Prospect beat Conant today by a score of 47-21. The teams played evenly on the top four boards with Prospect taking 1st and 4th and Conant taking 2nd and 3rd. However, Prospect swept 5th-8th boards for a comfortable win in the match. The top four boards were all close games in which the winners had to work hard to bring home the full point. Two of the wins could easily have been losses and the other two could easily have been draws.
From a coaching standpoint, there were lots of teachable moments:
(1) Don't underestimate your opponent's counterplay just because he dropped a piece. On 1st Board and 2nd Board, the Conant players were each up a piece against the Prospect players. in both cases, however, the Conant players had to weaken their positions in order to gain the material advantage. On 1st Board, Peter Dimopoulos was able to exploit the weaknesses in John Lasocki's position to win the game and Andrew Berowski had very good drawing chances against Greg Ruffing. On both boards, it seemed that the Conant players underestimated the weaknesses they had incurred.
(2) Don't let your opponent's time trouble change the way you play your game. On 2nd Board and 4th Board, the Conant players were in time trouble. Prospect's Kevin Kostka made the mistake of playing quickly in the hopes that John Calash would run out of time, but with less than ten seconds on his clock, John did a terrific job of creating problems for Kevin although Kevin held on to win. On 2nd Board, Conant's Greg Ruffing turned over scorekeeping duties to a teammate when his clock went below five minutes and Andrew Berowski did so as well even though he still had twenty minutes. It is just speculation, but I cannot help but wonder whether Andrew might have seen the threat that cost him the game if he had been forced to take an extra moment thinking about his opponent's move while writing it down.
(3) In an ending where both sides have bishops and pawns and the bishops travel on the same color squares, the pawns belong on the squares of the opposite colors. Conant's Joseph Man played such an ending very nicely against Tejas Shah to bring home the full point on 3rd Board.
(4) No matter how much you like to play the Sicilian Dragon, there are times when you are better off playing ...e6 and ...Be7 rather than ...g6 and ...Bg7. Both Tejas and Peter created problems for themselves by sticking to their favorite development scheme when it really wasn't warranted.
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2 comments:
Hello, this is David Lasocki, Conant's first board (John is my father). I agree with your comment that I sacrificed a whole lot positionally for the bishop, I do not agree with the statement that I underestimated the position and thought it was an easy win. If anything, I thought that immediately taking the bishop was a blunder and felt defeated after losing the two pawns for the bishop, and that led to me losing. Anyway, I feel a good lesson would be how to accurately assess a position as losing and winning, I know I would definately benefit on hearing how you assess a position. I assessed my position as losing, and tried to do to much desperation tactics to try and get a draw, whereas, in actuallity, as you say, I was not losing, I was at least in a drawing position, and I blew it.
My wife and I went to Michigan for the weekend so I kind of rushed to get a few thoughts about the match posted on Thursday night. Perhaps I was projecting my own feelings on to you. While I was watching the game, I was not sure Peter had enough for the bishop until pretty late in the game. In that kind of time control, I think you had a very tough decision between grabbing the pawn or bringing the knight back to play defense.
I hope to take a bit closer look at the games this week. Thanks for commenting.
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