Living the Dream: A Coincidence Diary

On  the  evening of March 28th 2016 I remarked to my wife that as part of my training for the upcoming  Ruta de Las Fortelezas  I was intending that week to do something that I had never done before, i.e. run up not just one of the nearby hills of San Julián or Calvary but first Calvary and then without pause, San Julián. I had only begun running up the Calvary hill a few weeks before and had made hardly any such runs, in contrast with the dozens of ascents I had made of San Julián over the previous few years, although I had many times driven to the spring atop Calvary to stock up on water. Fiona then said that there was such a dual ascent being run that very week. for a local charity: pay 10 Euro entry, run up Calvary, then San Julián and then enjoy a paella lunch in the village that lay closest to the base of each hill, Lo Campano. (One also got to keep the T shirt.) The charity was for residents of Lo Campano threatened with social exclusion. She had discover...

On October 22nd 2015 I found myself studying Reti´s famous study:  This was from page 14 of Dvoretsky and Yusupov´s Technique for the Tournament Player . White wins with 1 Rd1!! Kd5 2 Kd7! and thus catches the pawn. Although over previous decades I had many, many times seen this thing, it was only that evening that I was intrigued enough to figure out precisely just WHY 1 Rd1! is the, clever, way to win. (After all, as so many indolent players think: h ow often do you truly require arcane endgame knowledge?) And in over thirty-one years as a Grandmaster I could not recall ever coming across an instance of that theme. The very next evening I looked at Alex Baburin´s Chess Today newspaper in my e mail box and saw this - Brodowski (2452) Vs Leniart,(2480) European Universities Championship, Yerevan, 2015. They reached this ending - Here black chose 80...Kg2? and drew after 81 Kg4! "Mutual zugzwang" 81...Kf2 82 Kf4! Rf8+ 83 Ke5, etc. As Baburin commente...