alexrawlings Member since Dec-10-04 · Last seen May-24-13 I'm an accountant and live in London. I've been playing chess since my Dad taught me how to play when I was 8 and have been hooked ever since. I almost beat GM Granda Zuniga once on Yahoo Chess (I'm fairly certain it was him, as we chatted quite a lot throughout our 4 games, of which I lost every single one) which is my best claim to chess fame. My rating is c.1700 ELO (130 ECF) and I play for my local chess club in London. I can also often be found on pogo chess with the handle of evilkenivel82 and generally play 15/3 time controls.

alexrawlings has kibitzed 395 times to chessgames   [more...]

Apr-23-13 B Ivanovic vs K Osmanovic, 1983    alexrawlings: Earlier in the game, after <29 f4>, shouldn't black just play <29.. Nxe4?> Is there a tactic I've missed?      Sep-30-12 L Day vs F Lindsay, 1977   alexrawlings: How come there are no comments on this game? Wasn't it a POTD last week?      Feb-20-12 Rohde vs G C De Fotis, 2001    alexrawlings: Loving the star wars references today <Once>. By any chance were you influenced to use star wars as a theme after listening to the Chris Moyles show on radio one this morning? He's a big star wars fan and it was his birthday show this morning so they had some people dress      Jan-11-12 Once chessforum    alexrawlings: Hi there. I'm curious about the game you referred to in your post today on POTD. Could you share the game score? And could you also post one of your wins with the closed sicilian where you crash through on the kingside? Hope all is well, Alex.      Dec-30-11 S Bouaziz vs Miles, 1979    alexrawlings: What a fantastic game and POTD. This was too dificult for me. I kept staring at the board and looked at a number of first moves, but never even considered 45.. Rxh3. I guess this move just wasn't in my chess vocabulary. Hopefully it's been added now!      Dec-26-11 De Vreugt vs M Gurevich, 2001   alexrawlings: 23 Rf5! would make a great Wed or Thu puzzle imo      Oct-11-11 Monokroussos vs Igor Ivanov, 1985    alexrawlings: How would this game have continued after 23 Rxd5?      Oct-04-11 Casas vs L Piazzini, 1952    alexrawlings: I missed this one... 12 Qxh7+ was the first thing I looked given the forced continuation 12.. Kxh7 13 hxg5+, but for reason I didn't look at 14 Ne7#, or didn't realise it was mate as, in my mind, the pawn on g5 was loose. So, all of my variations in my head included 14.. Kxg5 ...      Aug-24-11 Hartston vs A J Whiteley, 1974    alexrawlings: Nice puzzle, which I also couldn't solve. Playing through the game, can anyone explain the tactics behind 22 Bf4 and why black couldn't or shouldn't have played 22.. exf4?      Aug-17-11 B Katalymov vs M Kolpakov, 1975    alexrawlings: Hmm... bit disappointed I didn't get this one. Hopefully I'll recognise the pattern if I see it in another puzzle, or even better, OTB.

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Jan-25-10    zanshin: Hi <Alex>! I see you live in London - one of my favorite cities. I used to live in South Kensington. Cheers! Jan-25-10    dzechiel: Hi, Alex, You are not the first one to suggest that I collect my daily puzzle solutions. While I'm flattered, I'll tell you what I said before: There are more books written about chess than any other subject, and I don't think one more is needed. I enjoy posting on the daily puzzle and I hope I'm able to offer insight to some of the players new to the game. And, during my misspent youth, I actually did publish some chess books (pamphlets actually), and don't feel compelled to do it again. May I suggest that you publish one of your favorite games in your newly opened forum? With our without annotations, it would be fun to look at. Jan-26-10    alexrawlings: Hi <dzechiel>, thanks for writing on my forum. What do you mean by publish? Do you mean creating a link to one of my favourite games or putting the PGN of one of my favourite games on this forum? And fair enough re putting your posts into a book. I'll still keep looking out for your posts regardless! Jan-26-10    alexrawlings: Hi <zanshin>! Thank you for writing to me here as well. London is a great city although sometimes I'd rather visit than live in it! South Kensington is also a very nice part of London so I'm not surprised you have fond memories of it :) Jan-26-10    dzechiel: <What do you mean by publish?> I'm thinking that you give the game score, details and perhaps a diagram. If you look on pages 1 and 2 of my forum you can see an example of how I published a few of my correspondence games. Jan-27-10    alexrawlings: Hi again <dzechiel>, I've had a brief look at your forum pages where you published some of your games. I look forward to looking at them in more detail. I may publish some of my own games here. I currently play for my local club in the London leagues so may have one or two OTB games which would be interesting enough and I also play some correspondence games on facebook and letsplaychess.com which may also make the cut... watch this space! :) Feb-14-10    dzechiel: Alex - since you are a paid member here at chessgames, you might want to select an avatar for yourself (at the bottom of your preferences page). There's over 500 to choose from, so you will probably find one your like. Jul-22-10    OhioChessFan: Your suggested puzzle of the day position is in fact today's POTD. I tend to agree with you about it being more a Tuesday/Wednesday level, though the need to see Qxh7 doesn't work makes it a little tougher. J Friedel vs M De Jong, 2009 Jul-30-10    SetNoEscapeOn: I'm an enormous fan of the Sopranos... what was your favorite season? Aug-03-10    alexrawlings: <SetNoEscapeOn: I'm an enormous fan of the Sopranos... what was your favorite season?> That's a good question! I think I must have watched the entire show from start to finish about 3 or 4 times now as well as revisiting random episodes. I'm going to go with season 4. :) Oct-28-10    SetNoEscapeOn: Yeah that was a great one, as they all are. I might have to go with either 5 or Season 6 part 2. But it's like trying to find an order for Kasparov, Fischer, Capablanca, Lasker, etc. Mad Men is the huge thing now and they've done some cool things with it, but it's like a young top 100 GM compared to the HBO World Champions :) Nov-13-10    David2009: Alex, Visit crafty chessforum Your post Radjabov vs Shirov, 2008 refers: <alexrawlings: Nice puzzle today. Can anybody tell me what <the endgame simulator> which some user are kibitzing about is please? > Cheers, David Nov-28-10    alexrawlings: Hi <SetNoEscapeOn>, I also love Mad Men and have seen the first 4 seasons, which I think is all that's been released so far! I'd also recommend the Wire. Nov-28-10    alexrawlings: Thanks <David2009>, I'll check that out. Jan-16-11    hms123: <alexrawlings> You are very welcome. May-06-11    wordfunph: <alexrawlings> i was in Leeds with my family in 2007 and took a two-day holidays in London. My memorable experience was a trip to The Chess Shop.. http://www.chess.co.uk/ as we come out of that bookshop and with a glowing face of mine, my wife was poorer by 100 pounds with around 13 books i bought.. :) ahhh, those were my cloud-nine memories.. i'm sure you are a frequent visitor of that bookshop. May-09-11    alexrawlings: Hi <wordfunph>. Thanks for taking the time to post on my forum. Pleased to hear you enjoyed your trip. Where are you from? I have been to that shop a few times actually. It's on Baker Street, which is within 10mins walk from my office, and not far from my appartment. It's an interesting shop. From memory it has lots of (pretty expensive) chess sets and an array of chess books, many of which seemed to be second hand. Although it's cool that they have a shop I'm more likely to order books from Amazon as they'll be cheaper and its easier to determine whether or not I really want them, as I can read through people's reviews. Feb-20-12    Once: <alex> Glad you liked the star wars references today. It something I've never grown out of. The inspiration didn't come from the radio. Instead, I blame it on a trip to the Guildford Odeon on Saturday. Have a look at the first of my posts on this page... Kamsky vs Lautier, 1993		Advertise on Chessgames.com

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