Bob Peretz CC vs CC of Fairfield County Match - Rd. 1

The East Coast version of the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis has recently opened in Norwalk, CT.  The Chess Club of Fairfield County opened its new building in the winter.  It's quite an impressive space.  They challenged my club to a match at their location.  I've been so busy it was actually my first chance to go there since they opened.  A number of players from my club also members of their club so there was a bit of case of divided loyalties.

Main playing room.

Players from both teams warming up.

Trying to get this match organized had its aggravating moments.  The original format was two game at a time control of game/90.  I had 14 people who expressed an interest in playing and said they were available.  It turned out CCFC had scheduled a lecture by Danny Kopec for 4:00 pm that same day.  They wanted to shorten the time control to game/60 so that we would finish in time for the lecture.

International Master Danny Kopec

A week before the match I email everyone to confirm whether or not they were going to play.  Several people now had conflicts and had to drop out.  Another player replied that he had no interest in playing game/60.  Of the five people who now weren't coming, four of them were rated over 2100.  There went most of the meat of the BPCC line up.  I knew CCFC had a number of masters that would be playing for them.

After everything was said and done I had 11 players for our team.  CCFC had 13 players so they gave us one of their players to even out the match.  They gave us Oliver Chernin who's rated 2243.  That would help our depleted line up somewhat, but still once we got to board five the rating difference was heavily weighted in CCFC's favor.  In round one we had board one vs board one, board two vs board two, etc.  We also would have White on all the boards in the first round.  On board five I would be playing their board five, Alex Eydelman, a 2060 who I've played a number of times at my club.  We've always had some wild games where both of us have very little time left on the clock.  This would be one of those rare games where we started with more then 30 minutes on the clock.   Despite the game/60 time limit I would still have severe clock issues.  The game was pretty close until I got under a minute and then all hell broke loose.  It wasn't a pretty picture at the end.

Here's the game.

pw-AEydelman032711.pgn


The first round was actually pretty close with CCFC winning the round 6.5 to 4.5.  The results looked like this:

Pairings for Round 1. BPCC vs CCFC Match


Bd   Res White  (BPCC)                 Res       Black (CCFC)

1       1    Michael H Bodek (2277)    0        Daniel L Lowinger (2265)

2       0    Oliver Chernin (2243)        1         Harrison Wheeler (2254)

3       1    Michael Amori (2027)        0        Ian Harris (2231)

4       1    Jason Shi (1969)                 0        Benjamin Katz (2122)

5       0    Polly P Wright (1700)        1        Alex Eydelman (2060)

6       0    Hubert Herring (1665)       1         Hanon W Russell (2057)

7       0   Anthony Lawrence (1632)  1         Alanna Katz (1958)

8       0   Noah Rutkovsky (1465)     1         Melvin B Patrick (1698)

9       0   Michael Morin (1336)        1         Druha Karunakaran (1577)

10     1   Jose Leon (1322)               0          Joshu Blanchfield (1529)

11     ½  Garrett Washington (unr.)   ½       Aman Karunakaran (1509)

Top boards

Harrison Wheeler and Daniel Lowinger of CCFC

With colors reversed things would not be so close in round two.  Stay tuned.....