Two USATE 2007 Upsets and Other Games

FM Bartell - GM Yudasin, USATE 2007
White to play and win.

I have posted two upset victories from the 2007 US Amateur Teams East for your enjoyment.

Games from the tournament have finally begun to trickle in: I recently discovered that TWIC #644 (posted 3/12/2007 and also available in other formats) contains a number of games from the 2007 USATE, including several by players from our club. And The Chess Coroner has annotated two USATE miniatures by our players.

The file at TWIC contains the interesting upset win by Arthur Shen (1605) over NM David Gertler (2286), which was also annotated this Sunday by Pete Tamburro and Steve Doyle in their excellent Star Ledger column. Arthur has been a student of NM Scott Massey, who also taught his older brother Victor (who is New Jersey's youngest master). It is an interesting game with several fascinating features (not least the problematic ending position where Gertler resigned), so I have posted it online with some notes expanding on those offered in the Ledger.

I was disappointed, however, not to find the full score of another interesting upset win, where FM Tommy Bartell (the former NJ Champion and a frequent visitor to the Kenilworth Chess Club) won against GM Leonid Yudasin. Tommy was visiting the club last night and tried, on my request, to reconstruct the game for us from memory but with little success. He was, however, able to show us the critical position (see diagram above), which is what I had most wanted to see anyway. Yudasin had just played ....Qe5? setting up what looked like a deadly cross-pin on the Bishop at e3 along the e-file and the diagonal leading to g1. But Tommy demonstrated that it is actually White who has a win in this position, which came completely out of left field, as they say....