Blaze Douse Dallas; Eric Scores a T-Shirt; Sharks Circling

The first item of business: the Blaze scorched the Dallas Destiny by a score of 3.5.-.5 (ouch) last Wednesday night to continue one of the greatest winning streaks in U.S. Chess League history and clinch first place in the Western Division. With two weeks left in the regular season the Blaze are 8-0, undefeated and untied, and that’s pretty impressive if we do say so ourselves. Even if you disagree (and if you’re reading this you probably don’t) the fact remains, as I understand it, that no other team in league history has ever had a perfect record this late in the season. Deal with it.

In a match where none of our players lost – we had victories by GM Friedel NM Rosen FM Dean and a draw by GM Gurevich—it’s hard to single out one player as the hero, so we won’t.

But it does bring us to the second item of business, which is that NM Eric Rosen, in defeating FM Keaton Kiewra, won the league’s Upset of the Week prize, for which he will get a nifty chess t-shirt from Endgame Clothing. Congratulations, Eric.

More on the Dallas match from the incomparable Bill Brock, who has annotations of the games spread across several posts.

Finally, we have no time to rest on out proverbial laurels, as if we ever would, because we have a rematch with the fearsome Miami Sharks Monday night. Miami eliminated the Blaze from the playoffs last year and went on to the championship round. We got revenge earlier this season, so the Sharks will be looking to chomp our legs off as payback Monday night, and they’re throwing a tough lineup against us.

For a complete coverage of this week's Blaze match, as well as Trevor Magness' weekly puzzle for scholastic players based on this week's Blaze games, visit the Chicago Blaze Blog.