Summer at PCA and Updates

I just updated www.chesspanda.com. Our Summer Chess Club is now open. We will focus more on playing and game review. The blitz tournament will be a great experience for our advanced players (and hopefully we will get some of our coaches and helpers to play. I've always wanted to organize a blitz tournament for our experienced players.

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The First Time You See a Puzzle — and How I (Waste?!) Spend My Time with ChatGPT

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  I’ve been coaching chess for a while, and there’s one habit I’ve considered changing: when I give a student a good puzzle and they get stuck, I usually end up giving away the answer that same day. When I was younger, I told myself that someday, when I’m older and wiser, I would change this habit. Today, I decided to try being old and wise. While waiting for a child to be picked up from chess camp, I showed a student one of my favorite puzzles. He couldn’t solve it (no one can) and asked me for the answer. I printed the puzzle, added this caption, and put my name and the date on it: “This is the only time in your life seeing this puzzle for the first time.” Then I laminated it and gave it to the student. By the way, this is the first time I’ve laminated a chess puzzle and given it to a student. I’m not really into laminating, but I have a laminator and hundreds of laminating sheets… After the student left, out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT if the caption was okay. I kind of liked ...
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New Biography!

Out of curiosity, I asked Google Gemini Pro (Deep Research 2.5) to generate a biography of “chess player Jeffrey Ashton,” and I was pleasantly surprised by what it produced. The profile was thoughtful, well-written, and even brought up parts of my chess journey I had nearly forgotten. For example, I had no real memory of serving as president of the UTDallas chess team   What impressed me most was how the biography stayed grounded in facts while still presenting a genuinely positive view. It pulled from over 20 sources that were not written by me, along with two that were—this blog and a couple of ChessBase articles. Overall, it was a nice reminder of the path I’ve taken in the chess world. Here’s the biography!  https://chessprep.com/3YN2hCO
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