Prospect v. Conant (3): Evaluation

In an earlier post, I speculated that Conant's 1st Board, David Lasocki may have felt overly confident after Peter Dimopoulos gave up a bishop for two pawns. I suspect that I may have been projecting my own feelings onto David because my initial impression was that Peter was in some trouble. In a comment to that post, David informed me that, in fact, he was quite unhappy with his position. It turns out that he appreciated the position better than I did.


It is important to remember that the player at the board usually knows more about the position than the casual observer even when the casual observer has a higher rating. This does not mean that the observer might not see some points that the player overlooks. Sometimes these are simple tactics because that is the first thing the casual observer looks for while the player often gets so engrossed in thinking several moves ahead that he may forget to look at one move possibilities. Nevertheless, the player is the one putting the most effort into the position and he should never blindly accept anyone else's opinion.


David suggests "that a good lesson would be how to accurately assess a position as losing and winning." I absolutely agree. I am just not sure I am qualified to teach one. In fact the more I have looked at his game on 1st Board against Peter Dimopoulos, the more complicated it looks to me. My current thinking (which is subject to revision), is that the momemtum shifted both earlier than I thought when I first reviewed the game and earlier than I thought while watching.


This is the position after Black's 29...Ke6.


Black played the very natural looking 30.c4, which I now think may be the losing move. The problem is that it immobilizes White's queenside pawns and leaves him unable to create a passed pawn. It also leaves an entry point for the Black king to penetrate. On the other hand, after 30.Nf4+Ke5 31.Kg2 Bxg3 32.fxg3, things look much different.

One of many possible continuations might be 32...g5 33.Nh5 f4 34.gxf4+ gxf4 35.a5 a6.

Now, if the Black king goes to f5, White has the threat of b4-b5 creating a passed a-pawn. On the other hand, if Black plays ...e3 or ...f3, White blockades the pawns with Kf3 or Ke3 when Black has too many weak pawns to protect.

I fear this was a position for which no general rules of evaluation exist. Unless you have analyzed something like it before, it may be impossible to know where to start when encountering it for the first time over the board. Still, I guess that is what makes the game of chess so fascinating.

Prospect v. Conant (2): Development

The three major goals of the opening are:

(1) Activating your forces, i.e., development;

(2) Controling the center;

(3) Getting the king to safety, usually by castling quickly.

For more information, see Opening Principles by NM Dan Heisman. The difference in the Prospect-Conant match was primarily the failure of Conant's lower boards to get their pieces activated. In effect, they were fighting with one hand tight behind their back.

For the lower boards, the best way to think about development may be this: The more pieces you have out, the more likely it is that your opponent will overlook one of the threats they pose. On 5th Board, Conant's Chris Ford got in trouble when he sent his knight out without any support allowing Prospect's Mike Zwolenik to concentrate his forces to trap it. On 6th Board, Prospect's Parth Patel used his knights and queen to create multiple threats that overwhelmed Conant's Sai Vagvala. On 7th Board , Dhruvin Tarlati distracted Eric Poczatek with an advanced knight while his bishop and queen combined for the knockout blow. On 8th Board, Conant's Conant's Vlad Petrovic, tried to overwhelm his opponent with his queen alone while Prospect's Mike Busby developed all his forces to take control of the game.

Prospect v. Conant (1): Teachable Moments

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.

Prospect v. Conant

In its last match of the season, Prospect lost to Conant 38-30, thereby finishing with a 8-2 record. For the first time all year, Andrew Berowski, Tejas Shah, and Parth Patel all went down to defeat in the same match. Moreover, they all lost on pretty simple tactical oversights that left them with no chance to salvage the game. Perhaps they had gotten overconfident, but hopefully they have learned that they cannot take any moves for granted.

I missed the Conant match because I was in Madison visiting my son at the University of Wisconsin, and my biggest regret was not seeing how excited the Conant players were about winning. In the five years I have been helping out at Prospect, this is the first time anyone has been excited about beating Prospect. Two years ago, the team was 0-10 and a win over Prospect was about as exciting as Grant Hill beating that little fat kid at basketball in the Sprite commercial a few years ago.

Unfortunately, being unable to watch the games made it difficult for me to decipher some of the scoresheets. Here are upper boards: 1st Board; 2nd Board; 3rd Board; 4th Board; 5th Board.