From Susan's Blog:

FM Marc Arnold has won the 14th NA FIDE Invitational with the score of 6.5 out of 9. He also scored an IM norm in the process. Congratulations!

1st - FM Marc Arnold - 6.5/9 (IM norm scored)

2nd - 3rd IM Angelo Young and FM Florin Felecan - 6/9

4th - IM Mesgen Amanov - 5.5/9

5th - 6th FM Teddy Coleman and IM Kirill Kuderinov - 4.5/9

7th - 8th Michael Lee and Parker Zhao - 4/9

9th - Robert Loncarevic - 2.5/9

10th - FM Aleksander Stamnov - 1.5/9

Today I was wandering around chessblogland. I clicked a link from chessloser's blog and found an article that expressed an opinion contrary to theory. It's not uncommon for players to dislike symmetrical games in the modern treatment of dynamic advantages created through imbalance but it was just too much. An outright dislike of slower systems only stems from a lack of positional understanding. I've never had a problem with this because my positional sense was better developed prior to my tactical sense (most people disbelieve this but then I point out my games playing the Colle and I played masterfully ... when compared to my other games. Naturally, I altered my opening repertoire to eventually include 1.e4 and began an upward spiral in rating after playing hundreds of tactically charged games ... but I never forgot the lessons of the Colle (the thematic Bishop sac, the power of the two bishops, and the IM Vukovic attacking formula). To make the Colle System (or the London System) appear unsound ... is to play it poorly ... people should not blame a specific opening choice on their poor performance.

Did I forget to mention that two of my games playing the Colle from years ago were featured in the 2nd edition of "The Dogs of War: Practical Play in the Colle".

I'm proud to announce that Chessvine has reached a milestone. We reached our 100th post today (and it's actually this post specifically). I'm proud to see the blog growing as people realize what I'm trying to do. The mission of chessvine is to encourage tech-savvy chess bloggers as well as share important or interesting chess new stories. Anything in the chess world that's viral or important ... you'll likely see it here.

After spending a little time in ChessBlogLand again today I came across a lovely little (well, not really little) article by Tom Chivers from the Streatham & Brixton Chess Club Blog.

The 'long and short' of that article is that it expresses some very interesting views. However, I was most interested by the last paragraph:

Overall Conclusion?
Maybe, that because we can't know in advance what will help our chess, we should leave ourselves open to all sorts of changes, always ready to reject, rethink, revise, or alter what we are doing or think we know. Embracing such uncertainty is not easy, but there are a lot of different and confusing things involved in trying to improve your chess. Or, maybe not.

Aside from Tom Chivers patented tongue-in-cheek-ness he's expressing an important point. In order to improve at the royal game you cannot under any circumstances be set in your ways. You must be flexible and ever changing ... morphing into the brilliant player you know you can be and will be. If you lose sight of that image of yourself then it's all downhill.