Doubles Team Tournament
If you do not know what a "doubles" tournament is. It is simple: 2 players per team and both players play on the same board, alternating moves every move. For example, I make move one and my partner makes move two, etc. There is a catch though. You cannot talk to each other! This is what makes the game so fun, you have to hope your partner knows what you are trying to do and play along. For instance, I may see a good comination but may not play it just incase if my partner would miss it, then it may not be the best move.
I played in a doubles tournament Feb. 6th with one of my students, Calvin, who was in 6th grade. We drew our first round to a team which would end up winning it all, and the rest of their rounds. We then proceeded to win round two, lose round three, and win round 4.
To conclude the day, we came in 4th place and won top Adult-Elementary team.
Here are the games which we played. The younger player always moves first, therefore, I will always make the even moves and my partner would always make the odd moves. I will do my best to annotate the game and add in our thoughts.
Round 1:
Here we played the top team in the tournament to kick off the day. It was a rather nice way to start actually. I mean, drawing the top team is always big! It was interesting in the end because we only had 6 seconds left on the clock! (Game in 35). Not a surprise for me since I always take my time in tournaments, and, I have to say, I was a little worried my partner wouldn't handle the time pressure well, but I was wrong. He did a great job with that, and playing. There was only one mistake in the endgame. Here is is:
Round 3:
Well, after a powerful start, we came to halt here in round 3, losing to the team which ended up at 3rd place. It was a tough game and rather unusal at the start.
As white we agreed to play e4 and then the Italian game or just a standard sicilian line. I usually play d4 to start out but I do play e4 quite a bit in just fun, causal, blitz games so I knew what to do. This is a hard thing about doubles, you have to coordinate and the big part of this is playing the same opening. Infact, at the last session we saw each other before the tournament we went over our plan which mainly consisted of openings.
So to conclude that game, it was a tough loss. That is how doubles is and that is why it is so fun. Either way we bounced back in round 4 with a nice and clean victory.
Round 4:
This was our 2nd win and the last round. We swept our opponents away in a nice, quick, and clean game.
