Our Hero!! - Making Lemonade
(Beat Reporter: Mark LaRocca)
Ok… so first you play some really bad (lemon-ish) sort of moves… then give your opponent a California “fur shur”, you’ll never get out of this one, mating attack… and then you add sugar, exchange your white squared Bishop, somehow get your Queen back into the game… stir things up a bit… and, voila!, lemonade. Julia Child could not have done it any better.
Boston Blitz vs Connecticut Dreadnoughts (2 – 2) in a match draw you just had to be there to believe.
Our hero, NM Jake Miller playing Black in a Benoni (Why??), was all but dead… in fact, I was envisioning the cremation ceremony… spreading the ashes across Boston harbor. His opponent, NM Kapil Chandran had played such a good opening… Black simply had nothing… no counterplay and no hope. But, such is the curse and the joy of chess… it ain’t over ‘til it’s over… first to finish, and what a finish. Boston (1 – 0)
Meantime, teammates, seeing this board 4 disaster happening, began taking some chances.
Next to finish, last week’s hero, NM Vadim Martirosov, with White, seemed to be inching slowly toward a win… at least, I had his game in the win column… NOT!!!.. a small inaccuracy (aka. Blunder) led to a quick collapse… such a shame… my (3-1) Boston win prediction seemed so close. Credit his adversary, FM Leif Pressman, for his alert play. Boston (1 – 1)
And then there was SM Denys Shmelov… playing Black against the inimitable IM Jay Bonin… struggling mightily. I thought Denys was better at some point… but, after the game he corrected me. He never felt he was equal until the end… and such a beautiful and shocking endgame it was. When is a draw more than a draw?... When your opponent misses a one move win! Check out our special puzzle tribute. Boston (1.5 – 1.5)
White to move and win!
GM Eugene Perelshteyn played his usual solid opening… under control… I asked him before the game to play the King’s Gambit… but, he defers to Marc Esserman on such subjects. Part way through, I know Eugene had his eye on board 4, and so, he played a little loosely trying to stir things up. At the end, when only his game was going, he was two pawns down in a Rook ending… which he managed to draw… no problem?
Boston (2 – 2)
Anyway, let’s not let details stand in the way of our worship… hero worship, that is… as Jake (Superman) Miller saves Lois Lane and the match to boot in what must be a heartbreaker for Lex Luther and the fleet.
This was an exciting one... What with Superman spinning around the world at light speed and all... See ya'll there next week. Stay tuned for a more exact location.
