He Who Makes the Second-to-Last Mistake ...

Twenty players showed up to take part in round 2 of Tuesday Night Action 33. And then there was one! One perfect score that is! On the top board, a Symmetrical English was played between Mark Biernacki(2102) and Vishnu Vanapalli(1894) and the former prevailed to take a full point lead over the rest of the competition with a score of 2 after 2 rounds. Meanwhile, on board 2, Sulia Mason(2000) won a rook against Grant Oen(2178), but it was Grant that got the last laugh as White proceeded to hang his Rook and Black achieved the miracle draw. Board 3 has our feature game of the week, a French MacCutcheon played between Aditya Shivapooja(1834) and Patrick McCartney(2063). White proceeds to play an inferior line and follows it up with many more inferior moves, but no outright blunders, until Black achieves a significant advantage after 16 moves. Then Black implodes, throwing away the advantage with a major error on move 17 and outright blundering on move 19, giving White a won position. However, after trying to set up a trap on move 20, White proceeds to blunder the full point right back to Black by playing a horrible blunder on move 21. Black never looked back after that, and even finished the game with a cute double rook sacrifice to deflect the White pieces away from his king and Black proceeded to mate the White king with his raking bishops.

The game can be viewed below:



Board 4 saw a Sicilian Najdorf, English Attack between Gil Holmes(1806) and Ali Shirzad(1679). A slightly offbeat line played by Black is followed up by an error by Black where White can achieve a significant advantage, but then White immediately follows up with an error in return and Black never looked back. Below is a brief study of the 6.Be3 Ng4 Najdorf with a trap missed by both players.



To round out the top section, David Blackwelder(1695) took down David Richards(1607).

In the bottom section, Phillip Miller(1555) and Rithvik Prakki(1155) share the lead with a perfect score each by beating Debs Pedigo(1309) and Hassan Hashemloo(1379), respectively. Other winners include David McGee(1512), John Peters(1064), and David Keeling(596).

The cross table can be viewed here.