The secret to club level chess

Between my last entry and this one I didn't actually play any non-club games, but I have had a couple more lessons with Vita, blitzed through some master games, and also been doing some tactical problems. I'll reserve judgement on the lessons for a bit longer, but felt I was doing fairly well on the puzzles, getting pretty near my all time best rating on Chess Tactics Server. An important point in the context of the game annotated below - I came to the board in my top form in terms of tactics, but still missed a lot of important moves!



Yesturday I had my second club game against the Horfield Team for this season. Last week it was a somewhat lucky win against Horfield B (which I mean to annotate shortly), but this week it was against Horfield C. Find the game below.

Play chess online

Browsing around the net I found some mention of that draw vs 68 (Chris Smith) here. The Thornbury Chess Club web site is really quite nice - I wish there were more active websites for Bristol chess. I also found the game score for my simul loss against IM Jack Rudd on the ECF forums.

The Chessit website has now been updated with the current grading information, which means I now appear there - ranked 83rd! I'm quite proud. Hopefully this season I can play at a higher level, and get nearer the Bristol (active players) top 50!

So... the secret to club level chess? Since I blew that game vs 136 (Yate A) in a one move blunder, I've kept thinking "Ah, that blunder cost me, how could I have made a move like that? If only I hadn't made that one out of character idiot oversight then I would be doing really well for this season" (etc. etc.). But the last couple of games have basically gone to show that even with the tactics practice I've been doing, games are mostly won and lost on tactical oversights. And in many games I find myself worrying about moves that are tactically impossible (even just basic board vision issues, such as forgetting that one of my pieces controls a square) for a minute or two before realising the reality. It makes every move a gamble, and every game a tragedy waiting to happen.

The mind set I think I (and probably many chess players) have, even if they don't realise it, is something along the lines of "I have to outplay my opponent. I do not expect my opponent to make any basic tactical errors, or overlook any basic tactical errors I make.". But the blunt truth is that at the club level, or at least for players under approx. 170 rating (to make a wild guess), just about everyone is weak at tactics, and is going to make fairly simple tactical oversights - it's just a matter of frequency. What I now recognise is that, based upon my games so far this season, if I was tactically competent I could probably get my grade up towards 160 and probably beyond, even without any further positional studying. And I need to remind myself that a lot of players are just as bad as me tactically speaking, or even worse!