Since I’m now retired, I think I should probably dump some of my experiences here. Perhaps some of you can learn from my mistakes and improve on my results as an organizer. I’d like to think I did a pretty good job, but I made mistakes and failed to solve some problems at all.

So let me talk a bit about the problems draws cause an organizer. Not the hard-fought earned draws; they’re no problem at all. But I mean the “tactical draws,” the short ones players make because of tournament standings, when they take a draw with their main competition for the event in a dozen moves or so. They’re part of the game, like playing “safe” in billiards they keep a player from damaging their own chances while at the same time blocking an opponent’s advance. I’ve said before that from a player’s perspective, these draws absolutely make sense.

But from an organizer’s perspective, they’re trouble. For two reasons.

Bobby Fischer is dead.There's a lot that could be said at this point, both good and bad. There's the brash young kid who wanted to be the youngest world champion ever. There's the bitter old man, spewing invective at everyone.

People will tell stories. And, in the end, we'll all remember what we choose to remember.

Over at the Chess Cafe (I'd provide a link to it, but Hanon Russell doesn't appear to believe in permalinks, so any link I'd provide here would break in short order, hence there's no point in doing so) Mark Dvoretsky has written an excellent piece on the place of opening preparation in the development of a chess player.

He starts out by noting that Botvinnik only lists any sort of chess preparation and training as one of four factors in chess success, and the place of opening prep falls farther from there.

I've been spending some time the last couple of years teaching chess classes (numbering from 5 to 36 kids). I have used both major databases in support of that goal, and I've been getting more and more annoyed with them. They both have some drawbacks, and I'd fully switch to one that lacked those drawbacks.

Here is my list of the top annoyances and how Chessbase, Chess Assistant, or both, fail to deliver: