Playoff Semi-finals: Primates lose to Discovered Mates

We square off against the Discovered Mates and for me I play against Andres Hortillosa, an expert from Minnesota.

As stated in prior entries, one of the best benefits to the 45 45 league is that it provides you incentive to study/prepare for specific games. For example, if you know your opponent plays a certain line in the Dragon, you can really prep for the game, which will (hopefully) translate over into stronger OTB play. In this match, I knew Andres plays the mainline Ruy. Now let me digress for a second: I am fascinated by the Ruy from both sides (same with the King’s Indian). I find the richness and variety that these defenses produce truly intriguing and can spend hours poring over games and analysis – which I cannot say the same about other defenses (Petrov’s & Queen’s Indian for example). So, when I saw that Andres would go for the Ruy, I leapt at the chance to play it. And the game was memorable, but not the way you would think. We delved 19 odd moves into theory, got into a very interesting middlegame with chances for both sides, and then he tragically “mouse-slipped” his queen (meaning he had a mouse slip and placed his queen accidently where he would lose it for no compensation) and resigned. Really not the way I wanted to win.

Our 2 lower boards have both lost, Darren in an interesting Scandinavian where his opponent’s 2 bishops proved to be stronger than Darren’s Bishop+Knight combination. Curt also lost in another interesting Ruy Lopez, this Ruy being a Marshall attack, where Curt could have sacrificed his queen for incredible winning chances (but in fairness to him, I never would have seen it either – only after having Fritz look at it did I see the idea). So we sit at 1 – 2 with Tom’s game tonight. So in fact we may draw, but I have to check the tiebreak situation.

Well Tom played his game and could not quite pull off the victory. His opponent, knowing that Tom needed to win, played the Berlin variation of the Ruy. Tom responded with the Worrall Attack, sacrificed the exchange, picked up a pawn and was threatening to grab another when he hung a piece. I suspect Tom was overpressing as he had declined his opponent’s earlier draw offer. So another season closes with our defeat in the quarterfinals. Not bad as we had to claw out of the cellar after the first 2 rounds in the tournament in order to qualify for the playoffs. I have 3 goals for every tournament:
No forfeits
Make the playoffs
Most importantly: Have fun & enjoy the camaraderie of team match play.
We achieved all three goals and I am already planning for Tournament 43, which will start in about a month’s time.