Back to work. I have not posted since early this month. My wife and I were off on a vacation in South Carolina for a week or so. The drive down and back along the I88/I81/I77 route was very pretty with Fall colors present all the way to the SC border. The route follows the western side of the Catskills, the Endless Mountains in PA, the Blue Ridge in Virginia and the Southern Appalachians in North Carolina. If you have the time, and enjoy “leaf peeping”, it is a trip worth taking.
Now to news. Last night, Thursday October 13th saw the latest incarnation of the “big” Albany - Schenectady matches. Albany brought twelve players this year, and Schenectady had thirteen show up. Schenectady won the contest rather decisively 8 to 4. The Schenectady side dominated on the top boards scoring 4 ½ to 1 ½ on the top six boards. Their edge was less on the lower boards, 3 ½ to 2 ½. Albany was designated the home team and had White on the odd numbered boards. The results were:
Albany Schenectady
Board 1 Dean Howard - 0 Patrick Chi - 1
Board 2 Jon Leisner - 0 Ashok Aaron - 1
Board 3 Gordon Magat - 1 Philip Sells - 0
Board 4 Tim Wright - 0 John Phillips - 1
Board 5 Peter Henner - 0 Michael Mockler - 1
Board 6 Bill Little - ½ Bill Townsend - ½
Board 7 Jonathan Lack - 0 David Fennerman - 1
Board 8 Glen Perry - 1 Dilip Aaron - 0
Board 9 Arthur Alowitz - ½ Richard Chu - ½
Board 10 Charles Eson - 0 Matt Clough - 1
Board 11 *Chris Caravaty. - 0 Cory Northrup - 1
Board 12 K. Kamma - 1 Zach Calderone - 0
* I made a typical reporter’s mistake and did not obtain the correct spelling of this player’s last name. Bill Townsend and I both recorded his last name as “Carvaty“, but this is wrong. With help from Cory Northrup we got the spelling right this morning.
Bill Townsend and I played a game with a couple of significant mistakes that rather spoiled what was a tense contest between opponents with a history over many years of hard fights. I dropped a pawn is a silly fashion resulting in a material imbalance of a Queen and a Rook plus a pawn versus two Rooks and a Knight. Bill then had the opportunity to simplify by trading off a pair of Rooks and getting a distant two-to-one pawn majority on the Q-side. Fortunately for me a shortage of time on the clock caused Bill to miss a further winning chances and the game petered out to a draw in about 75 moves. Our game ran long making obtaining scores of other games impossible. Mr. Townsend does have some of the game scores. He’ll likely be publishing some in his Schenectady Gazette column.
A personal note; I received a trophy for finishing second in the Saratoga Championship last season. Alan LeCours was to present it to me last week, but I missed it because of the South Carolina vacation. My thanks to Alan for the effort directing the event, and my apologies for my absence for his presentation. Since I’ve retired from serious competition, this is probably the last trophy for me. Over the many, many years of serious play I was able to win the Schenectady title a few times and the Albany title once, 2007. Making the “triple”, Albany, Schenectady and Saratoga titles just was not in the cards for me. The best I could do was a couple of second places at Saratoga, this year and 2006-07. Although I fell short of a goal, the pleasure of the competition and the comradeship of my opponents were certainly the real rewards of playing chess. My thanks to all my opponents.
More soon.
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