CSSCC News

Hello everyone. Agastya here. What happened was miraculous out here. Samarjith took the lead after losing the 1st game and was 2-1. There wasn't much fight in both games from Dragondom1( I played bad - Producer at the end of 4 games)

In the 2nd game Samarjith played a sicilian and Dragondom1 blundered a piece and the queen. Samarjith's tactical play was evident in that game. The 3rd game featured the Katalimov and Dragondom1 blundered again aaand lost in a closed endgame which could have been a draw unless he had missed that one move - Nb6. Kudos to samarjithbiju for finding the toughest ideas in that endgame. 

So far samarjith was on song and easily the favourite. 

But.. prep does matter and the contrasting thing between the their games in the league and in the finals was that they didn't take much time in the middlegame.

So as I was talking about prep, Dragondom1 actually managed to outprepare samarjith who would have expected 1.e4 or 1.d4 with 1.b3!! "My focus was to play Katalimov with white and avoid Sicilian." And indeed, he got an advantageous position from the opening , and samarjith blundered a pawn in the middlegame on move 10 which was the turning point. Dragon then traded all the pieces and with a pawn up endgame won convincingly . The endgame was just a display of technique on how to deal with a 7th rank pawn when u have a queen. " I spent quite a lot of time practicing those endgames in lichess drills. Thankfully paid off."

The tiebreaks will be played tomorrow or day after tomorrow.

On the other note, the Legends lead with 3-1 against the Blasters.

Hope you enjoyed the recap

Stay tuned for more updates.