Saturday 13 December 2008

Olympiad revision - Part 1

I'm a "glass half empty" kind of guy, where I dwell on my losses far more than I celebrate my successes. This was certainly apparent at the Olympiad, where I tended to treat the games where I did well with a shrug of the shoulders, while my losses were followed by me mumbling about the fact that "I cannot play chess" and mentally kicking my butt up and down the playing hall.
To remedy this I've decided to start my review of my Olympiad games with the games that I did well in. And I certainly got off to a good start with my first round game. Up until this point I have gone 0/3 in Round 1 of the Olympiad (I rested for Round 1 in 2002), but the accelerated pairings at least gave us an easier team than we might usually get.
My opponent was Guillermo Carvalho from Uruguay who as rated 2249. How you start a tournament like this is often more to do with psychology than form, so given the choice between 8.d3 (solid) and 8.d4 (aggressive) I chose the solid route. Even then my opponent was able to get his knights on good squares, but I endeavoured to neutralise this by avoiding exchanges until they were favourable to me (15.Qf1 being an example). By the time we passed move 30 the position was essentially equal, and the game ended when my opponent claimed a repetition, which I accepted without the involvement of the arbiter.



5 comments:

Unknown said...

Actually Shaun, I don't think the position repeated 3 times. Are you saying it was more a draw by agreement than repetition but for some reason you wanted it to be officially a draw by rep?

Shaun Press said...

No. He began to claim a draw by repetition, which also counts as a draw offer, and as I was happy with the draw I told him I would take the draw anyway.

Shaun Press said...

Note. He was going to play Kg7, which does repeat the position for a third time.

Anonymous said...

On that point it's important to note that you must claim the draw without making the move on the board (ref Laws of Chess 9.2), but rather just write it down without playing it. Once you move your right to claim lapses. A number of half-points have been lost this way. An incident based on this rule occurred at the World U/14 a year or so ago.

This is not just a technicality. The point is that if you were able to play the move first then you could use your opponent's time both to check that it was a repetition and that you wished to claim the draw, which would be useful if you were short of time.

Unknown said...

Quite True Ian!

I was once playing a tournament on the Gold Coast and caught out a vastly under rated opponent on that rule. He was rated about 500 points lower than me, made his move, then claimed repition.

To my horror I looked at my score sheet and saw that he could be right and that the position might have repeated 3 times.

I then told him I didn't think it had and he should get the DOP. He did and the DOP said because he had made the move repeating the position a third time, instead of stopping the clock and announcing it, it was now my move!

Naturally I broke up the repetition and he was so demoralized after the adverse DOP ruling, even though the position was relatively equal, he played like he had lost because of the DOP ruling, and I cleaned up the game :)