Congratulations to Nezh for his round two win, and kudos to all four contestants for playing their round two matches on schedule. Now for round 3!

Standings:


Pairings:


The deadline to finish round two is July 16th, but as always playing sooner is encouraged. Good luck everyone!

I slacked off and waited a day to send out PMs, so the deadline to finish round two is now July 17th. Otherwise, the above information remains accurate.

Nezh-Hackdeath 5.30 pm ET tomorrow

can i still get in on this?

.

Nezh-Hackdeath starting now on fics.

Nezh 2-0 Hackdeath

I caught the end of the second game; nice finish Nezh!

Tks...though a bit a bolt in a blue sky, can´t say it was ,,planned", was probably lost after like 10 moves. The (un)funny part is Hackdeath had already used this tricky move order (or move order trick)before on me in one of the tournies.

To be honest it worked out quite well for you, I must have made a mistake but can't find it. Can anyone see/know an improvement for white, its quite tricky with a knight getting trapped and in the others' way.



The game continuation:

Not sure if the discussion really needs to be in spoilers but



Some vague and probably inaccurate thoughts, especially since I'm too lazy to put this on a board.

After the game continuation 10. Ne (or g)xf7 Rg8 White MUST be better. Black loses a pawn, the right to castle kingside and his pieces are disorganized. If this is a viable defense for Black we might as well baptise it the Twoplustwo Variation. Don´t know exactly where you could improve between moves 10-15. For Black 7...Nd5 is the route to safety according to Rybka and an early Bg4 is clearly better than trying to move back into the the 4...Nd7 lines a tempo down. From the diagram position Rybka gives 10. Ngxf7 Be7 11. Qe2 0-0 12. Ng5 Bd6 13. Ngf3 c5 14. 0-0 b6 as best (+0.67), not a very attractive proposal for Black. The Beast thus chooses to not take the Rook on h8 and a likely R v two pieces, but to hang on to a an extra pawn and a structural advantage in the form of the weak pawn on e6, albeit with some prospects for active play for Black. Resuming I´d say the ´Twoplustwo Variation´ is close to unplayable.

Thanks, yeah Ngxf7 (with d4 first perhaps) is much superior, it's quite a simple concept, the e5 knight can't be dislodged by a pawn but the g5 knight can. I think I convinced myself that the knight was going to get trapped on f7 with h6 and Rh7/f8 ideas in this line but they're too slow, and my analysis made me believe Nxe6 was very strong in the game but in fact its just unclear.

Me and Nikitheone are about to start, spectators welcome to see my demise

1/2 - 1/2 after the first game which had quite an incredible amount of blunders and where I was lucky enough to escape with a draw in the end.

Second game in a couple mins

Nikitheone 1.5 - 0.5 YKW

Should have been 2-0, I really do suck

Glad to see you have such a wealth of self-confidence, YKW

Congrats to niki and Nezh, I'll get round four pairings up soon!

Nezh dominated the first half of this double round robin. A win over nikitheone in this round would clinch at least a share of first place overall. In fact a Nezh win coupled with Hackdeath drawing or losing would clinch the championship. On the other hand, if niki can beat Nezh then we're back in a dogfight with two rounds left... which will it be? In any case, best of luck to everyone.

The deadline for this round is Saturday, July 31. I'm going on a vacation until the middle of that week, so I may not be able to prod you guys too much with PMs, get those games scheduled and played!

Yall ready for the comeback Topalov style?

wow, just realized i ve been missing a lot. Nicely done tournament director!
Where r the games Niki-YKW?

search nikitheone on ficsgames

i would prefer that my and nezh games would be marked +/- , cuz we coulnd't manage time to play, not 2-0.

YKW vs Hackdeath on FICS now.

I am on monster mother****ing tilt right now.