After not accomplishing a whole lot on my vacation, I’ve finally posted the November games.  The tournament happened to fall on the same date as another tournament, so I wasn’t able to arrive until just after round four had started.  International Master Ben Finegold (http://finegoldchess.blogspot.com/) decided to play in the tournament, along with a life master, expert and quite a few class A players to top it off.

There were a few very interesting games.  Starting off with round one, Finegold picked up the exchange against Brad Heilman and around move 32 began getting into trouble.  Brad made a mistake shortly after and lost.

After a disastrous second round, Ryan Clayton played a rather elegant, although one sided, game against John Hibbler.  When I saw 21.Bh6, it reminded me of Reshevsky-Matsumoto, Siegen 1970.  I recommend anyone to look at that game as the combination was a wonderful conclusion to the game.

In the last round, Finegold was matched against life master John Bidwell.  The previous match up between them at the Great Black Swamp Open in September 2006 was close to winning for Bidwell, but the game ended in a draw.  This time, Finegold clearly outplayed his opponent.  With the best combination of the night, 27…Rf2 led to a forced mate.  The game ended with the cool 29…Bc8.  Simply awesome!

The last game I’ll mention is probably the most difficult, fought out game with Paul Maginley playing against Ryan Clayton.  The game was rather complicated and long, but Paul pulled out the win in the end.

Just a reminder that the next tournament will be on December 13.  See everyone then.

The World Chess Championships in Bonn have finished.  Viswanathan Anand defeated Vladimir Kramnik in the twelve game match  6½-4½.  For quiet a while, it appeared that Kramnik would go down in defeat without winning a single game.  I was thinking this myself, but around game eight, Kramnik began getting the slightly better positions.  For the entire match, Anand was not only getting in the novelties, but decent positions, and although Kramnik didn’t make many errors, they were definitely costly mistakes.  But by the time game eight came around, it appeared that Anand’s opening preparation was running dry and Kramnik was having an easier time.  But draw after draw, Kramnik was left with three ”must win” games.  In game 10, Anand’s pieces became confused and eventually the white pieces overwhelmed the position.

I had a feeling that Anand would play 1.e4 at some point in the match, simply because the Petroff would not be the choice of opening when you need to play sharply.  Kramnik use to be the great Sveshnikov player, but apparently that wasn’t sharp enough.  The last game was a Najdorf.

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cd4 4.Nd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Bg5 e6 7.f4 Qc7 8.Bf6 gf6 9.f5 

I have to say that in my notes, I have this move marked as dubious. It has seemed to be revived, however, and I’m seeing more and more games played with this particular move. Many of the older games showed that black doesn’t have any problems in the opening, but perhaps the times are changing once again.

In any case, it is always exciting to see the analysis of World Championship matches. Not only is there possibly a new idea in the Najdorf, but the Meran Semi-Slav games certainly put some recent opening books out of date.

This is now the fourth redesign of the website for the Greater Toledo Area Chess Club.  I have decided due to my lack of creativity with the old site, that it was time for an updated one.  I decided to work on code functionality before starting any of the redesign tasks that are presented before you.  This took a few months to finish and then began integrating the old content into the new layout.

I still have rather limited time in working on this site, but I have made it far more dynamic and easier to update.  Hopefully people will continue to show their appreciation for the game as well as my work here.  If there is anything additional that you would like to see, feel free to contact us.

Lastly, I would like to thank Scott Waddell for the extensive help that he provided in regards to the beautiful conceptual design and development, and some of the site’s functional programming development.