Chess is Like the Stock Market

Twenty players took part in round 1 of Tuesday Night Action 31. The top couple of boards show how much chess has in common with the stock market. How do you succeed in making money in the stock market? You make the right trades! Certain trades will make you rich while other trades will put you broke. On the top board, Grant Oen(2147) took on Dominique Myers(2117) where the latter fell victim mainly because he refused to make the proper trades that he needed to make. White offered Black a number of opportunities to equalize, and Black wanted nothing to do with it, proceeded to be down two pawns by move 36, and that was enough to ultimately cost him the game.

This game, along with complete analysis, can be viewed below.



Meanwhile, on board 2, Vishnu Vanapalli(1975) took on Patrick McCartney(2131) in a rematch from two weeks ago. Once again, it was a French Defense, Open Tarrasch variation. Black equalizes quickly and then proceeds to make a number of key trades to win the game. He starts off by swapping pawns that force White to make a critical decision. Does he split his pawns, making his queenside pawns weak? Or does he keep the pawns intact at the cost of dropping his Bishop in an open position for the Black Knight? He decided to relinquish the Bishop, and one more trade by Black on e1 followed by manouvering his Queen forced White to relinquish a pawn, and eventually the game.

This game can be viewed below.



Elsewhere in the top section, Pradhy Kothapalli(1870) took down David Blackwelder(1724) while Aditya Shivapooja(1767) did the same thing to Luke Harris(1675).

In the lower section, a 5-way tie for the lead with a score of 1 after 1 round was achieved by David Richards(1641), Andrew Jiang(1483), Monish Behera(1251), Daniel Boisvert(1089), and Aditya Vadakattu(1062), while Sampath Kumar(1448) and Corey Frazier(1404) declared peace.

All results can be viewed here.