Jim West On Chess: Cherniack

Friday, March 21, 2008

Cherniack - Ippolito

The Foxwoods Open is underway in Connecticut. You can follow the live action at monroi.com.

In round two, Alex Cherniack of Massachusetts was outplayed in a rook-and-bishop ending by Dean Ippolito of New Jersey. The fact that the bishops occupied opposite colored squares made the endgame all the more difficult.

Ippolito played the Nimzo-Indian Defense. He won by weaving a mating net around Cherniack's wandering king.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov