Ivan Swapoff

When I was much younger, there was a bit of a running gag in my chess club about players who tried to draw as many games as possible. "Who did you play?" when one of the top seeds could only draw. "Ivan Swapoff" would come the dispirited reply.
Eventually we learned how to deal with such players, by making sure that our remaining pieces were better placed than the opponents remaining pieces.
Here is a recent game that demonstrates this policy quite well. Whether Black consciously exchanged as many pieces as possible against his much stronger opponent isn't clear, but what did happen was that White's position got better and better. As a result White was able to play a 'petite combination', winning a pawn, and Black surrendered when it looked like another pawn was going.


Xu,Xiangyu (2567) - Devallee,J (2278) [A43]
15th Vandoeuvre Open 2019 Vandoeuvre les Nancy FRA (2.3), 02.01.2019