Der Alter Goniff

Much to my surprise and pleasure, I was invited to play in the Marshall Chess Club's Championship tounament (the Edward Lasker Memorial). It was originally supposed to be open only to players rated 2200 and above, but they decided to invite Club members who were National Masters but currently rated below 2200.

Aand so I found myself rated 28th in a field of 35, with 5 GMs and a like number of IMs. I had a plan: I was going to play some new and more solid openings with Black. I figured with opposition of this strength, I'd be doing well to make an even score with White and finish only -2 with Black.

I did a bit better: 1 win, 2 draws, 1 loss with White, 0 wins, 2 draws, and only 1 loss with Black. My losses were against IMs Almeida and Bonin, and I drew IM Naranja, plus I had my first win against a master in a couple of years.

I had losing positions in four or five of my eight games, and was worse in one or two others, but I displayed some good fighting qualities. My tactics remain poor, with a couple of massive hallucinations.

I'm going to try a little experiment here. If this works right, you can click here to see some of my games with very light notes in a new window. If nobody seems to have huge problems with this, I may start making all the javascript boards pop up in their own windows; That will cut down the loading time of the blog.

// posted by ed g. @ 8:00 PM