Author: Ken West, CCSCSL Championship Blogger

http://www.saintlouischessclub.org/US-Championship-2009-Player-Bios/Robert-Hess.html, one of the youngest players in the championship, wants to earn his third GM norm at this tourney. Playing the white side against Larry Christiansen. Greg Shahade wrote in his preview in the May issue of Chess Life that Chistiansen has been “relatively out of practice.”
 
After his win, Hess journeyed from the top to the bottom floor of the chess club where Shahade and Sutovsky are providing their analysis on ICC. Hess answered some questions and went over a possible line of play with Sutovsky.
 
After Hess left the room he signed a couple of chessboards for some of those on the scene. The event is drawing spectators from around the country. Daniel Parmet, a chess player out of Chicago, has come down to watch. He has made it to the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis for a couple tournaments and stated he didn’t want to miss this.

Blog #2: Approximately 5:30 pm CST

Author: Ken West, CCSCSL Championship Blogger



Jennifer Shahade told the audience a bit before 5 p.m. that Gary Kasparov was following the games online. That’s pretty good company. It would be great to have him commenting live here.

Sutovsky said Shabalov made a mistake somewhere. Earlier in the game he preferred Shabalov’s position. However, Sutovsky said looking at the position around move 20 it was looking bad for Shabalov. On move 23 Shabalov had 20 minutes compared with 53 for the young Nakamura, who is playing white.

Move 30 in Charles Lawton‘s game, and my chess analysis machine, Paul Mechem, still thinks it is equal and Charles may even have improved a bit. Paul thinks black could have trouble with defending the b pawn if he trades off too much material.
Sutovsky, in going over the Gulko-Hughes game, ripped off a five or so move series that shows Hughes would have a losing game after 25...Nd7. After the white rook takes the b pawn and the black Knight attacks the white queen, and then the white rook takes the black rook on the 7th. The black knight takes the queen, but the next few moves showed black losing.

Sutovsky got a lot of laughs when he was asked how many candidate moves he looked at before coming up with the winning sequence. He said it was the first line he looked at, that it was typical. Well, maybe for his level. As Jennifer said, when you can analyze as quickly as Sutovsky, you too can be a master. Listening to him analyze and the numbers of moves he comes up with, it’s easy to see why he was Gata Kamsky’s second during the run up to the world championship.

After he analyzed that line he and Jennifer went to the game. Hughes made the knight move to d7. She pointed out that Hughes had less than four minutes on his clock.

*IM Robert Hess has pulled off the first win of the tournament!