Game of the Year: 10th Place --------------------------------------------
by League Commissioner IM Greg Shahade
--------------------------------------------
This is the
fourth installment of a series of weekly articles that will determine
what
game was voted as the Best Game of 2006. The only games eligible for
Game of the Year are
the thirteen "Games of the Week".
There are four judges ranking the games from 1st to 13th. If a game is
ranked as 1st place by a
judge, it receives 13 points and if it's ranked 13th place, it receives
1
point and so on. If there is a tie, whichever game had the highest
individual
ranking will win on tiebreak. Thus if one game is ranked 1st by 2
judges, and another game is ranked 1st only by one judge, the one that
is ranked 1st by more judges is awarded the higher position.
The four judges are:
IM Greg Shahade (USCL Commissioner)
NM Arun Sharma
NM Dennis Monokroussos (Regular commentator for ChessBase.com)
GM Alex Shabalov+WFM Elizabeth Vicary (These two worked as a team to
determine their rankings) 10th Place: Jose
Cabrera (MIA) vs Michael Lee
(SEA) 0-1
Cabrera
- Lee after 25. g3-g4
Black sacrificed a piece with 25.....Nxg4 26. fxg4 h3
27. Kg1 Qxg4 28. Ng3 f5 after which things got very
interesting.
Below are comments from the judges on what position they ranked this
game and their reason for doing so, in parenthesis is the ranking given
by that judge and the number of points awarded for that ranking:
IM Greg Shahade(6th
Place: 8 points):
Well it seems as if I picked this game much higher
than all of the other judges. This ruins my streak, as the first three
games eliminated were picked in 13th, 12th and 11th by me. There are a
few reasons I ranked this game highly. First off, after white gave back
the piece on move 30, my initial instinct was that white should be
almost winning due to the weakness of the black king, as did quite a
few other people watching the game. However it turns out that white
isn't winning at all and that the game is quite complicated. It just
seemed that black had a rather unenviable position, that turned into a
great position, without any gigantic mistakes from white. Probably
white had to play something like 36. Rxh3 to curb black's initiative.
In all it was a good fighting game by both players, in
which I felt the quality of play was quite high, especially given the
fact that it was being played on Board 4. I thought it was a good
example of a common situation where a young and talented yet
inexperienced player gets completely outplayed positionally in the
opening only to muddy the issue somehow, play some weird tactics and
then ambush his opponent.
NM
Dennis Monokroussos (10th Place: 4
points):
Black played well, but white's collapse, likely caused by time trouble,
prevented it from taking a higher place.
GM Alex Shabalov + WFM Elizabeth Vicary (11th Place: 3 points):
Elizabeth
Vicary: "Are you prejudiced because their ratings are 2070 and 2103?"
Alex Shabalov: "Yeah, it's probably garbage." NM Arun
Sharma (11th Place: 3 points):
I awarded this game, Game of the Week mostly because
I felt that it was one of the best played board four games we had this
season (from both sides) and it was also pretty exciting. However I
really can't see it's excitement level measuring up to most of the
other Games of the Week, so I had to rank it relatively lowly.
