The Long Range Outlook

A total of 28 players took part in round 3 of Tuesday Night Action 31. The top section saw a 4-way tie going into round 3 with a score of 1.5. The first of those two games is our feature game of the week between Pradhy Kothapalli(1870) and Patrick McCartney(2131) which featured an insipid line of the Caro-Kann Defense that played more like a poor man's Van Geet opening. Black was equal as early as move 3. The position remained that way until Black makes a fairly major error on move 23. A critical exchange sacrifice by Black occurs on move 29, and White proceeds to hold a clear, if not winning advantage for roughly the next two dozen moves. Black spends a lot of time and energy trying to force the Queen into White's camp, attempting to defend his inferior position by counter-attacking White's King. After White's 55th move, Black uses the entire board to figure out a sequence of "long distance" moves by a "long range" piece, namely the Black Queen, such that she does find her way into White's camp. He proceeds to win another pawn, but unfortunately, it wasn't enough as Black's pawns were fixated on the color of his Bishop, making a light-squared blockade pretty easy to achieve, and the game ended in a draw, placing both players a half point behind the leader.

The game can be viewed below:



This opened up the door for Grant Oen(2147) and Aditya Shivapooja(1767) to take the lead, and the former prevailed to lead all scores with 2 1/2 after three rounds. Joining Patrick and Pradhy for second place and a half point behind the leader is DJ Cremisi(2304) following his victory over Dominique Myers(2117). Other winners in the top section include Mark Biernacki and Vishnu Vanapalli(1975) while Adharsh Rajagopal(1801) and David Blackwelder(1724) declared peace.

In the bottom section, the lead has changed hands as Corey Frazier(1404) took down Joseph Little(1527) to now lead with 2 1/2 while the previous leader that came in with a perfect score, Daniel Boisvert(1089) fell prey to Marnzell Hand(1600). All of the other games in the section were also decisive and included victories by David Richards(1641), Ali Shirzad(1650), Hassan Hashemloo(1307), Aarush Chugh(1307), Rishi Jasti(766), and Akshay Rajagopal(623).

The current cross table can be viewed here.