The Chess Mind

The match ended up 2-2: Becerra (Miami) beat Kacheishvili on board 1, Herman (New York) beat Moreno Roman on board 3, and the lower boards drew. It was on therefore to the blitz tiebreaks, which went like this: the fourth boards played, and if a player lost he was eliminated and the board four winner played the opposing team's board three player, and so on up the food chain. It played out like this: Norowitz (NY) beat Rodriguez, but then lost to Moreno Roman who then defeated Herman and Charbonneau as well. Kacheishvili stopped him, beat Lugo, and then even managed to defeat Becerra with Black in the grand finale. Congrats to New York!

At 7 p.m., on ICC, the U.S. Chess League finale gets underway. The teams are the New York Knights and the Miami Sharks; here are the pairings:

GM Julio Becerra (2615) - GM Giorgi Kacheishvili (2666)

IM Blas Lugo (2351) - GM Pascal Charbonneau (2560)

IM Alejandro Moreno Roman (2331) - NM Matt Herman (2275)

NM Eric Rodriguez (2290) - NM Yaacov Norowitz (2354)

The first column is Miami, the latter New York. Miami has White on boards 1 and 3. More info, including tiebreak rules, can be found here.

This week saw the U.S. Chess League semi-finals come and go, and the result is that Miami will face New York in the finals. New York, which has three teams in the USCL (New York, Queens, and New Jersey while Indiana has none), defeated New Jersey 2.5-1.5 while Miami beat San Francisco by the same score. The date for the final hasn't yet been set (at least not on the USCL site), but to whet your appetite here's a funny and impressive game from the Miami-San Francisco semi-final.

Looking through the games in this week's TWIC, I was shocked to find the following game from last week's USCL playoffs:

US Chess League, Internet Chess Club, 2009
White: Becerra, Julio (2557)
Black: Nakamura, Hikaru (2710)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.e5 Nd5 4.Nc3 e6 5.Nxd5 exd5 6.d4 Nc6 7.dxc5 Bxc5 8.Qxd5 d6 9.Bc4 Qe7 10.Bg5 f6 11.0-0-0 dxe5 12.Rhe1 1-0

(The game, with comments, can be replayed here.)

The next time you're miniatured, remember that it even happens to the best players in the world. Errare humanum est!