Saturday 27 December 2008

Rain stops play

"Rain stops play" is a familiar refrain for cricket fans (especially English ones), but it is less common at a chess tournament. However todays end of year Street Chess event was held up after round 3 as a summer storm swept through Canberra, forcing us indoors. Although the outdoor area has large umbrellas to shield us from the elements, the fact that players couldn't see how much time they had left due to the clocks being covered in spray, made up our minds for us.
Of course having moved indoors for round 4, the storm abated, meaning that by the time a fire alarm in the venue forced us outside again, the weather had cleared enough to allow us to resume our original positions.
Before the weather disrupted the event I was able to dash of this short game, when veteran player Gus Korda played down the line that Be2 in the English Attack against the Najdorf is designed to prevent.

Press,S - Korda,G [B84]
Street Chess, 27.12.2008

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 d6 6.Be3 a6 7.Be2 b5 (D)
8.Bf3 Bb7 9.e5 Nd5 10.Nxd5 exd5 11.exd6 Bxd6 12.Nf5 Bf8 13.0-0 g6 14.Re1 Qd7 15.Bg5+ Qe6 16.Rxe6+ fxe6 17.Nd4 Kf7 18.Qe2 Bc8 19.Re1 Bc5 20.Nxe6 1-0

2 comments:

Garrett said...

hmmm - good work.

Is there a way to play through games on the page ?

This was only a short game, so I followed Laskers advice and played through it in my head.

Could Black have castled, perhaps instead of undeveloping his dark square bishop, and prevented the hassles ?

Cheers
Garrett.

Shaun Press said...

Some of the games I put up can be replayed through a pgn viewer, although this involves a link to another site. Although that site is reliable, I wouldn't want to rely on it 100% for all the games I put on the blog.
The other option is to simply copy and paste the game into Chessbase(Light) and replay it that way.
Castling runs into 13.Qd4! which seems to win everything (mate threat as well as bad things happening on d5), but Gus could have defended with 12. ... Be5 although I keep an advantage after 13.Bc5. What I should have played was 11.e6! (instead of 11.exd6) as this gives me a winning position.
NB All this analysis was post-facto, courtesy of Fritz9 at home.