DC Chess League: December Edition

I was back at the board on Friday night, playing down 300 points in the DC Chess League. This presented a special challenge because I had a large rating gap and needed to win, both for my pride and to ensure a victory for the team. After looking at a couple of my opponent's games online I realized that he sometimes played a very drawish continuation against one of my main defenses against e4, so I turned to a line I knew well but hadn't played in a couple of years. Fortunately, a half hour of flipping through Mihail Marin's, "A Spanish Opening Repertoire for Black" gave me the needed confidence and even though he played a sideline, many of Marin's ideas were relevant in the game.

 My opponent played pretty well and I made a couple mistakes, so the game was roughly even until move 34 (pictured below) when he was overly hasty with the move a4. He didn't think long on this move because attacking my a6-c4 pawn chain is a normal idea, but he missed a couple tactical details that let me pick up a pawn. I think he became discouraged after losing the pawn and blundered twice more before resigning the game.

Titled Player's Can't Play Endgames (Part II)

I beat a 1900 in a long game last night, but I haven't processed it yet, so instead I'm sharing another win from a bad endgame on the Internet Chess Club. My opponent is a Russian IM, who was ranked fourth in the 3 minute pool on ICC.

Grandmasters Can't Play Endgames (Part 1)

I realized recently that I hadn't played anyone over age 12 in any form of chess for a couple of weeks. That's the excuse I made to myself for playing a couple hours on Internet chess club. I had some pretty good results by relying on my ICC specialty, getting into lost or difficult rook endgames and then winning them. A couple of these endgames were against strong players. Here's the first game, lightly annotated with another to follow soon.

Move First Think Later

I recently purchased a chess book by that title. Despite the name it's not a primer for how to play better blitz. It seems to be written as a challenge to the classic models of how to train at chess and how chess players think. Essentially, the author (IM Willy Hendriks) challenges the assumption that players evaluate the position and its imbalances before looking at candidate moves. Instead, he thinks that we simultaneously calculate and evaluate and you can't do one without the other. This part of the argument persuaded me, although I'm not convinced yet about some of his ideas about subconsciousness decision making.

The book isn't just a work of chess philosophy. My favorite chapter so far was a fantastic lesson on line-clearing sacrifices. The two diagrams below are a simple line clearing tactic and a much more difficult one. The first tactic is from one of my hundred or so games while entertaining kids at a tournament yesterday. The second tactic is from the book and much harder. I eventually stumbled on the answer, mostly through trial and error. Please leave solutions in the notes:

Question 1: Black to move and win:

Question 2: What is the best move for white?

My Childhood Simul

Last week I posted about a simul I gave in Madison over Thanksgiving week. That time I scored 6.5/7, sparing the host of the event from having to make good on his promise of donuts to anyone for winning (or to me for getting a sweep).

I recently remembered a childhood game of mine from 2002, where I was on the other side of the simul tables. I played against Grandmaster Alexander Goldin, a multiple time winner of the World Open Chess Tournament. I played very badly in the opening, probably just not taking my opponent's threats into account. Somehow though, he let me stick around and then made a typical simul over-site  to actually give me an advantage. I think that another player also got a draw and GM Goldin won the rest of the games. Probably no one got donuts that time either. I think that there is still a lamented copy of this score-sheet somewhere in my parent's home in Madison.

Here is the game with my original annotations from shortly after playing the game. Calculation errors and spelling errors are reproduced as they were.

All Rook Endgames Are Drawn?

Siegbert Tarrasch (1862-1934) was a world title contender with strong opinions about much of the game. He once famously claimed that all rook endgames are drawn, an exaggeration that contains a lot of truth. However, you can only make so many imprecise moves before teetering over the edge. See if you can spot the white's brilliant 53rd move in Karjakin-Morozevich. Full coverage is here: http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=8671

When Openings Matter

I try to focus on opening memorization as little as possible when teaching classes or private lessons. Instead, I like to focus on following opening principles. However, someone playing without a lot of memorized opening knowledge needs to start calculating early in the game. Here, a player (not one of my students) makes one early mistake and gets a horrible position. Silver Knight's coach (and soon to be master?) Justin Burgess doesn't let him escape.