Metropolitan IM Round Robin

Howdy folks,

I am currently in downtown L.A. watching my host, Kostya Kavutskiy play out a long endgame against Roman Yankovsky. It's a really intense endgame with two minors (for Roman) against rook and several pawns.

While they're making me wait to go home, I thought I'd make some observations about the tournament.

The set-up is really beautiful:

You may also have noticed in the previous shot that there are a plethora of drinks for the players (and any potential spectators) to enjoy. Ankit Gupta and Michael Belcher set up and ran the first round without any difficulties, except that apparently once again the MonRoi devices failed to broadcast the games, so nobody could watch them live.

I played the lowest rated player in the field I believe, and won the following game:

And here's me writing this blog with my recently-shaved head, and a smile cause I'm at a chess tournament:

with 2 minutes on his clock, Roman has just run at full speed out of the room (presumably to use the restroom)! wow!! The position is also really intense, I'm sure this will be a great endgame to play over later.

Kayden Troff scored a huge upset, winning with black against Joel Banawa who made a norm at the last event. I'll be playing him tomorrow morning-- will try to make him work hard for his first IM norm.

till next round!

update: Kostya has just won the endgame! I think he played really well, remained confident, and kept a small lead on the clock, then used that time to play the last few moves well. But I'll see when I play over the game later. Rook and two pawns are often better than Bishop and Knight in the endgame.

[next round]