Ganging up on the GM

This blog entry is out of order as I'm stalling on the Seattle Classic, a long tournament with some very hard to analyze games.  But this one is too fun to delay.

I was in Reno, Nevada for the Western States Open.  My husband advised me to fly down a day early to try to combat stress and fatigue, so I was able to play in GM Enrico Sevillano's simul the night before the tournament.  There were 11 players, including two other Seattle Chess Club regulars.  I may have been the highest rated player, though I'm not positive of this.

The pacing of simul play is unlike any other common form, as you basically have a flat amount of time for each move (the time it takes the GM to make the rounds).  We were given the right to "pass" twice, and I think most of us used one or both. But other than that, there's no more time for a difficult move than an easy one.

The organizer touted Sevillano as a killer tactician, so I was hoping for some fireworks. I wish I could find a picture of him wearing the woolly cap he wore during the simul; an odd combination of cute and menacing!  He seemed to pull it down further and further as the game pleased him less....

He played an odd line of the Dutch against me.  I played in a similar simul vs. GM Khachiyan a year and a half ago, and he also diverged from the main line in an odd way.  I noticed that Sevillano played 1. e4 against the player to my right and 1. d4 against me; it may be that having the games all be quite different (which I'm told makes them easier to keep track of) is more important than playing the best openings.  Or it may be that they don't want to reveal their opening prep on the eve of a tournament.  Whatever the reason, I couldn't shake the feeling that I actually had a better position for a while, and Stockfish agrees!

I waited until GM Sevillano's back was turned and did the Snoopy victory dance!  Yes, it's only a simul game, but drawing a GM was still a thrill.  More to the point, I drew a GM in a rook endgame.  Given how terrible I have historically been at them, and how hard I've been working to fix that, this was extremely pleasing.

Fellow club member Davey Jones was the last game to finish (meaning that Sevillano got to park at his board, which is quite intimidating).  It was also an equal material rook endgame, but Sevillano kept trying different things until Davey cracked.  While I felt bad for Davey, this underscored that getting the draw offer was a real accomplishment.  In fact, the last phase of my game felt like Sevillano, who is well regarded as a coach, giving me a quiz:  do you really know how to draw this against anything I might try?  And the answer was:  Yes!  The situation with the queenside passer is well covered in Silman's Endgame Manual, and the kingside pawns turned out not to add much to the equation as long as I didn't allow him to push them too far (which is how Davey lost, though I can't say I would have done any better).

GM Sevillano won the other 10 games; we had spread out somewhat, so while I was playing I could only watch one other game, in which my friend Sridhar traded queens but got mated anyway.  He was never able to really coordinate his pieces, which is my usual experience with much higher rated players.  I think I was helped by my familiarity with Dutch structures, which are quite idiosyncratic.

I hoped this would be a good omen for the tournament.  It was also, as it turns out, a particularly good warmup, as the Bf4 plan in the Dutch reappeared in round 1.