Round 3 of the September Night Swiss at the Boylston Chess Club tonight. I finally got the mychess viewer installed on my webserver, so you can look at my first and second round games here. The first game wasn’t that interesting, to me, but the second game had a lot going on. I’d appreciate comments on either game from anyone who has time to give them. I’m glad I got these posted now, as if I start falling behind I’ll never catch up, and I feel like a good way to motivate myself to look at my games is planning to annotate them and put them online. I didn’t annotate the 1st round game, but may go back to it later.
In other news, haven’t spent much time on chess this week. I did go to IM Husari’s Monday night chess class/shindig at the Medford library. The attendees were mostly small children, their parents, and a few older folks. I strongly suspect that my 15 USCF games were more than anyone in the room aside from the IM himself, and I had to explain to the woman playing to my right that castling involves the king and rook, rather than the king and knight. To be fair, she was a bit flustered because the child she was playing had brought his Harry Potter novelty set, and it was both 1) difficult to tell the pieces apart and 2) difficult to keep them from falling over in domino style chain reactions. I did have a reasonably interesting game against and older fellow that I got paired against. He asked me my rating, and when I told him he started to tell me all about how e4 c5 is the Sicilian defense…eventually IM Husari came around and said he didn’t want discussion during the game, for which I’m thankful since it was going to get a little annoying. Anyway, I played my standard closed Sicilian and got some helpful hints on the general plan from the IM as he visted each board in turn giving pointers to whomever was on the move.
My opponent eventually played an exchange sacrifice that didn’t work out so well for him, and although I had to offer it back on several occasions, he didn’t take me up on it. 8:30 came and his position was evaluated as losing, but he was a little cranky about it. If I go back I’ll probably play him again.
But is it worth going back? The two or three nuggets of information I got from the instructor probably made the trip worth it, but the crowd was overwhelmingly sub 10 years old…
Oh well. Chess is chess, and I suppose I shouldn’t pass up free hints from an IM twice a month.
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