Did You Come Here to Play Chess or to Have Fun?

Dana Mackenzie celebrates the joy of chess - the ordinary, everyday chess we amateurs play. For this book, he has selected forty of his favorite posts from his award-winning chess blog, including a diverse mix of stories, philosophical musings, chess improvement tips, and game analysis.

In each story, the fun leaps off the page. We attend club nights, team tournaments, and state championships. We are on the road and at the board. We enjoy the company of famous and not-so-famous chess personalities. You will read about the Hook and Ladder Trick and Dana’s personal favorite opening, the Bryntse Gambit, presented here with analysis found nowhere else.

A special chapter is devoted to Mike Splane’s invitation-only chess parties, a monthly ‘meeting of the minds’ for masters and aspiring masters in the San Francisco Bay Area. There was no resting on one’s laurels in this crowd. No matter how well you thought you played, you could expect some tough questions and spirited disagreements.The book continues in the spirit of the blog, preserving a dialogue between author and reader that is rarely found in other chess books, or any books for that matter.

Dana Mackenzie is a Ph.D. mathematician who went rogue and became a full-time freelance writer, specializing in popular science and mathematics. As a chess player, he was North Carolina State Champion in 1985 and 1987, is a USCF National Master and Life Master, and for several years was a popular lecturer on a chess instruction website, chesslecture.com. As a professional science writer, he wrote The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be and co-authored The Book of Why, which was named one of the top science books of 2018 by National Public Radio’s Science Friday program.

This book presents forty selected posts (many newly edited and revised) from his blog, which was named ‘Best Chess Blog of 2021’ by the Chess Journalists of America.