Happy Birthday to Life Master Brian Wall who turned 59 this past week!

Brian will be announcing the winner of his annual "Jim Burden - Francisco Baltier award" on April Fools Day (April 1st).

Every year this award goes to the game where one side loses a Queen, but still wins the game.  I am hopeful that my "Carlos Danger" game will win! 

It won't be easy because I am also competing against Brian's own son, Francisco Baltier himself, and a ton of Paul Anderson chess.com bullet games, where Paul sacrificed a Queen for 2 Rooks against a player rated 800 points lower than him.

Brian gives more credit to standard rated games, and games where one side has almost no compensation for their Queen, which was true in my case. 

Last week Anthea and I did a podcast with Grandmaster Jesse Kraai (99% Anthea, 1% me).  Anthea is a huge fan of Jesse's book "Lisa a Chess Novel", and did a deep dive into themes in the book.  Honestly, a lot of the conversation was over my head.  Both Anthea and Jesse have degrees in Philosophy, so at times I had no idea what they were even talking about :-)

But it was really cool to have such a strong and famous chess player on the podcast, and I think that you will find it interesting.

The puzzle that I sent out a few weeks ago in the newsletter "Just feels great" was featured in Stephen Dann's Sunday Chess Column this past weekend in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.

This is a tactic I really love from one of Jules Carter's games.

Black to Move.

One thing I find funny about this tactic (which I posted several places, including facebook and twitter) is that people will write back "Rxh2+". 

Yes, that is the first move of the combination, and a fairly easy move to guess, since it is the only check, but I have no idea if these people worked out the full variation.

Tactics time was featured earlier this month on the Chess Life, USCF website!

This was a real honor, and I had lots of people message me about it.

The article was written by Alan Rodenstein, formerly of New England, and currently living in Houston.  Alan also did a profile of Claudia Munoz, which I really enjoyed.  Alan is working on a book right now, containing stories about the chess world these days, and is currently in the research phase.