Sunday, August 3, 2008

Interesting Draw, Eh?

It's a quiet Sunday afternoon up here La Belle Province Quebec. We have a brief pause in the action before more eating and drink occurs this evening. My Texas cousins sure know how to host a good party. I thought I would take a moment to look over my last round game from last Monday's tournament. I do have to start to think about chess again because Wednesday I begin play at the US Open. That will be close enough to the one year anniversary of this blog. It's fitting the anniversary will fall during the US Open since that was my first tournament that blogged about last year.

The last couple of Mondays we've been getting a pretty decent turnout, but I keep just barely making the cut in the first round. That means I get paired way down in round one, and after winning I get way up. Round three can go either way. This particular week I got paired up. I don't mind that, especially when my first game was a bit of a waste since my opponent kept blundering pieces. Round three I played Kapil. My first encounter with him had been last year during the Empire State Disaster (Open). That game had an interesting ending that was thoroughly dissected by my readers. That post still is one of the most commented posts on my blog. At 15 comments that's pretty lame compared to some of the posts at Lizzy's blog that generates over 100 comments.

Going into this game with him I was 0-5. He has King Kong potential except that his rating has always been higher then mine when we've played. I actually set up a nice fork and won the exchange, but he did get two pawns for it, and play. I'm not sure if it was such a bargain. Here's the game up to the point where we stopped keeping score.



After a bunch of pawn pushes we ended out with this position that looked sort of like this. The pawns may not be on these exact squares, but this is the general idea. He promoted first and then I played d8/Q.

He played ....Qc1+. I can't play Kd3 or Kd4 because Qd1+ loses the queen on d8. I have to go b3 and let him repeat the position.

4 comments:

Glenn Wilson said...

"I missed shot here with b4. , I was very short on time so couldn't calculate the race."

You could just count.

I'm pretty sure I would just push the b-pawn here in an instant without thought. Now I need to figure out how to articulate why it is "obviously" winning "at a glance."

Maybe it just requires experience studying such positions?

Our Sword said...

Good luck at the Open, Polly! :-)

Anonymous said...

My Texas cousins sure know how to host a good party.

We know how to do everything well here in Texas, ma'am.

At 15 comments that's pretty lame compared to some of the posts at Lizzy's blog that generates over 100 comments.

Bribes.

Polly said...

Glenn: You're absolutely right. Sometimes I have trouble counting, and just screw it up. However that position is just begging for the b4 push.

RT: Thanks!

LEP: LOL I can't afford to bribe people to make comments.