“Secrets of a Grandpatzer” (Part 2)

Posted by Wahrheit - December 8, 2007 on 12:44 am | In Books, Psychology, Robert Pearson | Comments Off (Part 1 here) As I noted in Part 1, this book was written by Kenneth Mark Colby, a Professor of Psychiatry who also worked in the field of artificial intelligence (interesting paper on artificial belief systems here). He also had a great sense of humor and really enjoyed life and chess, if the book is any indication. Having previously covered the Introduction, let's get to the meat: After

 


“Secrets of a Grandpatzer” (Part 1)

Posted by Wahrheit - December 3, 2007 on 6:53 pm | In Books, Psychology, Robert Pearson | Comments Off Secrets of a Grandpatzer is a very interesting book that was published back in 1979, interesting both for the subject matter and for the author, Kenneth Mark Colby, a Professor of both Psychiatry and Computer Science at UCLA. Dr. Colby had a lot of valuable things to say about chess and chess players, and since the book is now out of print and very difficult to find (only one copy at $35.00 on

 


Postmortem

Posted by Wahrheit - November 2, 2007 on 11:06 pm | In Improvement, Psychology, Robert Pearson | Comments Off Having subjected you, the reader, to all kinds of reportage on the 2007 Western States Open held in beautiful Reno, NV October 12-14, let me sum up and move on. I had my best results in five years (since the 2002 Alaska State Championship) in terms of tournament performance (1800) and general quality of play. After a blunder in the first game, I managed to play three consecutive games against