Saturday coffee…
SPRAGGETT ON CHESS
The 2013 US Championships are taking place right now. The men’s tournament is run as a Swiss, while the female event is the traditional round-robbin. Lots of interesting chess in the first round, lost opportunities, etc. Kamsky is the favourite in the men’s to win, but I would not be surprised if one of the up and coming youngsters walks away with the title.
FM Bryant almost scored a point against veteran gm Shulman, but the latter managed to escape into a theoretically drawn ending:
gm SHULMAN
fm BRYANT,J
Position after 104 moves. According to tablebases, White needs one more file (to the left) in order to win. The only way to make progress is to some day capture the Pawn with the Rook, but at the same time you must prevent the Black King from penetrating to f8.
Unfortunately for White, this can not be forced here as the Black King gets there in time…never the less, White tried for another 26 moves before shaking hands.
wgm BELAKOVSKAIA
wgm ZATONSKIH
Position after White’s 23rd move. Quite a wild game, with the advantage changing hands atleast once…here however, with a Rook on the 7th rank and the White King exposed, the draw seems inevitable. Correct is now 23…R(8)-e3!, with the Knight perpetual on f3. If White tries to avoid this, then she risks being worse in the Rook ending.
INSTEAD, Black played the poorly calculated 23…h5?!, and after 24.c6! the game can no longer be held (24…R(8)-e4 25.QxR! etc)
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Suicide in the middle of the board!
im ZHIDKOV,V
gm SUETIN
Position after White’s 16th move (g3). USSR 1972. Here Black played the precise and very surprising 16…Rf2!! This is immediately decisive, as the best continuation–probably 17.Bxe6+ and 18.Qe3 –goes off to 18…Rxh2! 19.00 Re2!! and Black will soon be up buckets of pawns.
So Suetin, not wanting to humiliate himself any further, decided to make things simple: he played 17.QxR!! and after 17…Qd1++ he just shook hands and then headed to the nearest bar…
As the reader may have guessed by now, I have recently started to take a look at GM Suetin’s games. Born in 1926 (he died in 2001 at age 74), Alexi was an engineer by profession. He gained his GM title in 1965–when being a grandmaster still meant something special. You can find his bio HERE He won many great games and strong tournaments, but had his fair share of failings, especially in defence.
In the coming week I will present some of his better efforts…
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CFC newsfeed disappointing to Canadian amateurs
The CFC spent some 18k on a website several years ago but typically, forgot about content. In an effort to remedy this situation, the CFC then decided to divert funds from its magazine to do a newsfeed which got started on the first of this month.
Reaction to it has been luke-warm to negative, so far. Chess content is almost non-existent–unless you consider CMA and kiddy chess to be the centre of the Canadian chess world. INFACT, the entire newsfeed seems to do little but promote CMA!
HOWEVER, to be fair, this is just the first week and John Upper (the one responsible for this mess initiative) is just getting used to things…let’s give him a few more weeks before we all cry ” One more disappointment by the CFC”