On Friday, May 29th, 2008 at our school in Washington, two of the best chess players faced off. Both had successfully made it through a test of skill in the first ever double-elimination chess tournament held at the school. The details of the second game of this championship battle were recorded by the author of this article.
Note: The champions’ names will remain undisclosed until further notice. We will refer to the winner of the winner’s bracket as Player 1 and the winner of the loser’s bracket as Player 2.
In the first game, Player 2 beat Player 1, and because this was Player 1’s first loss, the two had to battle each other again. This, as Player 2 would say, would be “a battle to the death”. After the game, we weren’t so sure if that final game really was.
In the opening of the second game, Player 1 was white and Player 2 was black. Player 1 opened by moving a pawn two spaces forward. Player 2 mirrored the move, so to speak. This continued with a few other moves. The knights were out, taking pawns and anything in their zigzag path. Then, Player 1 mobilizes his queen, and brings it out. Player 2 starts moving his pawns out, forming a discontinuous line of pawns. This lead to Player 2 being put in check by the opponent’s queen. By this time, both players have most of their pawns out. Player 2 sets up a queen-for-queen trade, quite a risky move. All of a sudden out of nowhere, Player 1 realizes he has a pawn at the other end of the board and promotes that pawn to a second queen. Despite the unexpected pawn promotion, Player 1 keeps walking his pawns. By this time, all of Player 2’s pieces are huddled in a corner (except for an out lier pawn), while Player 1’s pieces cover the whole board. The game suddenly ends when Player 1 puts Player 2 in checkmate with two queens and a bishop. There wasn’t even much of an endgame.