Untitled Tuesday and Saturday recaps - September 5th and 9th

The report for the Tuesday event was written by @kstorn

Welcome club players, borderline masters, and patzers of all ages to the post-tournament report.

This event held 56 players and the Untitled Tuesday club has now reached 850 members!  

     Let's get into it.  The tournament started out smoothly with Joseph_Truelson taking an early lead and ace_mar following a 1/2 point behind.  With a huge pack of 4/5, the leaders had to stay on their heels

Joseph_Truelson stretched his lead by beating ace_mar

Meanwhile, all of the 4/5's drew their games.  So Joseph_Truelson now leads by 1.5 points with a perfect score.  The leaderboard has Joseph as #1 and #2-7 all with 4.5/6.  Next round, Joseph_Truelson played none other than kstorn!  *applause*  

Now Grandmaster2B and shepherd_shepherd are tied for second with many on 5/7 trailing.

This round Joseph played Grandmaster2B,  who was having a great tournament.

Shepherd_shepherd drew against misowalker, so now Joseph_Truelson grew his lead to 2 points, pretty much clinching the tournament.  So the fight for 2nd is on!

 Joseph_Truelson played Ankolyav, misowalker played SpeedyChess11 and shepherd_shepherd played me!

Joseph_Truelson finally lost his perfect score and I lost to shepherd_shepherd, I was up +4 and then made a huge one-move blunder to go -4.  misowalker then beat SpeedyChess11. 

In the final round, Joseph_Truelson played solskytz and shepherd_shepherd played SpeedyChess11

shepherd_shepherd couldn't quite get 2nd place because misowalker beat Ankalyov to tie him for points but with an edge on tiebreaks, misowalker took 2nd and shepherd_shepherd took home 3rd.

Here is the link to the tournament with games and the final results readily available.

Congrats to Joseph_Truelson for a great tournament!  Everyone, mark your calendars for the next Untitled Tuesday event on October 3rd!

The report for the Saturday event was written by @dpnorman

The Untitled Saturday event was a wacky one. One player led for the first half of the tournament despite spectacularly surviving a few scares, but after an upset loss, the competition was blown open and he was caught from behind by a rival. In the final round we saw some stunning upsets, but a winner did emerge among the two leaders. Who would it be?

The early leader was Ankalyov, a 2100-level blitz player from the UK. Despite starting 5-0, he had a very dramatic start to the tournament. Against Tudorache_M, he was (much) worse throughout the game, and went into a rook-for-two-pieces ending which should probably have been close to losing for him. And yet he won the game, because Tudorache_M lost his guard for one moment and let the rook infiltrate the position.

Yet this was far from Ankalyov's luckiest game. What I show next is something I could not bring myself to understand, and something I didn't believe when I first saw it, so hopefully one or both of the players could fill me in about what happened at the end of this game. After slowly building up a winning position and outplaying his opponent (with 1. Nh3! no less, as he played in some other games against lower-rated opposition), Ankalyov played a move allowing mate in two, and the opponent, instead of delivering the mate, resigned. What I would give to have the power to make my opponents resign at will! 

I find it hard to believe that the move was a mouseslip on Ankalyov's part, since a) the move is far away from the area of the board where the players should be playing, and b) there is an undefended knight hanging on g4! 

Regardless of what happened in this game against Lord_axe, Ankalyov was in clear first after five rounds, and a full point ahead of the field, no less. 

However, in the sixth game his luck caught up to him. His game against Enderao featured some wild tactics and double-blunders, but once the dust settled, a king-and-pawn ending emerged which was winning for black.

This created a three-way race between Enderao, Ankalyov, and another player, ukchessbomber, who had won all his other games apart from an early loss to Ankalyov. While Ankalyov and Enderao played their exciting game, ukchessbomber got a quick (and well-known!) win in a Maroczy Bind.

Don't let this loss by Marignon color your impression of his play. Firstly, he literally played like a master (or about twenty masters!), and secondly, he went on to win his last three games and tie for third in the event. A solid performance apart from his one opening hiccup!

In the final round, Ankalyov and ukchessbomber entered tied for first. Having already played each other, they were paired with other players both rated over 500 points beneath them. This is amazing in itself. Yet the results were even more shocking.

First there's ukchessbomber's game against Martin0, which was likely the longest of the tournament and one of the longest in any Untitled Tuesday. The underdog led ukchessbomber into a completely winning ending, but after missing some knockout punches, he blundered a full piece and the game was an easy technical draw. 

This was an extremely lucky escape for ukchessbomber, although he may have thought right afterwards that he had lost the event by not winning this game. 

However, in the other key matchup, something even more unexpected occurred as petitbonom (1581!) pulled off the upset of the tournament. Just like most of the other key games of the tournament, the winner was dead lost at one point, then equalized, and then his opponent lost the thread trying too hard to win.

While both leaders suffered upsets in the last round, the half-point difference in the severity of those upsets proved to be the deciding factor. Congratulations to ukchessbomber for clear first in this edition of Untitled Saturday, and to Ankalyov, Enderao, and Marignon for rounding out the top three, the latter two finishing tied for third.

Tournament link: https://www.chess.com/tournament/live/saturday-event-september-2017-895993