Sleigh Your Opponents this Christmas!
Visit the North Pole, via Scandinavia, this Weekend!
This holiday season, give yourself the gift of adding a new chess defense to your repertoire when Alex Blue-Day takes on the role of Silverdale Santa and gifts all who are present a lesson on the sturdy maneuvers of the Scandinavian Defense —1. e4, d5!
A solid opening with many variations, the Scandinavian can quickly lead to attacking avenues for Black, especially in Blitz Chess when you don't have time to play the long game for a positional edge.
The Scandinavian is thus arguably Black's most "forcing" defense to 1. e4, restricting White to a relatively small number of options. This has helped to make the Scandinavian Defense fairly popular and played by Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Arjun Erigasis and Sergey Tiviakov, among others.
Here is a look at a couple of Scandinavian games played by Magnus:
Aronian beats Carlsen, wins Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Final
Levon Aronian won the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Finals in South Africa after defeating Magnus Carlsen in a controlled 1½–½ match, securing the event's $200,000 top prize.
The final brought the four-day competition to a close, with Vincent Keymer taking third place against Javokhir Sindarov. Further down the table, Fabiano Caruana beat Arjun Erigaisi to finish fifth, while Hans Niemann prevailed over Parham Maghsoodloo in the match for seventh place.
Pictured: Levon Aronian with wife Anita Ayvazyan and their daughter
Will Faustino Oro become the Youngest GM in History?
The national championships of Argentina recently came to an end with one successful and one failed record – Diego Flores triumphed for the eighth time as Argentine champion, while Faustino Oro, who wants to become the youngest GM of all time and has till March to reach that goal, narrowly missed a GM norm.
By March, Oro wants to collect the three norms to take the record for the younges grandmaster from the American Abhimanyu Mishra.
The Silverdale Chess Club meets on Saturdays from 2:30-4:30 at Moment Brewing, 10876 Myhre Pl NW Suite 112, Silverdale, WA 98383
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