Zwischenzug

Zwischenzug
The newsletter of the Midland County Chess Club

Lubbock reminds me of a similie – or two: The Midland versus Lubbock match caused a lot of pain. I’m not going to go through this pain by myself — the rest of you guys need to share it with me, and when I think of painful reading, I think of bad similies. So no one gets to stop reading. Take your punishment like men.

The Lubbock team came from all over the world, was as different from each other as chalk from cheese, yet the result to Midland when the Lubbockiners took the board was as damaging as a tornado going through a chainsaw factory, a solid 20 – 12 win for the visitors from up north.

The Lubbock team dominated from the top down with top rated Chris Cohen calm as a millpond as he compiled a 3.5 score while second rated Chase Waters was happy as a rat with a gold tooth as he won three of his four games. The Midlanders found beating Rebecca Lelko (3.5 points) as hard as putting a six legged cat in a pail of water, while Konstantin Parkhomento (3 points) was as cold as a brass toilet in the Yukon.

For Midland it was all funny as a rubber crutch, and now there’s nothing left but to apportion the blame.

Charlie Vetter’s problem was time management as he took so long thinking that he ended up playing each of his endings like a cheetah on a motorcycle.

For Willie Callo the problem was that his castled king position was like a letter, not any good unless it was opened.

On the positive side, we all I think had a fun time and the library was a good place to play. How’s about the newspaper giving us two days worth of coverage? And who expected a four foot by three foot page one color picture of Bruce in Sunday’s paper?

Our kids also did well. Joel Cortes won two games, trailing only Bruce (2.5) and Charlie (2.5) and was the only Midlander to beat Dneprovosk’s Konstantin and Jared had a wonderful win against an adult player.

So in short, wait till next year.