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CK: Did it work? What color
did he play and how many minutes do you get for Blitz Chess?
MM: 10 minutes for each side
and I was white and he played his favorite Russian Leningrad Dutch
against my quiet King Indian Reverse Setup. I like this opening a lot
because it involve solid piece development, early castling, and nothing
happens for over 20 moves, sure, many of my opponents on the black side
try to play gambits against it, but I know my pet opening so well, I
just sidestepped them all and steer the game to more positional channels
of over 6 hours of positional maneuvering and brief skirmishes.
VRB fans: Did you win?
MM: I was pretty nervous at
first, because he kept staring at me and banging the pieces down because
after our respective clocks dwindled down to 5 minutes a piece, the game
was dead even, he was not able to break my center and I stopped all
three of his attempts at an attacks on my kingside.
Then at the 28th
move, he took a risk and over extended himself in the center by
advancing a pawn too deep into my center. I closed up the center, traded
down three sets of chess pieces and won a pawn. We were both down to 3
minutes on our clock and a big crowd was gathering to watch the little
humble Asian from Saigon, China takes on this strong Russian master from
St. Petersburg!
CK: Wow Doc, must have been
a very tense moment? Did you have everything under control?
MM: Yes, I continued to play
my game of Do Nothing Chess, but Do it Well and slowly traded more
pieces and locked up the center. Then he got desperate.
CK: How did you know he got
desperate and was going to do something desperate?
MM: I’ve played thousands of
chess games with top expert players and you can feel it in the air,
smell it, and almost sense the other player’s desperation.
CK: The excitement is
killing us? What did he do that was so desperate?
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