GOTW: Razvan 3 - ChessBrahs 1

John Upper's picture
Submitted by John Upper on Tue, 01/24/2017 - 23:56

Razvan 3 - ChessBrahs 1

The diagram comes from the game between GM Razvan Preotu and GM Alexandre LeSiege from round 2 of the PRO Chess League. White to play...

PRO Chess League

The PRO Chess League consists of 48 teams from around the world, with many of the world's top-10 players, playing online rapid matches once a week. The format is a Rapid Schevenningen Match: so every player plays all four opponents on the opposing team, with a time control of G/15 + 2s.

Canada has two teams: the Montreal ChessBrahs and the Toronto Dragons, both with a mainly Canadian line-up reinforced by foreign GMs. Montreal and Toronto played in Round 2, January 18, 2017. The lineups were: 

Toronto Dragons:

Chess.com nicknames = real names

  1. likemachine = GM Bator Sambuev
  2. Anaconda1983 = GM Gergely Szabo
  3. attack2mateU = GM Razvan Preotu 
  4. NeverW84M8 = IM Michael Song

Montreal ChessBrahs:

Chess.com nicknames = real names

  1. chessawp= GM Li Chao
  2. Caefellion = GM Alexandre Lesiege
  3. KNVB = IM Aman Hambleton
  4. michaelk123 = FM Michael Kleinman

Montreal won the match 9-7, once again relying on the strong result of their #1 board: Chinese GM Li Chao (a "free agent") has scored 7.5/8 in the first two rounds, conceding only one draw to GM Bator Sambuev, who plays for Toronto.

The big Canadian story from the match was the terrific result of Razvan Preotu. The seventeen-year-old Canadian GM scored 3/4 against the ChessBrah team, good for a 2685 TPR. The games were far from perfect -- they are, after all, played at a 15m + 2s time control -- and Razvan had a couple of lucky escapes against Hambleton and LeSiege. Even so, his attack in the final game against LeSiege, from a very well-known position in the Lopez, is (with the exception of one pair of moves) a well-played and vivid example of how quickly White can conjure up an attack from what looks like a closed/maneuvering position.

For more info and links about the PRO Chess League, see these posts:

 http://chess.ca/newsfeed/node/923

https://www.chess.com/article/view/pro-chess-league-guide

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