Sunday Afternoon

Yesterday I found a new chess player that I met at the Hailey Coffee Company, Jeff Baggett.  Jeff is a very strong chess player that used to run the Community School Chess Club.  He currently plays every Wednesday evening at Atkinson's Park Recreation Center with Norman Friedman and Larry Haelzo (please overlook the spelling errors).  Jeff recently began playing in the ICA tournaments and his performance has made him very well respected.  We played on Saturday as a practice session for next weekend when the ICA State Closed Chess Championship will be played.  We both are planning on attending.

Our pleasant Saturday afternoon game was progressing well until the coffee shop was preparing to close.  We then had to blitz the end game, in which I lost.  I opened with the Colle System as white but once again, stepped out of it with a fruitless knight attack that wrecked the position and enabled him to get pieces and pawns ahead.  It is important to stay in theory when playing such a strong player as I did not have enough time in the end game to really put up much of a challenge. (Jeff at the Southern Open, Garrett Reynolds in background).

We met again today to play at the coffee shop.  I opened with (what I knew of) the Caro-Kann but was unprepared for each of us to have pawns tying up the b1 and a1 diagonals.  I opted for a king-side attack and gave up some very important pawn guards.  I also had a bad, white bishop that kept one rook from rescuing  my position.    We analyzed and then played again.  This time I got the bishop developed sooner and had success.  We swapped sides for the third game and I again opened with the Colle as white.  Much better play with ample time.  Our games, 2 - 2.

Jeff will be teaching kids on Tuesday, as I have to be in Twin Falls.  He is going to offer a guess-the-next-move game using Mikhail Tal vs. ?.  He played the game for me and it offers some very unusual and unexpected moves.  I wish I would be there for this.