Busy weekend: Downers Grove repeats as CICL champions

Congratulations to DGCC on their second consecutive win! Motorola Kings, DRW Trading, and the Rogue Squadron tied for second.

I had never been to Fermilab before: what a great site! After the event, I turned the wrong way and had the pleasure of tracing the cyclotron's path above ground.

Round 1 was played during the workweek.  This painful game (well, painful for me) was instrumental in Motorola's win over the Rogue Squadron. The sac on move 27 was dictated by the match situation (a draw was worthless), but Black had missed a convincing win a couple moves earlier with 24...Nxe2! followed by the fork on f3. Igor's game continuation was good enough:

Saturday was more fun for us.  In the final round match Rogue Squadron-Fermilab, I had the pleasure of kibitzing this interesting Sicilian Rossolimo battle between David Franklin and Dmitri Sergatskov.  David annotates:

CICL: a lucky escape

My Rogue Squadron teammate David Franklin doesn't get positionally rolled very often, but Mike Failor of Enova Financial inflicts some serious positional hurt. Then things get complicated, and both players miss some shots....

Rolling the Rossolimo

David Peng's parents, Jenny and Bill, were kind enough to send along David's first-round game from Kings Island. I find it difficult to believe that a nine-year-old could play such a game.

 NM Kristopher Meekins of Ohio tries to outplay David strategically in the trendy Rossolimo Sicilian, but David more than holds his own. 19.g4?! is a critical decision by White: if Black doesn't capture en passant, White locks up the kingside and plays on the rest of the board (King's Indian players know this theme well).  So David keeps the game open: kingside attacks are stronger because that's where His Majesty lives.

White is still coping adequately until the moment after David poses the beautiful question 25...c4! Houdini suggests that White may still be slightly better after 26.Kh2, but even a master can easily go wrong in such a position.