The last time I blogged was after I drew against GM Charbonneau in round 4 of the tournament. At that point I was doing quite well, tied for the lead with GMs Charbonneau and Shulman. Unfortunately, in round 5 I proceeded to play very badly. Against IM Zugic, I played quite a bit too aggressively instead of being content with a draw. Somewhere around here, I realized that I was off form. Unfortunately, the rest day did little good for me as I proceeded to play a highly dubious Rauzer setup against GM Nataf and was close to losing if not lost in the final position. After this, I played against GM Mark Bluvshtein whom I have known since we played way back in the World Youths in 2001. The game was quite balanced, although I obtained a small initiative out of the opening. This eventually led to an endgame where I was a pawn up, but due both to feeling slightly sick (more on that later) ... Read More »