- Aug 7
- 4 min read
Howdy! It’s the Chess Friends!
Sorry about skipping last week’s blog! We were playing in the 2025 US Open, and there was no time to write anything, but now we want to share our experience! We'll talk about the history of the US Open and feature some cool chess people! Let’s begin!
Last week we traveled to Middleton, Wisconsin to play in the 125th US Open!
125th, everybody! …which means the first one was in 1900! That year it was held in the city of Excelsior, Minnesota, and won by Louis Uedemann. Back in the days, the tournament would usually be small, so it was played as a round robin, meaning you play everyone once, and the tournament lasted around 2 weeks. Slowly but surely, the participation grew, so in the 1950s, the tournament was transformed into an open format, in one big section, where everyone could play, paired by the Swiss System (we explain the Swiss pairing system in our book!).
The largest ever US Open was in 1983 in Pasadena, California, with 836 participants, including a noteworthy name Viktor Korchnoi, who also played in the World Championship. In the year of 1966, the US Open was hosted in our hometown of Seattle and co-won by Pal Benko and Robert Byrne.
This year, the US Open featured around 500 players in one big section with 9 classical rounds plus additional side-events, such as blitz, quads, and scholastic! Alongside the US Open, there were invitationals tournaments, where the best in each state competed among each other. The elementary school state champions participated in the Rockefeller Championship (National Tournament of Elementary School State Champions), middle school champs participated in the Barber Championship (Dewain Barber National Tournament of Middle School State Champions), high school champs attended the Denker event (Arnold Denker National Tournament of High School State Champions), girl state champs played the Haring Tournament (Ruth Haring National Tournament of Girls State Champions), and finally, best of the best Seniors competed in the Irwin Championship (John T. Irwin National Tournament of Senior State Champions).
The US Open is a lively tournament, full of people of all ages, from all walks of life and rating levels, who come together to play chess, talk chess, read chess, reconnect with their chess friends from around the country and world and make new ones! We love the atmosphere! It has a pretty good vibe: everywhere you turn there are people discussing theoretical endgames, or best systems against the London, or how they blundered, or what books they bought in a chess store there, or simply what they had for lunch. (Chipotle for us!)
The best thing about it? Meeting all the amazing chess people and making new friends! That’s one of our favorite parts of chess tournaments. Just to name a few…
Coach Jay Stallings. In this US Open, Coach Jay received the Award for Excellence in Chess Instruction! He runs a huge academy of chess in Southern California and wrote a system of chess books designed to take you from not knowing how to play chess to a competitive player, starting from white belt all the way to black belt! He also made a cool card game called Triple Check (in the photo above) that sharpens your tactical skills without any screen time! We recommend his books and cards a lot! Check them out on his website here!
The Myth Sarang got to play Coach Stephanie Ballom. She is an awesome teacher who runs a chess school called The Chess Quarter and has achieved many distinctions as a top trailblazing African American woman in her storied career.
IM Stuart Rachels. Back in 1989, Stuart was the youngest (since Bobby Fischer) to win the US Chess Championship. This year, he became a co-champion in the Irwin tournament of Senior State Champions, representing Alabama.
He is also a chess author! You can check out his book The Best I Saw in Chess: Games, Stories and Instruction from an Alabama Prodigy Who Became U.S. Champion.
Stuart has a degree in Philosophy, and he shared his chess thoughts with us. He talked about how most players, particularly young ones, tend to play much better when they are losing, but struggle to keep that focus and intensity when they feel they are winning. He also shared that for him, the moments he is winning are actually the most challenging as he has to think deeply about his plan and how to convert.
Indeed, “the hardest game to win is a won game,” as Emanuel Lasker, the second World Chess Champion, once said.
Stuart connected with us through legendary Spanish chess photographer David Llada, who captured some amazing shots of both Stuart and Sarang at the event. You can view many of his photos on his Instagram page. Stuart also shared some amazing stories about his career and talked at length about our local legend Uncle Vik, Viktors Pupols, who has beaten Bobby Fischer. Stuart and Vik played an awesome game at the 1987 US Open, the 88th edition of the tournament, held in Portland, Oregon, just down I-5 from us.
That’s all for today! We hope you make many new friends in your tournament journeys! Feel free to leave a comment on interesting people YOU met in a chess tournament!
Three Cheers, Fellow Future Master Chess Friends!
The Man Benji, The Myth Sarang, and The Legend Vivi
- Jul 23
- 4 min read
Howdy! It’s the Chess Friends!
Or should we say:
G’day! It’s the Chess Mates!
Why? Because in this blog post, we are featuring chess in Australia! We will talk about the Australian chess scene and chess books from The Land Down Under. Let’s get started!
Before we get to Benji’s book reviews, here’s a bit about chess in Australia. The first chess club in the Southern Hemisphere was the Melbourne Chess Club, founded in 1866. By comparison, the oldest chess club in the US, our favorite Mechanics’ Institute Chess Club, in San Francisco, was founded in 1854.
Not just that, the grand State Library Victoria in Melbourne has one of the biggest chess book collections in the world! We hope someday our book will be part of it! Meanwhile, if you are in Melbourne, stop by the library for a game of chess (we read they have several boards inside and two giant chess sets outside)!
There are a couple openings that feature Australia, namely...
The Australian Defense for Black: 1. d4 Na6?!
The Australian Gambit for White: 1. e4 e5, 2. f4 exf4, 3. Nf3 g5, 4. Bc4 g4, 5. h4!
We are definitely not recommending these openings! They are both a bit dubious!
Australia has 10 players with the Grandmaster (GM) title, and 3 players with the Woman Grandmaster (WGM) title. Five of them currently have a FIDE standard rating above 2500:
GM Bobby Cheng (b. 1997)
GM Anton Smirnov (b. 2001)
GM Ian Rogers (b. 1960)
GM Temur Kuybokarov (b. 2000)
GM Justin Tan (b. 1997)
The Australian National Championship is held every two years, and the last five were won by GM Bobby Cheng in 2016, GM Max Illingworth in 2018, GM Temur Kuybokarov in 2020 and 2022, and IM Rishi Sardana in 2024. We also want to give a shoutout to the top Australian Chess streamer, Woman Candidate Master (WCM) Hannah Sayce. You can watch her Twitch channel here.
Now it’s time to start our review of books from Australian authors!
Chess Nuts by Julia Lawrinson (2011)
This middle grade fiction was published when I was born, and 13 years later I could not find the paper version, so I read e-book. This book stands the test of time! It’s always interesting to read about chess and school in another country: kangaroos foraging on the side of the road, sport carnivals, schoolhouses, and people comparing chess with driving across Australia, like it’s boring (not!)...
Chess Nuts features two characters: Jackson and Anna. Jackson is a sporty, popular kind of guy, but he secretly loves chess and plays online a lot! Why secretly? Because in his school, a chess person is called a chess nut, like Anna, who is the best player on her school chess team. One day Jackson drops all his other sports for chess. When he pokes his head into the chess room, you could see the shock on Anna’s face! But it’s good that he does, because their team needs another player for the upcoming match! The problem is that the school’s bullies are now making fun of him and calling him a chess nut, and Anna still doesn’t trust him, and it stresses her, and her chess suffers. How will Jackson stand up to the bullies, and how will Anna regain her confidence? No spoilers, but this book makes a compelling argument that chess is a sport!
I have one question though. In the book, when chess matches between schools happened, the games lasted exactly one hour. If after one hour the game was not done, an "invigilator," like a student supervisor, decided who won based on the position on the board. Is this common in scholastic chess in Australia, because we have never seen this here?
Chess Legends Alphabet by Beck Feiner (2024)
It’s been a while since I learned my ABCs but look at this cover! How can one pass this book without opening it? From the top chess players such as Magnus Carlsen, to historical chess giants such as José Raúl Capablanca, to chess prodigies such as Hou Yifan, this book has them all. Almost all. For letter F, they’re missing The Chess Friends! But no hard feelings, and we still recommend this book to any chess player, even those who already know their ABCs!
“This was great, but I would make one small change. In the book, the letter P is for Paul Morphy! I get it, he is The Man, The Myth, and The Legend, all in one, but let’s not forget about me! I am the Pawn. I am Peshka. The letter P is basically me!"
What can we say… Our friend Peshka is eager to get attention!
Check out Alphabets Legends’ website for other cool topics in learning ABCs!
Going back to Australian GMs, GM Ian Rogers is the first Australian who was awarded the Grandmaster title. He doesn’t play competitively anymore but provides chess commentaries and writes chess books! He has two books with hilarious titles:
Oops! I Resigned Again! by Ian Rogers (2021)
Oops! I Resigned One More Time! by Ian Rogers (2023)
The books collect puzzles and personal stories from the actual tournament games when the players resigned too soon.
In our "Q&A Chess: Tournament Edition" book, we share our opinions about resignation when answering one common question “When should I resign?” Our short answer is basically: Never!
That’s all for today, Friends! Please share some fun facts you know about chess in Australia in the comments!
Three Cheers, Fellow Future Master Chess Friends! When in doubt, play it out!
The Man Benji, The Myth Sarang, The Legend Vivi
- Jul 19
- 2 min read
Howdy! It’s the Chess Friends!
Happy International Chess Day! Given the occasion, we thought today would be the best day to make our biggest announcement yet.
This is it. The moment we have all been waiting for. Ever since we started writing our first draft. Ever since we ate the first croissant at our meeting at the bakery. Ever since our friend Peshka was created, still too young to talk.
Behold! The cover!
Ta-da!
We might be biased, but we love it! Read on to learn more about our process creating it!
Shortly after we settled on a title (read about how we came up with the title here), on one cloudy morning in late autumn, we decided to take a short break from writing. So, we picked up pencils and started sketching ideas for the cover. Oh, the ideas we had! They were grand: How about have a drawing of a chess tournament playing hall? Maybe chess pieces as players and the position on the board should be from that wild game I had from last tournament? How about just have a drawing of all the chess pieces?
The more we brainstormed the more we realized that less is more, so “all the chess pieces” became “three different chess pieces,” then became just “three pawns,” something like that:
Then one day, Peshka grew big enough to say: “I’ll make it easy for you. How about just me on the cover?!”
At first, we created a black and white cover with Peshka and the chess board, but Peshka said: “Come on guys, splash some color on the cover!” After a lot of trial and error (do you know how many colors are out there?!? Ten million shades!!!), we decided on green, like a tournament vinyl chess board. In Procreate, the program we use to design our Peshka, there is this cool feature where you can upload a photograph and pick a color on that photo, to use it in your drawing, so that’s what we did to have as close match as possible.
After that, it all came down to formatting, like the size and the font (do you know how many fonts are out there? Hundreds of thousands!). We decided on the size of our final book 5.5” x 8” and downloaded a cover template from the KDP Publishing website, and placed the title, names, and drawing there.
At the end, we like that our friend Peshka is in the spotlight on the cover, inviting everyone to open the book and learn more!
There you go! Please let us know in the comments if you like it!
Make every day chess day!
Three Cheers, Fellow Future Master Chess Friends!
The Man Benji, The Myth Sarang, The Legend Vivi