Marquee Matchups / Pivotal Performers

Hello everyone! This is Alex Lenderman again.

Should I (or anyone else) be surprised that I didn't play for the first time in five matches, yet our team won the match anyway? Not at all! As I've said in previous blogs, we work as a team and have people contribute in different ways from all the boards. This time it was our manager, Alex Stripunsky, who came up with a big win, beating GM John Fedorowicz in elegant fashion, outplaying him using a strong Knight and taking advantage of Fedorowicz's aggressive Pawn moves. It all came from a calm Taimanov variation, which I don't know extremely well, but honestly speaking I couldn't quite tell who was better throughout until Alex took advantage of a few overly aggressive moves, won a few pawns, and quickly improved to a winning position. He was the first one to finish which naturally gave us a big leg up; not only did we score the first point, but also from a somewhat unlikely source, as we had only scored 1 / 4 previously on the top board, and hopefully this is the start of some real improvement in that regard.

The next game to finish was our young talented Board Four, Alex Ostrovskiy, who was Black and gave a very representable fight the whole game against the very clutch All-Star Board Four from last year, Iryna Zenyuk. It was a Slav Defense whose opening was very similar to a game I had previously played against him, and this time Alex played the middlegame much better. 5... Bf5 was likely a little more accurate rather than 5... b6, but he decided to follow the same basic plan he'd likely seen in my last week's game, though the line with 5. c5 is a little different than the line with 5. h3. Instead of 6... Qxb6 right away, 6... c5 first followed by Nbd7 was better, ensuring that he wouldn't have to lose his dark squared Bishop. As a result of this, White had the two Bishop advantage the whole game in an open position, which made for a very tough uphill battle, but Alex fought very well, and only in mutual time pressure did he finally succumb. However, he put up very stiff resistance and all we can ask from our players is for them to do the best they can, and Alex certainly gave a great effort and try, and we're certain he'll come up with some big wins for us in the future. Hopefully that will happen soon once he makes a few adjustments, gets more used to the USCL, and maybe plays people a little less experienced while having the White pieces :)

So we were tied 1 - 1, but the whole year our biggest strength has been the two middle boards; numbers speak for themselves as on Boards 1 and 4 we are 1 / 4 and 2.5 / 4 respectively (now 2/5 and 2.5/5). However, on Boards 2 and 3, going into the match we had an astounding 8 / 8!. So, I felt confident that on one of our pivotal boards, both matchups between two IM's, that someone would come through for us and indeed neither disappointed. Dmitry had previously struggled a little bit on Board One and chose to mix up openings a little bit against NY manager and in my view, the co-champion for the US Women's Championship, Irina Krush. He played the Tarrasch against d4 and got a slightly worse but very playable position as Black, with a nice time advantage. It looked a lot like a draw the whole game, but Irina, likely due to the team situation, noticing that Eli was up a pawn against Jay, seemed to get a little desperate. Since that obviously meant that a draw by her would at best end up tieing the match 2 - 2 and given their tough 1 - 3 start, Irina probably felt a drawn match was not good enough. Given that she was slightly better, tried to get a little bit fancy with her pieces, probably tried a little too hard to win, over pressing a bit and in mutual time pressure, she tangled up her pieces and a left them too loose. Dmitry found some excellent clutch moves during the pressure period and then found a nice tactic to simplify the game into a winning Bishop vs Knight endgame.

So when Dmitry won, and we were up 2 - 1, obviously we were in great shape. Even though Eli had a little trouble with time management in his game against popular Jay Bonin with Jay posing some strong challenges, Eli still had a better position out of the opening and slowly outplayed Jay to win a Pawn. However, Jay did create a lot of counterplay, and even though Eli was never at risk of losing, he probably made some inaccuracies in time pressure to turn it into a drawn position. However, at that point, due to the match score, Jay had to win. He tried everything possible to do that, but Eli naturally saw his ideas and easily defended against them. In fact, the only one really could have won on the board in the latest stages was Eli. However, Jay ended up trying so hard that he accidentally he lost on time. So we won 3 - 1, which was helpful for our tiebreaks.

Once again I'm very proud of my team and how we won without me in the lineup. A few people joked in their blogs saying that since I wasn't playing, our team wouldn't be able to win, but frankly I didn't like those jokes or find them funny since they implied that the team is all about me which is a big slap in the face to the rest of our team. I am happy we won and proved otherwise, and I am looking forward to the rest of the season. Unless a complete miracle happens, the playoffs should be a certainty so our job now is to try to win the division and get the draw odds and all the other advantages afforded by that. Hopefully we can manage to do that while at the same time testing some different lineups. Until next week then :)