ABOUT THE BOOK

Relive the Chicago Blaze history in action as we follow the team to their build up to the Championship! Insider stories are shared. It is Chicago history presented through the former manager’s unique point of view. All profits from this book are donated to the Muradian family.

The Chicago Blaze chess team represented the Windy City in United States Chess League from 2008 to 2011. In 2011, the team made the championship finals where they lost to the NY Knights. This book contains stories, photos, puzzles and analysis by team members of the 176 games. 169 games are annotated including 16 by GMs & 15 by IMs.

A few notes regarding the annotations that appear in this book. Every single game was reviewed and updated in 2017 by NM Jeremy Kane, Daniel Parmet and the latest engines available to us (Houdini 6, Komodo 11 and Stockfish 8). For the most part, however, the analysis of the games is from near the date the game was played (between 2008—2011). Where the opponent had also annotated their game for the opposing team’s blog, that analysis has been added and that annotator has been credited. A few games were updated, revised or annotated by the players themselves in 2017 for this book.

I would like to especially thank the players who returned to do extra analysis for this project; GM Dmitry Gurevich, GM Mesgen Amanov, GM Josh Friedel, IM Jan Van de Mortel, IM Angelo Young, FM Jim Dean and NM Gopal Menon. In addition, some games have multiple annotators (usually Daniel Parmet and NM Jeremy Kane). In these cases, the annotator who did the majority of the work is listed first. We have done our best to distinguish within those games having multiple annotators what analysis and commentary were provided by whom. All the puzzles were hand selected by NM Jeremy Kane. Finally, here is the complete list of annotators for the 169 annotated games in order of the number of games they annotated with the number in ():

NM Jeremy Kane (110)GM Dmitry Gurevich (5)FM Jim Dean (1)
Daniel Parmet (25) GM Mesgen Amanov (4)NM Gopal Menon (1)
NM Trevor Magness (11) FM Albert Chow (3) NM Todd Freitag (1)
GM Yury Shulman (6) IM Florin Felecan (2) IM Salvijus Bercys (1)
IM Jan Van de Mortel (6)GM Josh Friedel (1) IM Konstantin Kavutskiy (1)
IM Angelo Young (6)
IM Eric Rosen (1)