2006 Spanish Team Ch

The second group of the Spanish team championship played its third of five rounds today. Gelfand won a tremendously tactical game against Tiviakov on board one in today's top matchup. Great stuff. (Game below.) His favored Gros Xake Taldea team barely held on to win, however, thanks to an upset on the lower boards. It's always heartening to see a team of IMs and FMs hold off a team full of known Grandmasters. The untitled Jaime Valmana (2282) beat Harikrishna (2682) with a pretty tactic 17.Rxg6! (game below). (Although it looks like Black could have swindled a win with 34..h5!)

The team format also means you can find drama anywhere. In the second round, the heavyweight teams drew on the first five boards. Mamedyarov-Aronian, Jakovenko-Ponomariov, Harikrishna-Shirov, all drawn. So it came down to board six and IM Candelario vs IM Jerez. Perez won to give victory to Linex Magic. Actually, the drama can depend more on the length of the games. That decisive victory only lasted 24 moves and was probably over before most of the draws on the higher boards. And since a win on a higher board is worth more, any victory by the other team would have changed the team result. There are two more rounds to play. The top finisher will go to the final match in November.

By virtue of tardiness I once became the undeserving focus of a big match between the two largest Buenos Aires clubs, Club Argentino and Torre Blanca. The top boards were all GMs like Ricardi, Zarnicki, Sorokin, Spangenberg, et al. Because I arrived late and they were having trouble finding enough room for all the games, my game and one other started around half and hour later than most. (It's a massive match for the Najdorf Cup. I think it was 50 boards including a few dozen special ones for juniors and women.) I was in a superior endgame and it turned into the last game in progress when my teammate next to me went down in flames in time trouble after having a totally winning position. That was important because I had figured I had draw odds in that the score was tied 24-24 with our two games still going. Now if I failed to win we would lose! I managed to win and was treated like a hero since we drew the match, although of course my point wasn't worth any more than those scored on the top boards. The sad epilogue is that it was only the first half of the match and we got totally wiped out on our home turf a week later to lose the Cup. (I had to work and couldn't play in the second leg, but my replacement won.)

Speaking of team play, even if it's over the internet, the US Chess League is still rolling along and its website is full of interesting clips and games. Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston are all 3-0 in team play. Pascal Charbonneau beat Larry Christiansen for NY in a game he (and Irina Krush, I believe) will be annotating for an upcoming issue of Black Belt.