2011 SC/NC Border Battle

I enjoyed last year's SC/NC Border Battle so much that I was happy to participate again this year. I again played in the Class D match, my rating having taken a beating in the past year. These are all G/90 games.

The neat thing about this match is that you only play two opponents, and you know who they are in advance. This let us do a little research. One of the opponents was the same as last year, so I had those games to look over. And we were able to find a couple other games from the other opponent. Not exactly a vast history to work with, but interesting to study.

The Class D NC players were two amiable guys from the Henderson/Vance Chess Club. My teammate was from the Columbia Chess Club.

Game 1 opened into a line I'm comfortable with. My pieces got sort of cramped and then my opponent blundered into a big skewer. I didn't notice this immediately, but he did, as I could tell from his quiet grumblings. I found it soon enough. He had a sizable time advantage and my queen's mobility was limited, so we fought it out to the end.