Thursday, October 2, 2008

Blaze Keep the Heat on Miami

Chicagoans Pull Out a Draw in Tough Match

IMs Emory Tate and Angelo Young put the shark bite on Miami last night to salvage a draw for the Blaze.
Some but not all of the Blazers on hand last night: Manager Glenn Panner, IM-elect Mehmed Pasalic, GM Nikola Mitkov, IM Emory Tate, IM Angelo Young.

On yet another night when the new Chicago Blaze could easily have gone down to defeat, the team hung tough to salvage their match yesterday evening with a 2-2 draw against the Miami Sharks, a team that was considered one of the league’s strongest as the season began.

Once again it was the middle of the lineup, IMs Emory Tate on Board 2 and IM Angelo Young on Board 3, that provided the victories. Both players are grinding it out in style these days. Emory has now won his last three games. Angelo is undefeated in USCL competition and is currently among the league’s top ten players in game MVP points.

Playing Black, Emory beat off an early but premature mating attack by IM Blas Lugo in their Caro-Kann, Two Knights game, going on methodically to squeeze his opponent’s kingside and enter the endgame up a knight to a pawn. White resigned after Move 60.

Angelo’s game against FM Charles Galofre went late into the night, generally looking drawish to most of the observers on the scene at the Holiday Inn Skokie. In an endgame that went on for about 60 moves, however, Angelo managed to capture his opponent’s last pawns while retaining one of his own. Charles resigned after Move 111, as Angelo was about to promote. (Warning: Game not for those with short attention spans.)

The draw keeps the Blaze at .500—three points in six meets—and maintains our playoff hopes without actually advancing them. Every week is different, interesting and fun. Next up: the Blaze play the Tennessee Tempo again on Monday.

Thanks to Chris Baumgartner for providing first-rate tournament direction last night. Here are the games by board number.

1. GM Nikola Mitkov (CHC) vs GM Julio Becerra (MIA) 0-1

2.
IM Blas Lugo (MIA) vs IM Emory Tate (CHC) 0-1

3.
IM Angelo Young (CHC) vs FM Charles Galofre (MIA) 1-0

4.
NM Eric Rodriguez (MIA) vs NM Jon Burgess (CHC) 1-0

3 comments:

glennpan said...

Mouse slip or no? Emory Tate looked around confused after playing 1. ... c6. We were kind of surprised that he did not play a Sicilian. Later after the game he asked the rules regarding mouse slips.

Glenn

Greg Shahade said...

Angelo is not the top 10 in "game points". He is in the top 10 in MVP points, which is our MVP ranking system which gives bonuses for playing on higher boards, having the black pieces and so forth.

(Although Angelo is probably also in the top 10 in game points, but that's not the link you provided and we don't keep those stats during the season anyway)

Tom Panelas said...

MVP points? That sounds even better. Thanks for the clarification. I've fixed the text.

Tom