In San Francisco many years ago, I played at the chess tables at Fifth and Market near the Powell Street cable car turnaround. One of my fellow locals whom I quickly learned to avoid playing for money (unless I could afford to lose some) was a 2500ish Filipino IM named Omar.

Now, Omar was a blitz wizard. There was another player of close to my strength (~2200), a transplanted New Yorker who did play him with some regularity — taking odds of five minutes to one on the clock. Later, they sped these games to odds of one minute against 10 seconds. I never saw Omar lose one of those games, and time was no worry for someone capable of completing 10 moves in one second, as I saw him do on several occasions.

As it turned out, I played Omar only twice, and he won convincingly both times. My consolations were twofold: (1) at least I was taking no odds and (2) both games were quite good ... at least until they weren't anymore.

I remember no details of the first game, but the second featured my all-out kingside attack against his Scheveningen Sicilian, featuring multiple speculative sacrifices.

When the final explosions of the attack finally died away, I'd won the exchange. Twice over. I now entered the endgame with two rooks against two knights — and four pawns.

For just a sanguine moment, I was happy with my position. Then the game continued. I tried everything to activate my rooks and get them behind the pawns, but Omar closed all the lines and the pawns marched ever closer. A few moves later, my constricted and congested rooks gave up the ghost one by one as the pawns and knights wove webs around my king, and I soon resigned, with a position that looked as if it had been preserved in formaldehyde since the Johnson administration.

Ironically, however, Omar told me after the game that he was relieved that I settled for the two exchanges, because if I'd continued the attack with yet another sacrifice, he would have resigned on the spot.

Meanwhile, I still have occasional nightmares involving a swarm of self-replacing pawns and knights that I pick off with increasing desperation as I run out of pieces and the number of pawns and knights closing in on me remains undiminished.

<Lein>inger and the Ants?

No you didn't.

<What are 'Notable Games'?

On some player pages, tournament pages, and opening pages, there is a list of Notable Games. In the case of player pages, this list highlights some important games that the player has won or drawn. On opening pages, you can see some milestone games in its history. If you want to see some interesting games by a player, or of a certain opening, this is usually a good place to start. The lists of notable games are calculated by finding the games which most frequently appear in our users' game collections.

Notable games are chosen democratically by Chessgames members, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the Chessgames.com staff.

Unfortunately, that *would* be extremely difficult. Bear in mind that these were blitz games played a decade and a half ago, and of course no scoresheets were kept.

What you see is what I can remember. :-S