Las Vegas Desert Rats Week 3 Highlights & Recap - Part 1 (Round 1 & 2)

In round 3 of Chess.com Pro League, Las Vegas Desert Rats beat Pittsburgh Pawngrabbers 12.5 to 3.5.

Round 1

The highlight of the round was a very sharp battle between two aggressive attacking Grandmasters, Timur Gareyev and Alexander Shabalov. I annotated this exciting encounter below:

 On board 2, GM Kayden Troff patiently grinded down his opponent FM Song. Pay attention to Kayden's tactical combination that started on move 25, allowing him to get a passed pawn which decided the game.

GM Zbyshek Pakleza had a very suspect position for a while. On move 28, had White played Bb4, they would have close to a decisive advantage. Fortunately for us, Zbyshek opponent missed the idea. Zbyshek won a pawn and was calm as a cucumber in his defense. Having a huge time advantage on his opponent, he calmly took all opponent's pawns and brought the third win home!

Elliott suffered a loss in the first round: he had a playable / equal position for a while but managed to make couple of bad blunders in the time trouble.

The most crucial blunder for Elliott occurred on move 26:

After the first round, we were winning 3 to 1, not bad at all!

Round 2

This round featured a very interesting game between GM Shabalov and GM Troff. If you are interested in a 30 minute detailed analysis by Kayden Troff, check out our twitch stream  https://t.co/KdWI9wICyY starting at 2hr 33 minutes into the broadcast. 

My favorite move of this game was Kayden's Bc5 on move 27. Both players had less than 2 minutes left at that point and Shaba blundered badly, allowing Kayden to win the game.

Timur Gareyev won a pawn early but his opponent had a huge compensation. We got truly lucky on move 14, when Edward Song missed a very strong Ne5! after which Timur has a much worse position, per my engine. Even though Timur later missed a cute tactical sequence on move 23, he managed to carry his extra pawn through the whole game and outplayed his opponent in severe mutual time trouble when both players were down to seconds on their clocks.

Elliott played uncharacteristically slow and fell very behind on the clock. In the end, his position is only a smidge worse, but he simply ran out of time vs David Hua.

Zbyshek Pakleza played an Accelerated London system with White vs his opponent. He won an exchange early in the game after his opponent could not tolerate a monster Knight on d6. After that, our Polish GM showed his technique: taking away his opponent's counterchances and trading the right pieces until finally his Rook invaded the 7th rank of his opponent and that was all she wrote.

After first 2 rounds (8 games), our team had a nice lead 6 to 2 over Pittsburgh. Come back for part 2 shortly!