Chicago Open, round 9: Van Wely wins

At most big Swiss system tournaments the last couple rounds are filled with draws on the top boards. But not the 2010 Chicago Open! In the penultimate round, Loek van Wely and Sam Shankland scored impressive victories and went into the last game tied at 6½ points out of 8. Varuzhan Akobian also had 6½. For Sam, there was more at stake than a chess tournament: all he needed was a draw against Van Wely to earn a grandmaster norm.

Unfortunately, it was not to be.  As Black, Sam got stuck with a very sick bishop on a7 that had no moves. I’m not sure whether Van Wely eventually won the trapped bishop, or whether he was simply able to make use of its absence from the rest of the board. With his win, Van Wely clinched at least a tie for first place. As for Sam, he didn’t seem too down in the dumps. He still had a great tournament, and losing to a super-GM in the last round is nothing to feel bad about. It was a great way to bounce back from his tough performance in the U.S. Championship.

Meanwhile, Akobian got crushed by Michael Adams, which  left Van Wely in clear first.

As for me, I did a little bit better today. I won my morning game, although not without some adventures. I once again hung a pawn, but actually it was not a bad sacrifice. I got a lot of pressure, and my opponent eventually decided to return the pawn in order to trade down into a rook-and-bishop versus rook-and-knight endgame. My pawn structure was incredibly bad (four isolated pawns!) but my rook and bishop absolutely dominated the board, and she was never able to get her pieces (especially her knight) into useful positions. Eventually she missed a combination that won a couple pawns, but I think she was losing anyway.

In my afternoon game I played a kid and agreed to a quick draw. That’s right — while the grandmasters were playing fighting chess, I played a “grandmaster draw”! Shame on me! I had a pretty nice position but I neglected an important prophylactic move, and my center start looking really overextended and shaky. Just when things were starting to look good for my opponent, he offered a draw. What could I do? I thought he probably had an advantage, and I didn’t want to spend a few hours suffering when I could just accept his offer. So blame him, not me. Since when do kids start offering draws on move 18, anyway? 😎

So I finished with a score of 4-5, which was pretty disappointing. I was especially disappointed with the way I kept getting into time pressure, because in my last couple of tournaments it seemed as if I was finally conquering that problem.

If any of you missed the comments to my previous posts, Andy Hortillosa says that it’s now okay for me to talk about what Smart Chess (his company) is doing. Smart Chess is going to be an “app” for the iPhone and iPad. It will have a strong open-source chess engine, but more importantly it will have lots of lessons. Andy has gotten the rights to publish several existing books (including a couple of endgame books by Dvoretzky, just to whet your appetite) and he also has some writers (including me) who have agreed to develop new lessons as well. The “Bird by Bird” series from this blog will be one of the first offerings, and I am also planning to write a series of lessons that will expand on my “Eight-Dimensional Chess” lecture at www.chesslecture.com.

Andy’s main target is young players and players under 2000, including the many people who play chess on the Internet but would never dream of going to a USCF tournament. He wants it to be useful to ordinary players, not just a soapbox for grandmasters. I think that the iPad is a great fit for Smart Chess, because it’s like reading a book where you can flip back and forth to a board, play some moves, and go back to the book seamlessly.

If you tell Andy that you read about Smart Chess on my blog, maybe he’ll give you a discount! (Probably not, but Andy, that’s a hint.)

Random observation of the day: If you’re ever in Wheeling, Illinois, the best place to eat breakfast is Original Granny’s Family Restaurant. They have a dish called oven-baked pancakes that I have never had before. Imagine an apple pie that has pancakes instead of a crust on the top and bottom. I don’t know how they did it, but it’s fabulous. The crust is my least favorite part of an apple pie anyway, and pancakes are a vast improvement. The only downside is that normally you have to wait half an hour for the pancake to bake. But if you come on a weekend or a holiday (like today, Memorial Day), then you can order a slice and get it without the wait. The slice is a quarter of the pancake. Believe me, that filled me right up. I think you would need at least two people to eat a full pancake.

And That’s a Wrap: This concludes my busiest month ever of blog writing. I wrote 15 posts and had 5815 readers this month (with a few more hours left to add to the latter total). Don’t expect me to continue this pace! I’m expecting June to be a much quieter news month than May was.