Sep-28-24
 | | FSR: Black should play 7...a6 and only then 8...Bd7. My 7...Bd7? blundered the d-pawn. I could have soldiered on, but resigned in disgust. |
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Sep-28-24
 | | perfidious: <FSR>, while I never met this player, this is a familiar name; as we won the national team HS championship at Cleveland 1977, he was one of the high individual scorers (James Thibault won on tiebreak with 7-1, with Seirawan one of numerous players on 6.5). |
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Sep-28-24
| | FSR: <perfidious> Yes, Mark was a promising junior back in the day. Looks like he finally broke 2200 in 1994 (20 years after this game), largely lost interest in the game, peaked at 2223 in 1996, fell to his floor of 2000, and stopped playing in 2014. A common trajectory, unfortunately. Life gets in the way of chess. |
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Sep-29-24
| | perfidious: <FSR>, I recall Marovitch as being over 1900 in 1977, though just outside the top ten seeds at Cleveland. Never saw him play again. Used to see his name on top junior lists, so he was clearly a player of promise. As you say, that dang thing called life so often has the last word. Nunn wrote of that happening in his best games collection. |
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Sep-29-24
| | FSR: <perfidious> Times sure have changed. Back in those days, a kid who was a 1900 in high school was a fairly big deal. At the absolute highest level, Fischer qualified for the grandmaster title at the age of 15 1/2. That record stood for 33 years until Judit Polgar broke it. Today, there are six kids who became grandmaster before age 13, and another ten before age 14 (pre-high school, roughly). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess... Faustino Oro qualified for IM a couple months ago at 10 years, 8 1/2 months, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust... so he surely has decent chances to break Mishra's record of 12 years, 4 months, and 25 days. Nowadays if one hears of a promising young star who failed to make GM before age 16, one thinks, "Jeez, I thought this kid was supposed to be good?" |
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Sep-29-24
| | perfidious: <FSR>, I played an online blitz game with Radjabov in 2001 when he had just made GM, aged 14, which was damned impressive then. |
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Apr-08-25
| | FSR: I should have played on. It is not so simple. L Barczay vs P Szilagyi, 1964 (1/2-1/2, 42). Incidentally, future GM Alex Yermolinsky fell into this trap three years after I did! Z Lanka vs Yermolinsky, 1977. Opening Explorer shows that White finds 8.Ndb5! only a third of the time! |
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Apr-08-25
| | FSR: I find this hard to believe, but supposedly Najdorf also played 7...Bd7?, and Keres missed 8.Ndb5!, in Keres vs Najdorf, 1956 (1/2-1/2, 41). I guess that makes Mark stronger than Keres! |
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Kibitzing
