David R. Sands

4 days ago | washingtontimes.com | David R. Sands

- Special to The Washington Times - There was an international flavor at the top of the leaderboard at last month’s 12th Cherry Blossom Classic in Sterling, Virginia, with Lithuanian GM Titas Stremavicius and Serbian GM Luka Budisavlijevic sharing top honors at 7-2, while foreign-based players claimed seven of the top 10 spots in the strong 50-player event.

1 week ago | washingtontimes.com | David R. Sands

For many beginning players, the trickiest thing about chess is not how to play a game but how to end one. The concept of resigning — conceding defeat before your opponent has even started to checkmate your king — takes some getting used to. What baseball team forfeits its last three outs just because the other team has a huge lead going into the bottom of the ninth?

2 weeks ago | washingtontimes.com | David R. Sands

The ranks of the great generation of post-World War II chess players lost another luminary last week with the death of Czech-born, German-based GM Vlastimil Hort at the age of 81. A six-time national champion in his native land and a three-time German champion after emigrating to the West in 1985, the genial Hort ranked as high as sixth in the world in the mid-1970s, barely losing an epic Candidates match to former Soviet world champ Boris Spassky in 1977.

1 month ago | washingtontimes.com | David R. Sands

It seems every chess era produces at least one star-crossed player whose path to the top is blocked by an even greater talent. Polish great Akiba Rubinstein may have been the world’s strongest player in the first decades of the 20th century, but war, chess politics and simple bad luck prevented him from ever securing a match against longtime champ Emmanuel Lasker.

1 month ago | washingtontimes.com | David R. Sands

Don’t look now, but one of the hottest players on the international circuit is a grizzled veteran who first earned his grandmaster spurs in the second Reagan administration. Ukrainian GM Vasyl Ivanchuk, 56, has shot up the rating ladder on the strength of a string of sparkling tournament performances in Iceland and Spain in recent weeks.