August TNT Round 2

Week 2 - By the way, I am not commenting on every game, just those that have an interesting tactical shot, or ending or were just plain entertaining to play over. Your comments are always welcome (Boron) Full game scores at http://www.chessmanitoba.com

Top rated Jeff Babb defeated Joseph Van Wyk when the latter missed the power of 26. c6 .
25... Ke8 seems to hold everything, although White has an imposing looking Queenside pawn roller in the works.

Michael Gibbons must have had the chess gods on his side when Lu Zhou didn't play 32...Bxc1.

Position after 31. Nd6


Or 37...Rg6 ! Or am I missing something here ?

Jay Khedkar had a slight advantage for the entire game against Weixi Liu until he simplified into an ending with 31. Rc8 (or perhaps a few moves earlier) which turned out to be worse than it initially looked. I must say I was impressed with Liu's handling of that ending.

Lauritson defeated Igal Raihmann which featured pins and skewers all over the board.

Blair Rutter's fianchettoed bishops destroyed Alex Nikouline. There was no obvious big blunder that started the carnage.

Atem-Oberton 0-1 What can I say ? It's never over til it's over. Some kind of chess karma; as you may recall Tang-Atem from week 1

Wood-Kwiatek 0-1 Put your chess engines on this one.

Schulz-Letain 1-0 This game was equal until 30...e5 gave away a pawn and that was all Waldemar needed.