Play it Again, Sam

Mechanics-Sharks, 2005 USCL Playoffs: Tough loss eliminates SF from the playoffs. Team manager John Donaldson cleans house, brings in new fourth board Sam S. to lead team to 2006 league championship.

Mechanics-Sharks, 2010 USCL Week 10: Tough loss ensures that Mechanics will not make the playoffs for the first time in their history. Team manager John Donaldson cleans house, brings in new fourth board Sam S. to …

Well, you get the idea.

Mechanics fans were happy to see a win for the first time since last September 22^nd in what we can only hope is our most successful season yet. We’ve got some flexible lineup possibilities, some underrated folks for the fourth board, and some real power on the top. Here’s some analysis from the first week.

Board One: Finegold-Kraai

A tough positional grind of a game, nicely played by Finegold, although not the sort of struggle that’s going to get much love from the Game of the Week illuminati. Jesse appeared to go a little wrong during the flurry of exchanges in the center and sought refuge in a pawn down ending. A critical moment occurred on move forty:

Here Jesse avoided the exchange of bishops by playing the awkward 40… Ba3. As John Donaldson pointed out in the Mechanics’ Newsletter, the three vs. two rook and pawn ending with e and h pawns is rarely covered in chess literature, and Jesse’s instincts must have told him to avoid this one.

However, it’s here that I believe he missed his last good chance to fight for a draw. Let’s consider the following: 1) rook and pawn endings with all pawns on the same side of the board are generally drawn, particularly those with reduced numbers of pawns, such as three vs. two or two vs. one; 2) the addition of a pair of minor pieces in these types of endings is often enough to flip the assessment from drawn to won; 3) white’s bishop controls the queening square of the h-pawn, reducing a number of drawing plans in a pure bishop endgame; 4) with the bishops off, black can sometimes give up another pawn and hold, such as trading his two pawns for white’s g-pawn, leaving white with the problematic bishop and rook pawn duo.

I’m not saying that black holds the draw easily if he plays 40… Bxe5, but I would assess his chances to hold at about 60 percent, much better odds than I would give him in the bishop ending that took place in the game. Notably, white passed up two chances to enter the rook ending himself (although I’m not sure why he avoided it the first time; isn’t 42. Rxa3 Rxe5 43. Re3 a simple win?).

Board Two: Naroditsky-Banawa

My sense of righteous violence on the chessboard says give Danya GOTW, my little silicon friend says blunder by black on move 23 in time pressure. Unfortunately, as pretty much always the computer is correct, and in fact Banawa missed a good chance a few moves earlier:

Here 20… Qa5 is much stronger than Banawa's 20... Qb6 because the knight is not pinned. Now 21. Bxg7 Ne6 22. Qe5 (22. Bd5 Rf7) 22… Qxe5 23. Bxe5 Bf6 leaves white struggling. Risky play by Danya, but that’s sometimes what you’ve got to do when you take on the ugly pawn structure, and he was rewarded this time with a win.

Board Three: Eckert-Pruess

I don’t have much to add to David’s excellent article about this game; in fact, when I saw him bust out the QGA for the first time ever, I was reminded of a conversation that David and I had before playing at a tournament a couple years back.

David: I’m going to play an opening that I’ve never played against you before.

Me (in my head): So not the Benoni, Benko, Semi-Slav, Dutch, King’s Indian, Budapest …

Me (aloud): So it’s got to be the Slav or the Queen’s Gambit Accepted.

David: Good guess.

Obviously I could have manned up and played 1. e4, and for some reason I forgot about the existence of certain other common openings (Gruenfeld, QGD), but the lesson is clear: dude likes to play a lot of different openings. And I couldn’t agree more that playing this way keeps you fresh in a way that learning one opening straight through to the ending does not. Oh, and sometimes you play something new and get crushed, but that’s chess.

One cool little trick that David passed by in his article:

Here David has just sacrificed his bishop on c3 to help break through on the queenside. White’s rook and bishop are attacked, so he has to give back some materials, and did so, with 33. Bc2, which looked dangerous but lost in short order. But what if he plays 33. Re2?

Then 33… Qxb3 allows 34. Nf6+ gxf6 35. Qg4+ Kf8 36. Qxh4 with a miracle draw. The only way to stop Qh8# is to play the king back to the g-file, and then white simply checks with the queen.

Fortunately, black is still winning after 33… Ba6, but it’s a good reminder to never let down your guard when converting an advantage.

Speaking of opening preparation ...

Board Four: Sevian-Ding

This, in my mind, was the key game in the match. We lose here with white and a tie or loss in the match was quite likely. I wasn’t too comfortable with how the opening went for our latest wunderkind: he was wandering through (and getting way down on the clock) a really dangerous line of the Dragon (and reminding me in the process why I try to avoid the open Sicilian).

Black missed two good chances to gain a big edge against his youthful opponent:

In this position the move 18… Rb6 has done very well for black. The idea is that after 19. h5 g5 20. Rxd6 f6 white is playing without his queen for a very long time. Instead, the game continued 18… Be6 19. h5 Qc7 (now 19… g5 loses to 20. Nd4) 20. hxg6 fxg6 21. Rxd6 Rfc8.

One more diagram:

22. Rc6 is good enough to draw here, although that is something of a defeat of this whole line for white. Instead Samuel went for the unbalanced ending with 22. Qxh7+ Qxh7 23. Rxh7, but instead of the automatic 23… Kxh7, black could have had great winning chances with 23… Bxb3.

So, as almost always in the USCL, both teams had plenty of opportunities to win the match. A good season takes steady play and a little luck, and let’s hope we have both against a tough Dallas team next week.

Making a list, checking it twice

After a long morning of looking at chess games and copying and pasting until my eyes glazed over, here are my picks for game of the year, with brief and hopefully not too insulting commentary. Who says you can't win blog of the year after the season's over? Wait, there isn't a blog of the year prize? What gives?

Anyway, as Tony Kornheiser would say, "That's it! That's the list!"

20. Week 7: Schroer-Kacheishvili

Voted into the contest after a majority of GOTW judges were stricken with upset-itus, this game has a lot of value when used to show kids that even GMs can fall asleep in the opening. But the system allows for do-overs, so the more deserving Stripunsky-Erenberg will get its day.

19. Quarterfinals: Krasik-Balasubramanian

In a week with a reduced number of games you expect shock-and-awe to get a little more play. The Krasik game was a nice bit of prep and technique, but at the risk of becoming an Esserman groupie it would have been more entertaining to see Esserman-Enkhbat in the GOTY competition.

18. Semifinals: Rosenthal-Thompson

An attractive attacking game with some nice ideas by white to crash through, but something about black’s porous defense makes me feel like it’s not quite on par with most of the other games in the competition.

17. Wildcard, Week 5: Gurevich-Barcenilla

This is the sort of thing that King’s Indian players everywhere have nightmares about. Not only does white overrun the queenside, but he eventually even pulls together a mating attack. The tactics were pretty if not too surprising, but black’s position will not attract many supporters in the future.

16. Week 5: Galofre-Milat

This game makes me think of what the NFL would look like if they didn’t have offensive linemen. It would be entertainingly violent, but the quarterbacks would make a lot of mistakes, as black did in this one. Good enough to win for the week, but the GOTY contest isn’t so forgiving.

15. Week 1: Shulman-Khachiyan

A nice clean win with a typical storyline: white gets initiative, white keeps initiative, black saves king at the cost of too much material and resigns. But they don’t give the Oscar to movies that come out in February.

14. Week 6: Christiansen-Kraai

I don’t really understand the appeal of this game. Castling on opposite sides is right in Larry C’s wheelhouse. And black’s queenside play was almost nonexistent. A couple quick blows and it was over. But if I rank it 19^th the judges will pick it to win the whole thing, so I’m hedging my bets.

13. Wildcard, Week 8: Kacheishvili-Shankland

A lot of people thought this should be game of the week, and indeed, it’s sort of magical to win in such fashion with black out of an opening that has been so heavily analyzed. And Shankland played quite well. But on some level, it feels like white got punished for playing too hard for a win when there was none to be found.

12. Week 10: Sammour-Hasbun—Kacheishvili

White wriggles into black’s position and black, overextended, capitulates after a short struggle. The coolness factor comes from the fact that this all came out of an exchange Slav, but I think that the wildcard selection from this week will do better. A lot better.

11. Week 9: Akobian-Friedel

A nice game, if mainly for the way the e4 shot tore apart black’s position so effectively. Strangely enough, there were three games from this week that made it into the GOTY contest, and everything that made the other two too scary to pick for GOTW will make them all too appealing for GOTY.

10. Wildcard, Week 9: Sammour-Hasbun—Kaplan

I remember glancing at this game and thinking that black had just won with Bxg3. Then Sammour-Hasbun rolled off a bunch of tactics and the black position just collapsed. As Tal said, you can only take the sacrificed pieces one at a time.

9. Week 3: Rensch-Abrahamyan

This game reminds me of many battles from my youth with my old sparring partner David Pruess. I’d play the Winawer, he’d sac the queenside, and then suddenly his pieces would all be better and I’d get mated in some sick way. As did Abrahamyan. Some things never change.

8. Week 2: Shulman-Felecan

Certainly the deserving winner of the “Upset of the Year” award. Or “Clutch Performance to Salvage a Draw for the Team” award. But “Game of the Year?” Probably not, although it was a nice effort from Felecan.

7. Finals: Shankland-Becerra

I’m glad I got my licks in against Shanky when he was a grade-school lad rated 1600. This game is elegant, smooth, and against the league’s most successful player in the most important match of the year. It’s not GOTY, but the context pushes it up a couple of spots in the rankings.

6. Wildcard, Week 7: Stripunsky-Erenberg

It’s clear that the judges initially rejected this game because of the strangeness of the opening. It’s not like they blundered any pieces, but the opening looks like it came from the top board of a B section rather than the USCL. However, Erenberg more than showed off his GM credentials with some nice tactics and technique.

5. Wildcard, Week 1: Rosen-Guo

The best game on board four, bar none. I admit to having some bias towards the French Defense, but it’s hard to argue with the facts: nice exchange sac, tough middlegame struggle, and a nice long combination at the end to win the queen.

4. Week 8: Schroer-Christiansen

A tough one to rank. Imagine that you’re back in 1998, watching “The Matrix” for the first time, totally blown away by one of the action sequences and then “My Dinner with Andre” is spliced in for the final three hours. Do you give the movie a good review? And how many times during the film do you have to go to the bathroom?

3. Wildcard, Week 10: Akobian-Shulman

This game reminded me of Shulman’s win from week one, but I like this one better. White just hammers and hammers at black’s position and eventually breaks through with a new queen. There’s something about the power of an attack down the center that isn’t aiming just for the king that is very aesthetically pleasing.

2. Wildcard, Week 9: Hungaski-Schroer

If the Turing test is the name for the not being able to tell that a computer is not a human, what do you call not being able to tell that a person is not a computer? Hungaski had to have ice in his veins to play this game with queen and knights circling his king.

1. Week 4: Friedel-Akobian

From my perspective, the game of the year should be epic … really epic. And this game certainly was, with the showy endgame making up for a maneuvering middlegame. This game made me realize that if this is what it takes to beat Akobian, well, I’m probably never going to do it. And I realize that this leaves open some talk of “West Coast Bias.” And I’m OK with both of those things.

Stuck Inside of Miami with the Playoff Elimination Blues Again

Going into the last match of the season, one thing was on the minds of the San Francisco Mechanics: we had won one championship. We had been eliminated by the Miami Sharks in the three of the four other years, each time losing despite having good chances to win. Now the number is four, and for the first time, the ‘Nics won’t be making an appearance in the playoffs.

First, a little history. Although according to the league website we’re 7-7 against the dreaded Sharks, it seems like we’ve lost every key match against them. In 2005, needing only a draw to win the match, I fumbled the following position:

I had calculated 33… Nf4! 34. gf Qf3 at the board, and realized that it drew, when I looked at the clock, saw my time running down, panicked, and hammered out 33… Rd7?, losing on the spot. Dima also lost a drawn ending against Marcel, and a curse was born.

Two years later, 2007, and we met the Sharks in the first round of the playoffs, draw odds again, same result. Patrick drew quickly with black against Becerra on board one, and Dima got posterized by a sick piece of preparation from Martinez on three. Greg was getting destroyed on board four, so Vinay went all out to win in the following position:

Unfortunately, the winning attempt backfired, Vinay lost a position he certainly could have drawn, and so even when Greg miraculously came back, we had still lost the match.

In 2008 we lost to Dallas, but the next year it was Miami’s turn again. This time we fell apart early, as David tried to resurrect an ancient variation of the King’s Gambit that was probably best left dead and buried. He was already busted in the following position on move 12 (!):

So now, the present: we had neither draw odds this year (as we needed a win to grab a playoff spot), nor did we have one of our strongest lineups, as we would prefer to play Danya or Stephen on board three with Yian on four, but neither was available. So we went with Jesse on one, who had a tough time with Becerra last year in the playoffs, Dima on two, who had lost a surprising five straight games in the USCL, me on three, playing up for the essentially the first time in my USCL career, and Yian on four.

For a while things looked pretty good. Jesse got the a solid position against Becerra, the sort of stuff he likes where he can shuffle his pieces around like an old man and torture his opponent to death. I didn’t love Dima’s position out of the opening, but he worked through the complications well and got a reasonable middlegame position. Yian was clearly not very comfortable in the French-style position he achieved, but I had hope that he would eventually overwhelm his lower-rated opponent. And I stayed in preparation for 22 moves.

A big part of my preparation was psychological. By playing a sharp line that had a few places where white could force a draw by repetition, I wanted to see whether Martinez was willing to take some risks to make a game out of it. I was out of book after 22… h6, but got an interesting attacking position and felt pleased with my initiative after 29. Ra2. We were turning down draws on the other boards and our intrepid team manager, John Donaldson, slipped in an important message: Giants 8, Rangers 2. It was San Francisco’s night, baby!

(after 29.. Nxb2)

Here, however, things started to go downhill. After 29… Nxb2 I had intended 30. Rxb2 Bxb2 31. e5, with the idea 31… Bf5 32. Qd2 Bxc2 33. Qxc2 Bxe5 34. Bg5, but then realized that all black has to do is give back the exchange and he will be up a couple of pawns. Thus, I played it a bit more carefully: 30. Qd2 Nc4 31. Qf4.

I was again surprised by 31… Bh8, but I decided to go for the kill instead of bailing with 32. Bg5 f6 33. Bxf6 Rf7 34. Bxd8 Rxf4. Unfortunately, I had missed the hidden point of Martinez’s clever defense: clearing the bishop to the back rank allows the rook to swing to h7 as well. So after 32. Ng5 Ne5 33. Qh4 (threatening 34. Bf8! Nf3+ 35. Rxf3 Bd4+ 36. Kh1 Kxf8 37. Nxf7), 33… f6 leaves white in a very awkward position. I burned half of my remaining time, panicked anyway, and played the lame 34. Nf3? A couple moves later and I was down a piece, playing for tricks.

But by this time the whole match had fallen apart. Yian, whose opponent had the good side of a Karpovian torture position, tried to make sometime out of nothing and quickly resigned. Dima, pressed but the position liquidated into a drawn rook and pawn ending. Jesse, seeing our plight, went for it on one, got his queen trapped, and was granted a mercy draw. And so we lost 3-1, our worst drubbing at the hands of Miami yet.

Perhaps the worst part of the whole night was having to fight the World Series traffic on the way home from the match (what post of mine would be complete without baseball?). Thousands of ebullient, drunken, screaming Giants fans on BART, and me, morose and headachy, the one sad guy wearing a Giants hat in the Bay Area.

And so for the first time we watch the playoffs from the sidelines. I’m not going to break down the matchups quite as scientifically as David has, but I’ll pick a couple of teams for the finals: New England vs. Seattle. Best of luck to all the teams as they compete for the USCL’s biggest prize, and we’ll be back next year.

Under Pressure

“Mine goes ding-ding-ding-duh-duh-ding-ding.” – Vanilla Ice

Well, it’s been a while since I blogged at the end of week one. At that point in the season, the ‘Nics were coming off a dominate performance over a dangerous Dallas team, Wolff was winning pawn down endings, Naroditsky looked like a lock for MVP, and I had a performance rating over 2600. I figured we would just win the next nine matches like that and coast through the postseason. It didn’t quite work out that way, but even halfway through the season, we looked like a pretty sure bet to get through to the postseason with our 4-1 record. Unfortunately, after two close losses in a row, we found ourselves Wednesday night facing the St. Louis Yankees and their ravenous Cerberus lineup.

Back in week two, when the Yanks first unveiled this monstrosity, I was sure that it would lead to the immediate collapse of the league. I mean, who the hell could compete with H-Rod on board one and C.C. Shulbathia on board two? I briefly considered sending a solution to Greg and Arun at league HQ, but I figured that my Hikaru-baiting plan would be too much of a stretch of league rules (for those interested in employing it, you simply put your fourth board on board one against STL, and then shift your other boards down one).

However, strangely enough, the big lineup didn’t really impress during week two. And then in week three, the unthinkable happened and Shulbathia lost with white. Throw in a few weeks of Olympiads, and the Yanks were no longer looking so high and mighty. And so we got stuck facing round three of the superlineup, no longer cocky, but focused, filled with venom rather than hubris. Not exactly the way we wanted to face them, especially not in the face of a two-match losing streak.

From the fourth board point of view, facing the Yanks is a peculiar experience. First of all, there’s the letdown that the rest of your team is facing GMs, and although the guy you’re playing has the same name as one of the GMs, he isn’t a GM himself. So everybody’s really amped up to play up and you find yourself playing the lowest rated opponent you’ve ever played in the USCL.

Then there’s the pressure. And it’s not normal pressure as when you’re playing an comparable opponent in a match-up that could mean the playoffs (see all boards, SF vs. SEA, for example), but the weird pressure where everyone on your team tells you that you’re going to win. And you can’t even think about how bad it’ll be for your team if you don’t. But going into a chess game thinking either “I’m going to win,” or “I have to win,” is somewhat disastrous. The former shuts down your brain and the second leads you to unfathomably aggressive and bizarre decisions.

So, as I sat across from the Panda, chewing on a Cliff Bar and preparing to get serious, I realized that I needed a new mindset. And I determined that I should not try to win. I was just going to play chess. If for some reason my position got good, I was going to be happy and convert it, but I wasn’t going to go out of my way to do this. Looking back on it, I wouldn’t say that this is an amazing game plan, but I needed to do something to focus on the chess rather than the pressure.

So, to get to the chess: according to little Finegold’s blog, (which is notable for its crass attack on the Mechanic’s Institute, but there’s no accounting for the tastes of youth [just look at the brainwashed fans of Hanson, Britney Spears, Justin Bieber over the years as evidence]), he did not expect the ol’ “best-by-test” e-pawn surprise. Now, I know that I have a lot of queenpawn games in databases, but I’d played 1. e4 against Shankar (that game’s another story: I haven’t beaten a player whose name begins with “Shank” since 2004), and I figured that I would only get one game of surprise value out of it. It probably doesn’t matter, since I had been counting on 3… Bf5 and was out of book by move five myself.

The game proceeded rather normally, and as a French player, I kept expecting black to break with the f-pawn. He finally did, a few moves after I had thought he would, but he played 12… f6 instead of 12… f5, which allowed me to take on g6 and try to play against his queen bishop. This is probably fine, but I felt afterwards like I was still trying too hard to do something about the position. Remember, no winning attempts allowed!

By move seventeen I was stuck. Nothing concrete looked like it worked, and although my pieces were a little better, he had the bishop pair and was adequately covering his weaknesses. I calculated some stuff involving 17. ef, but realized that 17… gf was going to be an annoying response … black’s a little loose but his center and bishops are going to be in charge. Then 18. Nxe6 Re8 19. Nxd8 Rxe2 20. Nb7 Rxc2 is the stupid sort of stuff that you try when you are desperately under pressure to win. So I resolved to make pawn moves and rook moves and not do too much.

The other boards were not going particularly well at this point. H-Rod had trotted out a pretty stupid looking opening against the Panda, but white seemed to still have some pull in the endgame, as most of Josh’s pieces were guarding pawns or restricted by white’s structure. Danya had a position that looked similar to mine but with more aggressive chances, and then Steven … well, Steven’s position looked like he’d been letting big Finegold choose the moves for both sides. I had no idea how he’d gotten into such a mess until I saw 14. Nb5 after the match was over. Certainly not a game of the week candidate, but a pretty sick move nonetheless.

Back to my game on four, which I was certainly not delighting in. Little Finegold played a couple strong ideas on moves nineteen and twenty and appeared to be within the drawing range. My bishop was still more active and I had an outside passer, but the rooks were coming off the board on the queenside and it was going to be hard to win anything given black’s compact structure. Fortunately, my “wait till he blunders” strategy paid off after the unwise 25… g5 and the subsequent hang of the exchange. Then all it took was the invasion of the rooks (now the open queenside proved useful), and black resigned in light of 41… Ke7 42. Qxf7+!

Unfortunately, by this point, we had already lost the match, as Danya had come through, shaking his head after forcing a perpetual. And that’s the trouble with playing the Yankees: they get a couple quick wins on boards 1-3 and whoever is left has to choose between pragmatism (those extra tiebreak points could be big) and desperation. Anyway, we go into the final two matches under even more pressure than before, but with some pretty clutch players out there. I wouldn’t count us out yet.

A Very Old Post From Week Three That No One Is Likely to Read

Well, that’s not really the way we drew it up in practice. Seriously; I mean, I left my preparation on move two, which isn’t very surprising, but makes me feel like I should just get a good night’s sleep and show up at the match alert and awake. The excuse, “Honey, I can’t do the dishes, I’ve got a couple more variations to look at,” doesn’t carry as much weight when you have a three minute think on your third move.

Perhaps the only person with more wrecked opening prep was my opponent, although I haven’t asked him; I was simply surprised to see him sink into thought even earlier than me (move two!). For a long time I was only a queenpawn player; I’ve since tried to teach myself 1.e4, with mixed success. Still, I’m guessing that most of my available games start with the queenpawn.

To continue: my opponent from the Windy City played 2… g6 and I was a bit flummoxed, as I had been expecting a Najdorf. I considered playing casually with 3. c3, but then remembered that this had already been played in the league (the day before, in fact, in the game Costigan-Williams [see, it does pay to follow the league outside of your personal team affiliations]). I hadn’t much liked Costigan’s position after he took on d5, although it’s probably fine, so I tried to recall half-remembered variations and thought that there was one that involved moving the queen a bunch of times. I couldn’t find anything wrong with it and decided to give it a shot.

Around here I took a minute to wander and observe the rest of the team, or Dima and the Ninos, as I affectionately call them. Daniel’s game amused me: I found it a bit ironic that a guy who writes a book called Mastering Positional Chess goes out and plays some sort of an Austrian Attack with Bg5 thrown in for good measure. When’s Mastering Angry Caveman Chess coming out? The position after 9. Qxf3 reminded me of the comment about a similar recapture in My 60 Memorable Games: black doesn’t really slow down white’s development, because as soon as he takes the knight the queen replaces it. Definitely the sort of position I enjoy.

The other boards (where Chicago had white) were looking a little dicey. Chicago apparently went with a very specific strategic game plan: 1) lure opponent’s pawn to f5, 2) break with g4, 3) obtain extremely strong positional advantage. The Dmitry v. Dmitry matchup concerned me the most, as after 9. gf gf, white is two moves from castling queenside while black is not close to completing his development.

I was relatively happy with my game after 11. Ng5, which I felt offered me good attacking chances despite being quite double-edged. Although the potential discovery on the queen from the Bb7 is annoying, it works both ways, as now black cannot reply 11… Nxe5 and must find another way to cover f7. My opponent decided that castling was an unacceptable risk, and we continued 11… Ne6 12. h4 Rb8 13. Bd5 (I was not happy
about this move after the game, but I felt that the alternatives were speculative) 13… b4 14. Ne2 Nxg5 15. Bxg5 h6, and after a quick search, I tried to bail out with 16. Bf6.

A quick survey showed that we weren’t in Dallas or Miami any more. Daniel was still fine on two, although Felecan’s … f6 had broken the center phalanx. The real problem was on boards one and three. Gurevich had just played 15. Ne5, the kind of angry move that gets in your face as says, “Yo! Hand over the dark squares.” I was sort of horrified to see Dima accede to this request by taking twice on e5, and playing … Qh2. However, I see the logic: if your position is crummy, you can always grab a pawn and hope for the best. But given white’s position, what black had to hope for was a little limited. Heart attack? Massive nationwide internet failure? All of the above?

Stephen’s position seemed more weird than bad by this point. As he was playing on his laptop in the corner of the room, I could only see his screen from a weird angle, and although I could see that there were three e-pawns, I wasn’t completely sure whose they were. I figured one of them must be his. Wrong! I mean, take a lot at this thing after 20… Ke7! So, he’s down two pawns, but it’s not at all clear what white’s supposed to do with them. I had a brief flashback of a game where I had three extra e-pawns again Larry Christiansen – unfortunately, I had sacrificed a piece to get them and promptly resigned.

Back to my game, definitely feeling like I needed to win. Shankar continued to feel that discretion is the better part of valor, playing 16… Bxf6. After 17. ef e6 I had a brief vision of 18. Qf4 ed 19. Qd6 Rc8 20. Rh3, but 20… d4 kills it. White just cannot prepare the attack and keep the queen on d6 at the same time. So I continued bailing out, but by the time black played 22… Kf8 I realized I was in some trouble. Now my planned 23. Qxa7 Kg7 24. Qc7 Bb5 25. Rxd6 Qf5 26. Re1 loses to 26… Qf5, so I played 24. Kb1 and tried to hold things together.

About this point Dima’s game fell apart and he had to resign after a smooth mating attack. Felecan kept finding ways to liquidate the position and Daniel took a perpetual in the endgame. Stephen’s game looked as weird and strange as it had for the past hundred moves or so. Interestingly, it was turning out that the tripled e-pawns were crippling white’s winning chances, as he much rather would have had his king on e4 than a pawn.

So the pressure was on. Fortunately, despite my positional problems, Shankar was pretty low on the clock (if there’s one thing you can say, good or bad about the USCL, it produces some entertaining time scrambles), and he blundered a pawn with 27… Ba4 28. b3 Bc6 29. Nd3. One pawn became two, and I breathed a big sigh of relief. Oops.

A quick digression: two weeks ago, against Dallas, I had been happily finishing off the end of summer vacation. But now, two weeks into the school year, the names of 150 kids memorized (to the loss of countless opening variations), I was not in prime chess condition. I had tried to play in the CalChess Labor Day tournament the previous weekend and found out that: 1) I was so tired that I needed to be up more than 4 points of material to win a game, 2) that it’s hard to win an endgame without pawns, and 3) that when the end of your combination involves moving a rook to a square that is attacked you should resign and probably withdraw from the tournament.

So although I was happy with my two pawn edge, I probably shouldn’t have gotten too relaxed. After the sneaky 44… Rb2, I played the boneheaded 45. Re4 only to be shocked by 45… Rexb3+, a move which I had been considering in another variation only a few moves before. Calm down, I told myself, you’re probably still winning. I played a couple more quick moves, watched my opponent play 48… f5, and thought to myself, “That’s stupid, I just play 49. gf gf 50. Kc4 Re3 51. Rxf5 and he doesn’t get my h-pawn.” Then it hit me: 49. gf g5! and I can’t stay on the f-file.

I played the rest of the game pretty shell-shocked, and Shankar held the draw easily. Stephen made a valiant effort, but he was working from a pretty tough starting point. And so we lost our first match of the season. Chicago should be congratulated for playing two outstanding matches in a row; they were extremely solid this week, offering us very few chances to score cheap victories. Let’s hope for a better result against Seattle next week.

Taking the Draw

by IM David Pruess

Not only do I not offer, or make a lot, of draws, but I am not offered draws very often. So the other night, as I was playing in the SF Mechanics match against the Miami Sharks, it came as quite a shock to me when my opponent, GM Renier Gonzalez, offered me a draw in the following position.

My first thought was that we must be doing badly on other boards-- because I thought my opponent was doing quite well, and we were the only board in the match where Miami held a significant rating advantage. So maybe they were doing so well on the other boards that he wanted to solidify the match score by making sure of a half point from our game. But after quickly checking the other boards, they were about as I had last seen them: about balanced. My outlook on my own position was a bit pessimistic, because my opponent had just recently played a move that I had not expected, and which disrupted my sense of where the game was heading:

It's natural to feel an aura of pessimism after this kind of event, even if it has not changed the evaluation too much. Of course, in the game, you don't know how much it should have changed the evaluation, so it's not so obvious if the position has really gotten much worse, or if you are under the influence of your emotions. The answer to that problem, as usual in chess, is to do some work and figure out what's actually going on in the position.

But on this day, the unpleasant turn of events was swiftly followed by this draw offer. My confidence was what was being questioned, and honestly I had not been at all confident going into this game. At some point, I could sit down to a game opposite the U.S. Champion expecting I'd probably brutalize him; but the past year or so, I often go into games with a "realistic" assessment that my opponent is stronger than I am, or at least with a distinct and unpleasant awareness of my own weaknesses. Before this match, I had felt that I was the most likely to blow the match of anyone on our team... and I had been nervous about the game for a couple days. Did not sleep well the night before. During opening preparations, every position I reached did not seem good enough to me. (note: when you are really confident, you are more easily satisfied while preparing "oh yeah, if I get this position, I'll be able to take it from here;" whereas when you are unconfident, you need to see a really good evaluation or a position that perfectly suits you to feel you have looked far enough). I had trouble getting out of bed that day, and felt like I was dragging with everything I did.

This could also be because the last time I played this same opponent, I had an overwhelming position, with, in addition, few losing chances, but managed to blow it and even lose. That could have contributed to my lack of confidence against him: I knew that getting a good position against him was at best the start of the battle. And if I ever did not have a good position, I'd really feel pessimistic about my chances. Especially since I knew that generally, I might be better in the opening, equal in the middlegame, and worse in the endgame. So as the game advanced, if I wasn't doing really well, my chances of being outplayed would just be increasing.

Now, in terms of team match strategy, it's a bit unusual to offer a draw at a stage in the game where both players have about 30 minutes left. It gives you the opportunity to wait, holding on to the draw possibility, and judge how the games on the other boards go, then decide if your team needs a draw or a win. I examined the three remaining games carefully: they seemed about balanced. However, I was quite confident in our young boards 3 and 4, Daniel Naroditsky and Yian Liou, being stronger than their opponents. So after I calculated a bit and realized that GM Patrick Wolff was holding a draw with black against GM Becerra on board 1, I realized that a draw would just put the match in the hands of the two kids, and that was a safe place to put it. I felt uncomfortable sitting around waiting in case of a change (seemed too gimmicky to me, and rude to the opponent) so I agreed to a draw.

If it had been an individual event, I knew for sure I wouldn't have taken the draw. Even if I slightly disliked my position (which I did), I would have played on in order to make myself suffer for not having played incisively enough in the earlier part of the game. But the USCL is a different ball game: you are partly there to play your chess, but you are also there to try to help your teammates score 2.5 points out of 4 every day. For me at least, that always takes priority in a USCL match.

The match followed my expectations: the Becerra-Wolff game followed a short forced sequence I had expected, and soon ended in a draw:

Yian Liou's position was totally equal but he had 40 minutes against 1. He moved back and forth for a long time, and eventually his opponent blundered into the c3 idea to win the blockaded isolated pawn. (The position was equal because white's c2 pawn was just about as weak as black's d4 pawn. In these positions, in order to defend it's important to place your pieces attacking c2, NOT defending d4).

And Daniel Naroditsky played gloriously, as he had the week before, and became our team's early-season MVP. Good dynamic strategic chess:

This of course confirmed for me that I had probably made the right decision in taking the draw. However, I could not shake the bad feelings off. I still felt like my draw was a lie, and I had lost the game, but had the result masked by my opponent's mercy. While thinking a few minutes during the game, I had been planning that if I needed to keep playing, my move would have to be Nd2, hanging the d4 pawn, with the tactical idea of Nxd4 Ndb1 opening the queen on the d-file and winning back the d5-pawn. But I had not analyzed the move out very precisely because of all the emotions. And without an analysis I was convinced of, I had a bad instinct about this plan-- it felt like the kind of plan that has a hole in it. I would have collapsed and lost in a few minutes if the game had go on, the thought kept nagging me.

Finally, on Friday, I had a little time (an hour) to prepare myself for the California State Championships starting the next day. Played a couple blitz games against 1200 rated opponents-- nope, that's anti-prep, cut it out, David. Solved a few tactics trainer problems. Ok, good. Now, how about just a short bit of serious analysis. I pulled out our beautiful chess board, and set up the final position again. Time to test my idea!

I was very happy to find that I was doing well. I no longer felt like a complete schlump for the moves I had made earlier in the game. A weight slipped off my shoulders, and I went back to work.

My analysis pgns did not copy over here, so if you want to see them, they are here: http://blog.chess.com/SFMechanics/taking-the-draw

Life Imitates Chess Imitates Baseball

It’s become rather clichéd to blame sporting obsessions for distracting certain players during major chess tournaments. Short draws are attributed to a player’s desire to retire to the hotel bar to watch the latest soccer or cricket match. I’ve never quite understood this phenomenon; despite being a rather passionate baseball fan, I’ve never found chess and sports to interfere much with one another.

That said, some friends of mine from Cincinnati had purchased tickets to the Giants-Reds day game on Wednesday, and I went with them to engage in one of life’s purest pleasures, trash taking. The Giants, as I’ve come to expect, were down 10-1 by the third inning, and I was wishing that I could go back home across the bay, which I might have done had I not been in the USCL lineup that evening. My Cincy buddies were enjoying themselves immensely and trying to get me to drink beer; perhaps they were Dallas Destiny fans as well. I ignored them politely and hand some garlic fries and a lemonade.

Anyway, since I’m sure at some point you want to get to the chess, the Giants came back and took an 11-10 lead, only to blow the lead in the ninth and go into extra innings. (Doesn’t blowing a one run lead feel a lot like going into a pawn up ending and hanging the extra pawn?) And so we slogged on … tenth inning, eleventh. And at some point I realized that we were getting close to 5 o’clock, and it was going to take me a good 20 minutes to exit the stadium and bike on over to the Mechanics’ Institute. And there I am, sunburned, hoarse from screaming, bloated from garlic fries, trying to read an opening book in the upper deck while Barry Zito is giving up screaming line drives.

I ended up leaving before the game was over, proving that the expected disapproving tut-tutting from team captain John Donaldson was more frightening than the baseball game was enticing. I somehow managed to switch my baseball-addled mind over to chess mode, switched off the auto-queen feature on Blitzen, indulged in a few garlic heavy burps, and settled in for an evening of chess.

The opening in my game was moving at a nice molassesy speed, so I had ample opportunity early on to wander about and annoy my teammates by looking over their shoulders. Patrick had some sort of Sicilian on Board 1 – he was down a pawn but his knights were everywhere but his opponent’s bishop was strong but Patrick’s queen was centralized … anyway, that was about the time I decided to stop looking at his game (since I didn’t have a clue what was happening) and just go based on his facial expressions. Did glasses off mean that he had traded queens? Did rubbing his eyes mean that he was unhappy or just sleepy? Tough to tell.

Danya’s game on board two stressed me out even more. You know it’s a bad sign when you’re thinking about the other guy’s game: “Hey, that guy’s opening looks pretty strong; I might start playing 1.d4 again just so I can play it!” I mean, who can resist playing g4 at some point in every queen pawn opening?

(Bercys-Naroditsky after 14.Rg1; I am perturbed by white's kingside formation)

My assessment of Steven’s game on board three was also based on gut reactions. When he was down an exchange, I was a little sad for him. When he won the exchange back again, I was happy. When he was down the exchange again, well, you can guess how I felt. (Besides feeling that either I was insane and he had never won the exchange back in the first place or that these guys had missed the chess lesson where they tell you about how the castles are worth five and the pointy ones and the horseys are three apiece.)

My game, fortunately, was rather clear cut. White cannot be happy about taking on d5 and breaking up his ideal center; however, he tried to justify the decision by hanging on to the d5 pawn. This idea, 10.Qb3, appears to have been the critical mistake, since after 10… Nf5 white cannot castle: 11.00 Bxf3 12.Bxf3 Nxd4 with a terrible discovered check coming.

(Lopez-Lee after 10.Qb3 and Nf5; the d4 pawn is quite weak)

After 11.Ne5 Nxd4 12.Qd1 Bf5 my pieces swarmed in: 13.Bd3 Re8 14.Kf1 Qh4 15.Be3 f6, although white avoided a couple of checkmates: one unlucky line was 16.Nf3 Bxd3+ 17.Qxd3 Nxf3 18.Bxb6 Re1+ 19.Rxe1 Qxe1#. He instead played 16.Bxf5 Nxf5 17.Bxb6 axb6, but then had to avoid 18.Nf3 Ne3+ 19.Kg1 Nxd1 20.Nxh4 Re1#. Nevertheless, the result was never really in doubt.

(Lopez-Lee analysis; a checkmate that remained hidden in the wings)

Steven had already drawn by the time I was finished (after a nifty display of tactics from both sides), and Danya had exerted his will through some magical pawn sacrifice on g4 that involved trading his bad pieces, activating his good ones, stopping the kingside attack, and crippling his opponent’s pawn structure. A neat rook penetration lead to zugzwang and victory.

Somehow Patrick also pulled out his game, although he mentioned that it probably wouldn’t make his best games collection. He was kicking himself for not playing 18.Nxd6 at the critical moment.

(Wolff-Wang: the critical moment after black's 17th)

Then 18… Qxd6 19.Nf6+ is ugly, and 18… Bxd5 19.Qxe5 Ne4 20.Nf5 is devastating. But then Danya suggested 18… Ne4, which, besides being aesthetically pleasing, is also a hell of a move. (Or so it appeared last night, feel free to bash holes in it with your electronic devices.)

One other wild moment from Patrick’s game: our trusty TD Payam Tanaka suggested that instead of 46.Rxb4 that Patrick could have played 46.c6.

(Wolff-Wang after 45... Nd7)

I brilliantly pointed out that white’s rook is hanging and that there might be more important things to do than to play pawn moves, to which Payam said 46… Nxb8 47.c7! Oops! So then I tried to take the knight (if nothing else, I can take a hanging piece when I see one). But 46… Rxd4 47.c7! However, black can weasel out of it now: 47… Nb6 48.Rxb6 Rc4. And in the light of day, I also see that 46… Rxc6 47.Nxc6 Nxb8 is a clever line as well, since 48.Nxb8 b3 turns the tables. Oh well … just like some baseball comebacks (the Giants lost 12-11 in 12 innings), some variations just aren’t quite meant to work out, no matter how beautiful they appear.