Hello out there!
It's time for a report on things that happened at the US Amateur Team East (or, if you insist, the 'World Amateur Team' as organizer Steve Doyle now styles it--as you'll see from the story below, it wasn't a total exaggeration this year). The Schenectady Chess Club fielded two squads, one being 'Favre Snaps A Pawn,' of which I was captain, and the other being 'Chess Club Bailout', led by club member John Phillips. A third team, made up of scholastic standouts from the Albany area, had an indirect connection with the club, as two of its players are or have been club members. I regret that I can only cover here in detail the doings of the team of which I was part; hopefully, someone with greater knowledge of the other teams' play-by-play progress in Parsippany will put up a blog entry here. I, for one, would love to hear about their experiences.
The roster of 'Favre Snaps A Pawn' was a little different from the past couple of years. I played board one, followed by Alan LeCours, Bill Townsend and Phil Ferguson as options on board three, and club president Richard Chu on board four. Phil had things that could need his attention back home at any moment, so we lined up Bill as an alternate.
Our first round was on table ten, just outside the ropes. Unlike in the past couple of years in our first-round match, we were clean shut out. This was a bit of a disappointment since, though we're always paired well up in the first round, we usually come away with at least something from these first-round matchups. I played Black against FM Oliver Kniest from Solingen, who's at school in Boston. It was an interesting back-and-forth game. At one point, I played 26...Rxe3, which came as a rather unpleasant surprise to my opponent. I mention this only because it dawned on me much later that I had carried out the action suggested in our team name--I'd snapped a pawn! The game was very complicated, though, and I was behind on the clock (I know, what a surprise); eventually I turned a winning position into a dead loss due to the time pressure. I thought we carried some decent chances in some of our other games, but in the end we had all succumbed. This was the toughest team we were to face all weekend.
The round after that was easier. We were paired well down this time, and scored 3.5/4, with Alan taking the only draw of the match. Ferguson was the first of us to win; his opponent was for some reason wearing a funny moose hat, which I thought at first was serving as a team 'costume'. None of this gentleman's teammates saw fit to follow his lead, either on this point or in terms of his opening play, which was apparently careless enough to land him in serious trouble with Phil as early as move seven, to judge from the self-deprecatory chuckling that I was hearing from that area. Richard also won quickly, playing a young boy. My opponent lasted rather longer, but that was because I was taking a considerable amount of time trying to refute his strange system against the Yugoslav Attack. He explained to me in postmortem that he and his brother had worked up this setup between themselves, and apparently the brother in particular has done well with it. But he also noted that my treatment of the line was the most pressure to which their setup had ever been subjected, and that because of this, he admitted that it would need some more work.
Round three saw us all the way down on table 70, which was our lowest location for the weekend. We were still in the grand ballroom, but because accelerated pairings were now done with, we were well and truly in the middle of the pack. Again, being paired down helped our cause, and we scored another 3.5/4. I got the draw this time, after Richard and Bill Townsend won their games (I had put Bill in on board three so he could get warmed up in view of Phil's inevitable departure). My opponent, Jonathan Pagan, played fairly well; I tried out the Sveshnikov, which I sometimes do these days against lower-rated players, and this time it didn't give me very much, as Pagan was fairly familiar with the ideas. I thought I had a bit of a bite, but in the end couldn't get any real play and settled for a repetition. But that won us the match, at least. The other games were pretty routine for our side, as far as I could tell from a distance.
Round four was made interesting by the fact that we were paired against a team of unrated youth players from China--Harbin, specifically. Here was a great advertisement for the tournament's alternate name of World Amateur Team Championship! Two of these squads from China, with players ranging in age from perhaps eight to maybe fourteen or so (according to FIDE, my opponent's birth year is 1999, so he's about twelve years old at this writing), had traveled to the US specifically to play in this tournament! None of their players had USCF ratings, of course, and I don't believe any were FIDE-rated, though my opponent, Tong Xiao, is listed currently on FIDE's website as unrated, but with some experience against rated players. In any case, it seemed to me on the basis of what happened in our game that the boy is going to have a respectable FIDE rating before too long. This time, I got to play another Sveshnikov... with White! Knowing what I do about the rigorous Chinese approach to training in just about everything, I assumed that my opponent would be well prepared in the Bxf6 main lines, so I went for the branch with 9.Nd5. Here again, he knew the book line pretty well, and I actually couldn't remember the theory beyond move 18 for some reason. As we approached the endgame, I learned that Phil had gotten a lost position on board three. I wasn't too worried yet. Perhaps if I had seen how Richard's game was going, I might have been more concerned, because Richard told me afterward that he was basically losing, but his young opponent just happened to drop material at a crucial moment, which turned things around for us and evened the match. I eventually won a rather interesting double-rook ending. Alan fought on for a long time trying to use his slight material advantage, but eventually took a draw in order to secure the match for us, 2.5-1.5, rather than risk making a mistake. This gave our team a 3-1 score going into the final day of the weekend--not a bad place to be. For the remainder of the tournament, though, we no longer had Phil available on board three for us.
On the last morning of the event, we were paired up on table 30. Again the round-five blues struck, as has happened to us before, and we lost 1-3. I found myself playing a Hedgehog setup against a strong Expert, which I haven't tried in some time; I had a decent game going, but time pressure again caused me to err, losing a piece, then more material later. Once more the clock had caused me to turn a pretty good position into a dead loss! Richard also lost. Bill had taken a draw on board three, which was actually not a bad result, considering that he was pretty rusty and playing an Expert. My game finished third in line, and that left Alan soldiering on, trying to save our honor. It seemed that he was about to do so when, in a minor-piece ending, his opponent made a blunder, but Alan got his move order wrong and found himself in a dead draw instead.
In the final round, we were on table 49, which happened to be in the exact middle of the room, where the lighting was rather poor due to the arrangement of the fixtures. It was an odd match. Richard's game finished first--in fact, while the rest of us were still in the opening, he and his opponent were already well into the endgame, which ended up drawn soon. My game featured what I felt was slightly passive play from my opponent, but I wasn't sure what to do with the position. Suddenly I found myself losing a pawn, which I tried to pass off with an air of confidence. As I played on, about the only thing I had going for me was my bishop pair. After a long time, this became influential enough to induce a repetition from my opponent, which I accepted rather gratefully--I knew that this 'executive decision' would put a certain amount of pressure on my teammates, but there was no way I could squeeze a win from the position I had. Much to my relief, Bill won his game when his opponent walked into a lost pawn ending. That left Alan with our last game, which seemed to involve a lot of subtle maneuvering from both sides. The sporting situation suggested that Alan's opponent would buckle down and at least make some serious effort to win, but instead, perhaps not being up for a long fight into the wee hours, he extended a draw offer, which Alan accepted. So a very close win for us, 2.5-1.5! (Curiously, the Albany-area scholastic team was playing our opponents from round three at this time.)
That put us on four points, which turned out once again to be "close, but no cigar," as a rival team with a relatively low rating average, but still in our rating class, had performed very well to reach 4.5 points. I don't remember how our other team did in the end, sadly; nor do I know for certain what the final result for the scholastic team was, though I believe they reached 3.5 points, which strikes me as commendable.
Our team's individual scores were:
Philip Sells 3/6
Alan LeCours 3/6
Phil Ferguson 1/3
Bill Townsend 2.5/3
Richard Chu 3.5/6
So Richard was our top individual scorer! Congratulations! I also want to point out Bill Townsend's undefeated record, which was not due only to his abbreviated playing schedule--he showed considerable focus on the last day, fighting through fatigue to keep us in the race. Alan was also playing a good anchor role on board two. Phil Ferguson, of course, was the pirate of the bunch! Again, I thank the team for allowing me to serve as captain, and I'm grateful to the Schenectady Chess Club for all of its support.
[Edit: changed the title to make the number of teams more clear]
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