12th Arkport Open-Marijan's Games

It was good to play in 12th Arkport this past Saturday, September 22. Thank you, Harish, for driving David and me. Final result for me was fine, although I hoped to play at least 2 games with higher rated players, but in order to do that you need to win each game.

The full cross table for the tournament is at http://main.uschess.org/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,201/ and then type in 12th Arkport

I managed to win first one. Play with pawns at the end was nice. Worl - Procyk

Second game was a draw against Shao, who is fast improving. He was pawn up, after inaccuracies in my opening play, but I fought hard to secure draw, which you can see from the following game. Wrong color Bishop and a-Pawn up is a theoretical draw. I was putting of to learn Nimzo-Indian (mainly I tried to avoid it), but now I need to do something about that. Procyk - Shao

Third game was a strange one. I played against 1200+, but I had feeling he was much stronger. He made big mistake in 10th move, loosing a piece, so all was over in 13. Zhow - Procyk The best game was my last game with Craig A La Salle (2141) who is a fine player from Rochester. I only used about half an hour in this game because I had played a similar game on line just a few days ago. By transposition we reached the same position after 17 moves as I had had in the on line game. It was pure chance that I got to play it again in Arkport. Although the 18th move went differently, it did not matter as white was in command by then anyways. We can first look at the on line game. Procyk - Ichibanov And now let us look at game from Arkport which brought me a share of 1st place. Procyk - La Salle If you have any question about some particular move in these games against La Salle or Ichibanov, I can probably provide an answer. La Salle asked me after the game where he went wrong, and Ichibanov wrote: "Did I miss any way out after 17 d6? I looked long and hard but failed to find a successful defense." Possibly it was all over at that point. What do you think?