Back at the Board

Sorry. I haven’t posted in a few days because I was with my company team at the Amateur Team East Tournament over the long weekend. I had played the North (Previously Titled Midwest) section of this tournament every year since 2004. The Eastern tournament bills itself as the largest tournament in the country each year and the largest team event in the world. This was my first weekend tournament since Amateur Team North last year, although I had played seven games in the DC Chess League (all wins!) in the intervening months.

Here’s a quick recap of round 1, with future rounds to follow.

Round 1: The team was playing down and won convincingly. I had black against a 1900 who was probably in high school. I equalized easily with black, but he forced me to trade a lot of pieces, so I was not sure that I would be able to win from this position:

The key imbalance is that white has an isolated pawn on d4, but I think that with accurate play he should be able to hold without too much trouble. Fortunately, I was able to improve my position for the next few moves, while white moved the queen around fairly aimlessly. By the time we reached the following position, things had begun to turn in my favor.

X
White hasn’t done much in the last few moves, while I’ve managed to improve my knight, queen and king. Here, I played Nb4, which forced Qb3 (I had hoped a bit for Qa3?? Nc2 --- Note: This doesn't actually work because of Qb3, pinning the queen.). I traded queens and marched the king over to snatch the d4 pawn. White defended fairly well down a pawn in the knight ending, but I think it was winning throughout.

I haven’t done a serious analysis of this and my remaining three games yet, but I’ll try to get some up in the next couple days. Here’s the complete first game without annotations. I was happy to win, but a little concerned that a 1900 was able to hold on for 64 moves and 4 1/2 hours.

Chess Book Suggestions

Does anyone have suggestions for good game collections aimed at a 1400 player?

Amateur Teams

Sorry I've been out for a while. My internet was down for a couple of days. Now that it's back I am starting to think about preparing for the Amateur Team East competition, annually one of the largest events in the country. This will be my first weekend tournament since moving to DC nearly a year ago. For many years I used to play the Amateur Team North (formerly Midwest). Last year our University of Chicago team tied for first, but lost on tiebreaks. I'm not expecting as much from my company team this year, but it should be a fun weekend.

Here was my best game from last year's event. The person playing white has won both K-12 Nationals and the National Junior Open.

Another Queen's Gambit Trap

Shortly after taking up the opening (always played the Tarrasch defense as a kid) I fell into this trap in blitz a few times. A few weeks later I got to use it in a classical time control. Pause the game below after black's twelth move (Nd7) to find a path to an advantage for white. Despite winning material in the opening, it took me a further six hours or so to pull out the win. That's what it was like growing up in Wisconsin with the preferred time control of 40 moves in two hours and then one hour for each side every 20 moves until the game ended or one of the players died of exhaustion.

The Dangerous Queen's Gambit Declined

Short post today. Here's a recent one of about 10 games I've played on ICC where the opponent allows this exact trap or something very similar. When playing through the game find white's 20th move. Even before then the position is very comfortable, thanks to black's weak c-pawn.

Your Blogger in Action

Finally, a real DC area chess experience!

Last Friday night I played board one for Silver Knights Chess in our match at the US Chess Center with the Black Nights. Because of confusion over the match location we got started late (8:30 PM) and without one of our players. Because the confusion wasn't our fault we negotiated to play a 5 board match, rather than the traditional six.

Before the game I shook hands with my opponent and he told me, "I am from Montenegro." I wasn't sure how to properly reply to that so, I responded, "Hi, I'm from Wisconsin." I found out after the game that my opponent isn't just from Montenegro, he is serving as their ambassador to the US.

As the evening wore on, we started winning on one, then two, then three other boards, so by 1:15 AM when the game finished, my score took us to 4-0. Shortly thereafter we won on board two to sweep the match! I think this is one of the most complete games I've played. I managed to get active early which caused my opponent to make a couple of key mistakes before the time control on move 30. Not finding a clear win, I traded into a better endgame and managed to force a zugzwang (one of my favorite chess terms) to win material and the game.

What follows is a long string of recollections and analysis. The game was complicated so I would appreciate any thoughts or questions. Enjoy.

Alternate Solutions

My first tournament game since starting this blog is coming up Friday night. The Silver Knights Chess team is playing in the DC Chess League against the Black Nights. I'm expecting to play against one of a couple of NMs with the white.

Looking through a tactics database I’ve been building up recently, I ran across a puzzle that had frustrated me on the server chesstempo.com. This is an interesting puzzle, so it’s worth taking a few minutes to figure out how you would play for white.

Have you tried the puzzle yet?

The first things I noticed were the unsafe black king and black’s seemingly annoying threat of gxh2+. Deciding that I shouldn’t let black take over the initiative, I decided to focus on checks and came up with what I thought was a great solution, particularly since it required calculating a mating net six moves away which forces black to sacrifice a rook.

1.Rd8+ Bxd8 2.Qxd8+ Kh7 3.Rb7+ Kh6 4.Qd2+ g5 5.hxg3! (setting a mating net on the h-file)Kg6 6.Qh2 Rf1+ (forced) 7.Kxf1 1-0

It was pretty disappointing when I went to play the first move of this line and the website told me, “Your move is good, but it is not the computer’s first choice. Please try again.”

My pride shot, I eventually found the line that the computer finds marginally better, 1. Rb7 hxg3+ 2. Kh1 Qc6 3. Rxc7 and white will win black’s queen for a rook.