can<\/em> watch it.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSo that brings us to last night\u2019s match against the\nSeattle Sluggers. Any team with Hikaru Nakamura on board one is a team to be\nreckoned with, but the Sluggers were coming off their own disappointment last\nweek, a 9\u00bd – 6\u00bd loss to the Dallas Destiny. Who would recover faster?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first round went quite well for the Mechanics. The\nbig stop-the-presses result was a win by our third board, Andrew Hong, against\nGrandmaster Gabriel Sargisian. However, this outstanding result was partially\nnegated by a very disappointing draw by our second board, Daniel Naroditsky,\nagainst Bryce Tiglon. Danya found a neat tactic that appeared to just win the\ngame outright, but he somehow got too sloppy in the followup. Tiglon had two\nrooks against a queen and bishop, but the bishop was very ineffective and the\nrooks had constant checkmate threats against Danya\u2019s king. Plus, Danya\u2019s flag\nwas hanging. So he had to bail out to a draw by perpetual check.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So the good news was that we were ahead, 2\u00bd-1\u00bd, our\nfirst lead of the season. The bad news was that our lead really should have\nbeen 3-1. That game by Naroditsky would set the tone for the rest of the night.\nWe kept dropping half points: draws that should have been wins, losses that\nshould have been draws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Round two was uneventful, as the favorites all won, leading to a 2-2 tie for the round that left us with a 4\u00bd-3\u00bd lead. Wang Hao (our \u201csecret weapon\u201d on board one) played a truly magnificent double-rook endgame against Tiglon. On the team broadcast, commentators Andy Lee and Josiah Stearman were agog at the smoothness and precision of Hao\u2019s technique. \u201cThat\u2019s a grandmaster move!\u201d Lee kept saying. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in round three, disaster struck — in fact, several disasters. First, Nakamura pulled out an ingenious win in what had seemed to be a probably drawn opposite-color bishops endgame against Naroditsky. Rooks were still on the board, and Naka found a nice way to sacrifice a pawn in order to advance his a-pawn to a7, where it was protected by his bishop. Naroditsky\u2019s rook was forced to blockade on a8 and could not be protected by his bishop (if I remember correctly, there was a pawn on c6). Hikaru was able to methodically move his rook to h7, b7, and b8, trapping Danya\u2019s rook in the corner and forcing submission. A very thematic winning procedure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile, our fourth board, Ladia Jirasek, played too passively against Tiglon and our third board, Andrew Hong, botched a superior position against the much lower-rated Jason Yu and was only able to draw. Suddenly, instead of being a point ahead, we were a point behind going into the last round.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The last round is always exciting because the players\nare in theory evenly matched: first board against first, second against second,\netc. Just as in the other rounds, and the match as a whole, we seemed to start\nout well but then run into problems. Ladia, on fourth board, won impressively\nfrom what had seemed like a dull-as-dishwater position with no queens and with\nall center pawns gone. It seemed as if we would get massive exchanges and a\ndraw, but Ladia managed to keep the pieces on the board and whip up a strong\nattack, and then Yu\u2019s flag fell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But every other game followed the same discouraging script: decent position followed by groveling for a draw followed by resignation. On board one, Nakamura completed a truly impressive 4-0 performance by outplaying Wang Hao in the endgame. It looked as if Hao had decent drawing chances with a rook and two pawns against rook, bishop and one pawn. In the broadcast, Lee said, \u201cIf you\u2019re going to be a piece down, this is the way to do it.\u201d But Naka, blitzing out his moves, found a way to give back the piece and go into a winning ending of king and one pawn versus king and one pawn. It was very clear that Hikaru knew exactly where his pieces had to go and had seen the win a long time earlier. On board two, Naroditsky evidently felt the pressure to go for a win against Sargisian, played a dubious exchange sac and lost. And on board three, Hong got into an insanely tactical position against Tiglon where Hong\u2019s rook was en prise<\/em> for about six moves in a row and his bishop was also intermittently en prise<\/em>, but he had lots of cheapo threats against Tiglon\u2019s king. It was impossible to tell for a while whether Hong would find enough tactics to save both his rook and bishop. But in the end, Tiglon found a simple little intermezzo that not only Hong but also the commenters, Lee and Stearman, completely overlooked. \u201cThis just shows we have no idea what\u2019s going on,\u201d Lee said.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSo the final result was 6\u00bd – 9\u00bd, another bad loss after what had seemed like a promising start. Everyone on the team had reasons to be disappointed. Wang Hao, on board one, played elegantly in his first three games but surprisingly looked overmatched by the Hikaru juggernaut in the last game. Daniel Naroditsky, on board two, dropped two critical half-points and then had a complete flame-out in the last round (partially due to the match situation) and continues to look rusty. Hong, on board three, had a super-impressive victory against a GM in round one but then had two losses and a draw that felt like a loss. Jirasek, on board four, had a solid 1-3 result and fought hard, but in the end all he did was beat the guy he was supposed to beat and lose to the guys he was supposed to lose to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By contrast, the kind of lineup you need to win in\nthis league seems to be something like this: super-GM on board one who is a\nthreat to go 4-0 almost every week; solid GM on board two who draws other GM\u2019s\nwith no effort and is lights-out against anybody lower; scary prodigy on board\nthree who has an FM rating but, at least intermittently, GM strength; and a\nyoung player on board four who doesn\u2019t get too discouraged at being beaten by\nthe \u201cbig boys,\u201d can beat the other board fours and occasionally put a scare\ninto the board twos and board threes. So far it doesn\u2019t seem as if we have\nfound any of those pieces yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next week will be interesting, with the first \u201cbattle royale\u201d where eight teams play against each other simultaneously and bonus points will be awarded on the basis of cumulative score. It\u2019s the first of three \u201cbattle royales\u201d in the season, and offers a unique opportunity for teams that have started poorly (i.e., us) to make up a lot of ground. Hopefully this will be our week to be chuffed, not gutted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My wife is a big fan of reality television, and has watched almost every episode of the Great British Baking Show and has moved on to watching the not-so-great British interior design show. Even if the shows fail to teach us interior design, they at least educate us to some of the finer points of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1363,3669],"tags":[4251,4254,755,608,1607,242,2906,4250,1140,4253,1209],"class_list":["post-5659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-news","category-pro-chess-league","tag-andrew-hong","tag-british-words","tag-daniel-naroditsky","tag-david-pruess","tag-groveling","tag-hikaru-nakamura","tag-ladia-jirasek","tag-rap","tag-san-francisco-mechanics","tag-seattle-sluggers","tag-wang-hao"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5659"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5662,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5659\/revisions\/5662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}