Player of the Week

Each week I will be looking at a player from our Chess @ 4 series. This will be the player of the week and it is possible to be Player of the Week more than once! To be considered for this position, all you need to do is score 15 points during the week in the Chess  @ 4 series on Tornelo. Chess @ 4 is a series of 5 round events that run Monday to Friday, starting at 4:00pm. Between the rounds there are interviews with players, analysis of games and positions, and chat about other chess related things.

A relatively new player to Chess @ 4 is Harshad Gurumoorthy who only started playing these tournaments about a month ago. Harshad was already quite strong at his first tournament but has quickly improved his rating.

Harshad is now very close to the magic 1000 rating. He seems to have a regular set of openings he plays, is quite strong at spotting tactics, and plays endgames quite well. This means he has a lot of ways that he can win games. First he uses his strategic knowledge of openings, then he finds tricks to win material, and he has technique to finish games off. 
​Harshad's favourite opening seems to be the London Opening.

Would you know what to play here? The London Opening has recently been played by Magnus Carlsen. It was considered a safe and sometimes boring opening, but recently there have been a lot of attacking ideas that have been found for White. Harshad shows good attacking technique in this game, opening the h-file to attack Black's king.

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I have noticed Harshad plays some interesting tactics including Zwischenzugs. This is an in between move. In this position White has just played 1.b4 and the obvious thing is to move the bishop away, but Harshad plays a move in between the attack/run away sequence. 1..Nd4 attacking a bigger White piece. White now played 2.Qg3. Should the bishop move to safety now? See the answer here!

This endgame is tough, but players need to remember that "rooks belong behind passed pawns". So Black should play 1..Ra2 to get his rook behind White's passed pawn. Instead he played 1..Rf2 meaning to push his own passed h-pawn and a pawn race began!

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Black to move in this position. What is best? What should you be trying to do in this ending? What is most important? Find the answers here!
So Harshad has shown that he is a good all round player. What does he need to do to improve? Just keep working on these things and keep playing lots of challenging chess. If he can get his rating to 1000, then he will have a new challenge in the Premier section of Chess @ 4 to test himself.

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