The Woman Does All the Dirty Work

A total of 20 players showed up to take part in round 2 of Tuesday Night Action 31. At the top board, Patrick McCartney(2131) took on Grant Oen(2147) in the Leningrad Variation of the Nimzo-Indian Defense. The first 11 moves by each player follows book lines. Then, for some reason, White, despite knowing while thinking about the previous move that if Black continued with 11...c4 that he could not take on c4 with the Bishop, proceeds to blunder after a brief lapse and takes the poisoned pawn, which cost him a piece. Then White got his act together and decided "I don't need no stinkin' Bishop!" He proceeds to send his Queen on a very long tour where she basically does all the dirty work, and after a couple of slightly inferior moves in the form of "right idea, wrong order", White's Queen scoops up the b-pawn. A couple of moves later, a blunder by Black gives White the a-pawn, and in the process, the Queen proceeds to fork 3 pieces at once, and only two of the three can be saved, and so she scoops up the Bishop during her mission. After she does all that, which now gave White a material advantage, Black snags one pawn back, and White has to make a very critical decision on move 29. With 11 minutes left to Black's 41 minutes, he can grab the Knight, which Black will win back, and head into a pawn up drawn endgame as all of White's pawns would be split, or he can play 29.Rf4 and go into a very complicated and messy position where White has to find an only move on move 30 and Black then has to find an entire sequence of only moves in order to reach a position that is a small advantage for White. Whether it's enough to win or not is unclear. That said, White spent 6 of his precious 11 minutes to try to figure out whether he could win with the Rook move, and given the level of complications involved, he instead decided to take the Knight and head into a drawn endgame. It gets down to a Rook and two Pawns each, and Black proceeds to continue with his feeble attempt to win over the course of his final 48 moves in the game, but despite his time trouble, White is able to get it down to just the Kings on move 88, and the game ultimately ended in a draw.

The game can be viewed below.



This puts both players in a tie for first place with 1.5 out of 2.

Elsewhere in the top section, Pradhy Kothapalli(1870) and Aditya Shivapooja(1767) also proceeded to draw and claim their share in the four-way tie for first place with a point and a half. Daniel Cremisi(2304) took down Mark Biernacki(2117), Annastas Wyzwany(1798) defeated Vishnu Vanapalli(1975), and Luke Harris(1641) downed David Richards(1641), each of which trailing the leaders by half a point.

In the lower section, Daniel Boisvert(1089) takes the lead all by himself by defeating Aditya Vadakattua(1062). To claim second place to himself, Corey Frazier(1404) took down Richard Trela(1092). Other winners include Kiru Mendez(1640), Ivan Manchev(1528), and Mahesh Padhi(1021).

The current crosstable can be viewed here.