2015 ANU Masters - Week 2

The 2015 ANU Masters is proving to be a tough event, with some of the pre-tournament favourites already struggling. After drawing his first game last week, top seed Andrey Bliznyuk lost fairly quickly to Alana Chibnall. Chibnall got the kind of Dutch Defence position she was aiming for in pre-game preparation, and Bliznyuk used up a lot of time deciding what to do. He then moved a couple of pieces to exposed squares, and ended up losing a knight after it ran out of escape squares.
Miles Patterson had a fairly straight forward win over Harry Press, after Press seems to swap off all the wrong pieces. With good knight versus bad bishop Patterson had plenty of time to organise his pieces before finishing the game with tactics on both sides of the board.
Fred Litchfield had a stroke of fortune after a miscalculation by Jeremy Reading just gifted him a piece. Prior to that Reading had been trying to mate Litchfield on the dark squares, forcing Litchfield to defend with his pieces posted on the back rank.
In the final game to finish Victor Braguine scored his second win of the tournament, beating Adrian De Noskowski. Braguine dropped a pawn in the middle game, so decided to sacrifice a second one to post a rook on the 7th rank. This strategy paid off as his passed d pawn proved the deciding factor.
After 2 rounds Braguine and Litchfield lead with 2/2. Chibnall and Patterson sit on 50% while the remaining 4 players are all on 0.5/2


Braguine,Victor (1729) - De,Noskowski Adrian (1708)
2015 ANU Masters Canberra AUS (2.3), 18.02.2015