Fremd vs Barrington... Part III
It's that time of year again, the MSL Season is underway, with a few changes, of course, due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. This time around instead of players traveling to schools and playing their games, the players meet through Zoom, and play their games on Lichess! This is the 3rd edition of Fremd vs Barrington that's being recapped in Raburn and you can find the previous 2 editions here:
https://www.chess.com/news/view/fremd-vs-barrington-final-result
https://www.chess.com/news/view/msl-conference-tournament-results
And now - onto the games.
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The match took place on Thursday, November 12th, with all the games starting at 4 PM CST. Once again, I was a spectator of the match live, so I was able to get a first-hand glance at the live-action that was happening during the match - despite having other things I probably should have done (like studying for midterms). The games progressed slowly at first, with players on both sides going into their familiar openings, and as a result, nothing too surprising happened. However, that changed quickly, as very early on, it was clear that Zach Mungons, a senior for Fremd, was outclassing his opponent, and ended up winning with relative ease to put Fremd up 5-0.
Things quickly started to go wrong for Barrington, however, as on board 1, Edward Zhang had taken the upper hand against Shreya Mangalam, and quickly converted his material advantage to a full point, leaving Fremd now up 17-0, and Barrington needing a result quickly to get them back into the match.
However, Fremd quickly struck back on board 7, as Jacob Devadas couldn't defend against the raging attack from Ansh Aggarwal, who put Fremd up to a 23-7 lead, and only needing a couple of results to go their way in order to clinch the match win.
By now, the match was in crunch time, with every board in time pressure, and as a result, nothing was predictable anymore. But then came a shocking result.... on board 3, Barrington's Ethan Gagliano accidentally walked into a 3-fold repetition while trying to push an advantage against Fremd's Pavan Pandurangi, and as a result, Fremd clinched closer to a match win, with the score at 28-12 now.
Barrington wasn't out of the match yet though. Jack Bradley on board 4 was able to capitalize on a blunder by Ian Clark to bring Barrington back into the match at 28-21. They were now within striking distance to complete the comeback and beat Fremd for the 2nd time in a row.
However, the remaining 2 boards were in complex endgames with both sides having very little time left, so it was hard to figure out what exactly would happen. But then, Adu Batta on board 5 for Fremd was able to find an interesting piece sacrifice, and after some mistakes by Jimmy Zhang, Adu was able to convert his passed pawns into a win, and clinch the match for Fremd, 36-21.
With the match already over, the board 2 game didn't matter as much, and eventually, that game was drawn for a final result of 41.5-26.5.
Fremd won this match, and likely will win the MSL Conference Regular season, however, Barrington is not an easy opponent, and they will certainly be looking for revenge in January during the Conference Tournament, where they will likely still be favorites to win, despite this match result. The IHSA season is still in the early stages, with the State Tournament likely still being held in February (online of course), but based on this match, Fremd and Barrington have both shown that they are capable of being some of the best teams in the state, and watching the results during the rest of the season will definitely fun.
