Summer Doldrums Redux

Just like last summer, our chess activities dropped off significantly towards the end of the school year. The kids played just couple of tournaments after the supernationals with uninspiring results. In the last tournament Richie accepted a draw against one of his friends in a completely winning position and it reminded me of the scene in Searching for Bobby Fischer where Josh offers a draw to share the championship with his opponent even though he sees that he has a forced win in like 10 moves. We'll have to see what we can do about stamping out that weakness (kidding). We have enrolled them in a summer chess program at Darien High School for a few weeks but except for the very occasional home game I don't expect them to play much before the next school year. Unfortunately I believe their new school will not have a chess club so they won't be able to play anymore in school. For the last few months, Richie has declined to play chess with me at all, but the other day, he took up the challenge. I played quickly but fairly seriously so I was actually a little surprised to lose. I told him that I was no longer going to go easy on him because he had gotten too good for that. Based on that game, I guess he might have improved over the last few months, but it has been harder for me to tell without actually playing him and with his relatively poor recent tournament results.