Orlando Sunshine Open - Club Memeber Results

The Central Florida Chess Club held their annual Orlando Sunshine Open & Scholastic Tournament this weekend. The tournament also featured side events by ChessStars.com. The event was held at the Rosen Plaza at 9700 International Drive. Personally it was the best location I've ever played at for a chess tournament, with the possible exception of the old Fells Point Chess Club in Baltimore, Maryland, which is right next to a bar.

The purpose of this post, though, is to congratulate Paul Leggett for his fine performance of 4.5 out of 5 points in the U2000 section, which was good for a two-way tie for first. William Bowman held him to a draw, but he mowed throw the rest of the competition, including a grueling 92 move marathon against me.

As for my performance, and that of Connor, perhaps the best way to sum up the results would be with a cartoon dog in a funny hat.

Baku Chess Olympiad

As of this writing, the Baku Chess Olympiad starts in about three days. The official web page for the event can be found here. A listing of the teams can be found here. Our own Jim McTigue is listed on the US Virgin Islands Team, and those of us in Clermont will be following his results closely.Good luck, Jim!

I've added a Twitter account for the Club

Said account is creatively called @ClermontChess, because I am the creative type. If you've got a twitter account, follow us so I can add more accounts to follow! There's a limit to home many accounts one can follow, and that limit goes up as one adds followers. At the moment I'm locked out from following @HowardStaunton, which is killing me! Grrr. And if that weren't bad enough, I also can't follow @Nakafacts! It's a tragedy, I tells ya!

Simul Saturday in Clermont

Yesterday we had the pleasure of having a master join us at the Club. Hleb Zharkov (originally from Belarus, who came here via France and Jacksonville, FL) gave a simul for five of us. Below are a couple of pictures Joe Sanderlin took with his phone.

That's Hleb standing in both pictures. In the top picture we have, from the right, a young man from Venezuela whose name I keep missing (I have some hearing issues), Paul Leggett, Norm Meintel, and me. In the bottom picture it's the same group of people. Joe isn't pictured for the obvious reason.

(I'm fiddling with my phone, but I wasn't cheating. I lost on my own, thank you very much. I saw Joe taking pictures and decided I should get some with him in the frame. Sadly, though, the camera on my phone no longer works very well, so my pics didn't come out.)

We went five and oh - five loses and no wins for the club regulars! Hleb cleaned our clocks. I'm not sure if it was me or the young man from Venezuela that lasted longest, but in my case I could have resigned sooner, save for my bitter-ender strategy.

A very interesting position from the club tonight

A slow night at the club this evening, but at the end of it Jim McTigue and I played a game in 25 minutes with the usual five second delay. (Actually, we turned the clock off when we were both down to a couple of minutes and had a rather complicated endgame on the board, well before the position below.) The whole game was interesting, and I'm sorry I didn't record it. I may try to put more of it together tomorrow, but I'll probably forget most it by then.

That said, I did manage to get a couple of pictures of our hard fought endgame. Here's the most interesting position.

McTigue-Durham

Black to play

Can Black save the game?

I'll try to get back to this in a few days, or less.

A Tactical Mess: Solution TIme

Many posts back, on March 13, I put up the following position and asked what White should play.

Eickelman-Slade (analysis)

White to play

 On March 21 I wrote:

With the Connor-Theo inspired position I posted the other day I've got pure madness, and lots of it. I've pretty much taken up residence in Bedlam. Putting all that together in a reasonable, digestible form may not be possible for a player/writer of my caliber, but I'm stuck having to try. So it's taking a while.

I've finally written up my solution. See below the fold.

An editorial note

I'm running behind on my posts. Partly it is a problem of finding the time to write them up without distractions.

But there's also the problem of being able to write the posts with the level of quality I would like to achieve. I am just a Class B player, which means that I am a Class B analyst - unassisted. But like everyone else, I have access to an ELO 3200 beast to help me out. Thus I cyborg the analytical work.

But this means that my natural proclivities to look for positions that are complex, even weird, gets me into one briar patch after another. For example, while quickly cyborging my way through a recent club game between Connor & Theo, I went far afield of their actual game and ended up with the position featured in "A tactical mess". The initial position in that one features seven reasonable candidate moves (though I'm only going to look at six of them, I think), and the best line features four responses by Black that need to be considered, and White's has to look at four tries, minimum, to find the correct response to Black's best response. In fact, it might be a good candidate for the Stoyko Training Method.

Alexander Kotov, in Think Like a Grandmaster, calls such a "tree of analysis" a "Thicket of Variations":

Naturally, the greatest difficulties arise when a player has to contend with a position that is complicated and in which there are a lot of variations which every single move diverge into quite different lines of play. If one were to depict the tree in this case then in fact you would get a whole forest of variations, a real set of impenetrable thickets or jungle undergrowth. It is in just such positions that there is the greatest need for accuracy and discipline in one's thought, and that the analytical mastery of a player really shows itself.

For the cyborg analyst, the variations get calculated very accurately. What we've got here ISN'T failure to calculate! But we need to make sure what we've got here isn't failure to communicate, either.

So the questions the cyborg analyst has to ask himself are: "When do I stop?"; and "How do I present all this mess in a reasonable manner?"

And that's where I'm stuck. With the Connor-Theo inspired position I posted the other day, I've got pure madness, and lots of it. I've pretty much taken up residence in Bedlam. Putting all that together in a reasonable, digestible form may not be possible for a player/writer of my caliber, but I'm stuck having to try. So it's taking a while.

Similarly with my games from the USATS. In the first game I was going to post I found what to me seems a strange continuation. Unfortunately, I believe that it is also critical that I understand it. Sigh. I can't post it until I figure out that one position, and I can't do that until I can find quiet time when I have sufficient energy.

So that's why I'm stuck, and that's why the low output. The incredible complexity of the game even at my level is a killer.

...

Which gets me to one last point: Remember that any of you from the club are invited to post here! Either articles/items can be emailed to me to post here, or permission can be granted to post here directly without any interference from me. Just a thought....

A tactical mess

Playing through Eickelman-Slade from the club championship, I came across this position in analysis.

Eickelman-Slade (analysis)

White to play

Far afield of any position from the game itself*, Black has played 28...Bc5xf2 attempting to win White's queen and create even more chaos on the board. What should White's response be? Just giving the first move only gets partial credit.

* Seriously, gentlemen, good luck figuring out how I got here!

USATS Results now posted to USCF

The results have now been submitted to, and tabulated by, the USCF. Below are the rating changes for our teams. Congratulations to all who gained points, and commiserations to all who lost points.

GB Chapter Before After Diff. Theo Slade 2011 2033 22 Wayne Strickland 1933 1925 -8 Connor Eickelman 1574 1631 57 Tim Bowler 1521 1525 4 PHOG Chapter Jim McTigue 1849 1874 25 Paul Leggett 1819 1847 28 Todd Durham 1733 1748 15 Garry Day 1673 1673 0 GF Chapter David H Raymond 1637 1610 -27 Norm Meintel 1434 1476 42 John Wolfe 1238 1207 -31 Thomas Johnson 546 605 59

United States Amateur Team South, 2016 edition

The 2016 edition of the USATS was held in Tampa, Florida from February 12-14. I'll post more on the tournament later (perhaps even a comment or two about the hotel we stayed in, but probably not), but for now I just want to record that the Clermont Chess Club sent three teams to the tournament, and that we did well.

Our highest rated team was Clermont Chess Club Great Britain Chapter (1785.3 avg.). The team consisted of Tim Bowler and Connor Eickelman from the club itself, and club friends Wayne Strickland and Theo Slade. (Theo and Tim are from Great Britain originally, hence the name.) They had tough pairings, playing two of the top teams, but were still in contention for the Under 1800 prize in the last round. [ADDED: I should note too that Theo played a very tough schedule, against three masters and two experts. Included among the masters were John Nardandrea, who once again led the winning team, and FM Mark Ritter, who won the prize for Best Score on Board One. That was a murderer's row with an average rating of 2163 on the wall chart. That may be the toughest schedule anyone faced in the tournament. I know he was disappointed he only scored 2.5, but overall that was a good total.]

Our second highest rated team was the Clermont Chess Club Pine Hills Original Gangstas Chapter (1777.0 avg.). (Don't ask about the name, or we might tell you.) That team consisted of club regulars Jim McTigue, Paul Leggett, Garry Day, and myself. Somehow we managed to win the Under 1800 prize, no thanks to a late Round 5 meltdown from yours truly. (More on the games in later posts.) The incredible thing to me was that we were actually the leading team for the prize after the fourth round. Still not sure how that happened, but someone's got to win!

And in the Under 1500 division, the Clermont Chess Club Grand Fenwick Chapter (1227.8 avg.) won the Under 1300 prize convincingly with 3.5 match points. The final standings haven't been posted yet, but they had to have been close to finishing third overall. [CORRECTION: The team had three match points and finished in a tie for 5-7 overall. 3.5 mathc points would have tied them for first!] This team consisted of David _H_ Raymond (OUR Dave Raymond, the good one!), Norm Meintel, John Wolfe, and Thomas Lee Johnson. Again a team of all regulars, and I'm particularly pleased with this team's accomplishments. Thomas is fairly new to competitive chess and only had 11 rated games prior to the tournament. John is coming back from a decades long lay-off from the game, though he had two other tournaments under his belt from recent months. It had been two & a half years since Dave played in a tournament prior to his return two weeks ago, and Norm hadn't played a rated game in over three & a half years. Norm played especially well, scoring 3.5 points out of five, and he had one really nice endgame grind that I hope to post later. Nice work from a newbie and a bunch of drop-outs!*

So we scored two team trophies, which was all we could realistically hope for. (Great Britain and Pine Hills were competing for the same trophy.) Paul quipped, "Once again the Clermont Chess Club has demonstrated its dominance of the lower echelons of the USATS!" 

True, but not entirely fair! Unless we were to get the best the club has had through the years (e.g., Mark Ritter Ryan**, Theo Slade, Ray Robson(!)), and maybe recruit a couple of other strong players, we simply don't have the firepower to compete for the top prizes. (Alternately, Connor needs to jump to a much higher plateau.) But this is why they've got sections, and we put up a fight in our class! We do what we can, and that also means putting Garry Day on the team, since Garry's teams always come away with trophies for first place in these events. I doubt anyone has a better lifetime record, percentage-wise. I believe this is now five wins in five tries for Garry.

Good work, gentlemen, and perhaps we can do this again some time!

* I should add that I was returning from almost seven years away from rated chess. I know what it's like, fellas....

** Thanks to Paul for the correction. Sorry to all the Marks involved!

Clermont Chess Club December Unrated G15 Tournament Results

We've taken to running unrated tournaments on the first Thursday of every month. For the month of December we ran a G15 tournament with the unusual pairing method of 1 vs 2, 3 vs 4, etc in the first round, and similarly in subsequent rounds. This is Rule Variation 29L1 in the USCF Official Rules of Chess, as discussed here in this earlier post by Paul.

Anyhow, the results are below. As the winner I think I played one good game, one adequate game, and one poor game that I won by luck. Unfortunately, I didn't write down any of my moves. Also unfortunately, I was coming down with a nasty lung infection which left me completely zombified for several days thereafter, so now if I fail to win in the future I can't use the excuse that I was sick, because I was sicker than I realized this time. So much for that excuse in the future!

Still it was fun. I'm not sure we've got an adequate sample size yet to opine on Rule Variation 29L1, but the results seem promising. At the very least everyone know coming out of the gate they'll get at least one game against a similarly rated opponent, and after that it's up to the player.

Note that the tournament is unrated, so the rating changes at the end will not actually occur.