Thursday, 6 March 2014

Winning the session

In modern day cricket "winning the session" has emerged as an important feature of the game. What this means (for non cricket fans) is that in each 2 hour session, you aim to do better than your opponent (either by taking wickets or scoring more runs than they would like). Chess often has a similar concept, in that you need to win the opening, the middlegame, and the ending.
Of course cricket isn't entirely like chess, in that one mistake normally doesn't lose you the game (unless you get caught ball tampering). But I have seen enough games where a player might be better at one stage, then end up worse going into an ending, before turning the tables one more time, to think it can be a fair comparison.
An example of this is the following game from the current ANU Summer Swiss, being held at the ANU Chess Club. After one mistake in the opening Doug McClure found himself in a bad way going into the middlegame. But having lost the opening session, he fought back in the middle session to reach a probably equal position. But in final stage of the game, when running short of time, he missed a couple of key moves, and Harry Press was able to find the path to victory.


Press,Harry - McClure,Doug [D43]
2014 ANU Summer Swiss Canberra, 05.03.2014


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