Marshall U2300 Tournament

I scored a respectable 3/4 at the Marshall CC U2300 event held February 23 and 24th at the Marshall CC. I gained 20 rating points. I drew with FM Boris Privman and FM Erez Klein. My game with Boris Privman was a roller coaster ride. I will analyze that game in a separate post.

Marshall CC Saturday Game 60

I scored 2.5/4 at the Marshall Saturday G/60 on 2/16/2013. I drew the following game with Nasyr Akylbekov.

Exchange Sac Game

As I mentioned in an earlier post I'm starting to get a sense of when an exchange sacrifice could be appropriate. I believe my opponent could have played better in the later stages of this game. However, I believe my exchange sacrifice idea is correct given the situation on the board. White should be able to hold the position atleast.

I will post more examples of my games featuring a successful exchange sacrifice as they occur.

Kramnik - McShane London Chess Classic 2012

If you have not seen it yet, this is fully worth the 20 minutes of time to view:
Themes of interest to me in the game are compensation for a pawn, active pieces vs. theoretical quality ( exchange sacrifice etc. ) and pawn structure. In this game White played to damage Black's structure around the Black king and the resulting weaknesses permitted White to follow with a nice exchange sacrifice.

Alekhine - Yates Hastings 1925/1926

I recently dusted off my copy of Pawn Power in Chess by Hans Kmoch. This is one of the older volumes in my collection of chess books. I never got through reading it completely I suspect because I lacked sufficient chess understanding earlier on to digest the ideas in the book. I now find this book to be valuable not just for the ideas about how pawns should be used but also as an index to an excellent collection of master games for study.
Alekhine apparently did not consider his win vs Yates at Hastings 1925-1926 worthy enough to include in his own best games collection. ( This is not the great game Alekhine - Yates 1922 which ends with a White king march to win an exchange. ) In fact Alekhine's collection contains no games from Hastings 1925/1926. Hans Kmoch references the game as an example of how a knight is superior to a bishop when pawns are on the same color squares as the bishop.
Alekhine - Yates Hastings 1925/1926