Club Champs – Round 9

  • The Spring Rapid will be starting this coming Monday (August 29th). It will be 6 rounds across 2 nights. See the Vega page for the 50+ entries so far. If you want to play then enter on the sheet at the club, email or txt before the tournament starts.
  • Similarly the Winter Cup is just 3 weeks away. I’ll be putting up an entry form for that is well

Results from Round 9

Round 9 PGN file from Alex Nagorski

I’ll post the results from Round 9 below and the final results for the tournament in a separate post.

A Grade

  • Alexei has already left for the Olympiad so took a draw against Gino. The other 4 games were all won by White.
  • Gordon Morrell played a nice opening and quickly got an advantage against Daniel Gong. Daniel tried a piece sacrifice to open up the position but it failed to provide enough
  • Mike Steadman’s opening experimentation continued (although his dubious one last week was a typo) this time with 1. d3 d5 2. c3 c5 3. Qc2 . After some more straightforward move he and Alphaeus castled on opposite sides and Mike’s pawn and piece advance decided things.
  • Bruce Watson played a very nice game to beat Nathan Goodhue
  • John Duneas looked good for most of his game but lost a couple of pawns to end up in a lost endgame against Ben Hague

B Grade

  • Paul MacDonald and Don Eade had a fairly even game before Paul’ Attack left his King undefended and enabled Don to get an unexpected mating attack.
  • Tim had blundered a piece early against Keith Ward and Keith swapped material until he resigned.
  • Simon Lyall blundered a pawn early against Richard Taylor and while Richard was ahead throughout the game he missed the best moves and eventually settled for a draw.
  • Jasmine Zhang was ahead for most of her game against Alex Nagorski and after missing some winning chances eventually prevailed.

C Grade

  • Andrew Michael missed a tactic from Sergy Kozakevych and lost after losing an exchange and in a poor position.
  • A few wasted moves saw Rodney Li come under a sting attack from Mike Steiner and he quickly lost.
  • Scott Treanor was having a nice game against Hilton Jacobs but accidentally trapped and lost one of his pieces to allow Hilton to win.

D Grade

  • The top boards all went according to rating

The Vega website for the tournament is