Class A player

The new half season grades came out this week. Including my 15 odd games from this season, and the last 15 or so from last season, my new rating is increased from 141 to 152. Converted to FIDE, that would make me a 'Class A' category player (1800-2000) in terms of rating. Something I have been working towards for a while now. Happy days.

My ICC ratings suggest I have improved recently as well, as I managed to break 1900 standard rating on ICC this month, in addition to improving my blitz and rapid ratings to new highs (I am still pretty poor at rapid chess however). For all that, the strength of my opposition in club games of late has been increasing even more quickly. This week I will even be playing against a 195 rated player (ranked 3rd for Bristol, and in the top 300 for active FIDE rated players in England)... I think it's probably a good idea to take pride in the ability of my opponents!

Moving on to the two club games I have played so far this month, one is quite good and the second isn't. The first of the two games was actually against the opponent I last played at the end of 2011. That game had been a bit of a mess, so in this rematch I was quite motivated to do better. My first time playing the Modern Benoni in a club game.

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I shall include the second (and rather less satisfactory) game at a later date.

Average strength of opponent: 164. Result: 1.5/3

And we come to my final three games of 2011. So without further ado...

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A satisfying win! I was quite happy with how I played the endgame especially. On the other hand, it took several blunders from my opponent before I got the win... the queenside weakness alone probably would not have been enough. I also felt a bit cheap basically skipping the middlegame and forcing all that simplification early on.

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So... a game against a 177 with the black pieces. I.e. against an expert player, >2000 FIDE equivalent, eligable for the ECF "County Master" title. I was probably doomed to lose, but really lost in a very sad way. I would prefer to have lost in a different way (even if it had been quicker!), if it had involved having some of my own play, and setting some more interesting challenges for my opponent. In this game I was too blinkered, and instantly dismissed some viable continuations based on generalisations.

After this game I became aware that I had been switched up a board, and Alan also wanted me to start playing as board 1 for the C team at the next game and probably going forward. He may yet live to regret that decision! I probably won't be getting many easy opponents now. Indeed this season has been quite a big step up in terms of average opponent rating. Last season the average rating of my opponent was 128, where as so far this season it has been 146. Find below my first board 1 game in Division 2... a pretty weird one at that!

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So there we go. I was lucky not to lose, but then stupid not to win! I could pretend that I saw the full tactial continuation when I played 18.Ne5 (I suppose it is fairly forcing after all), but I didn't at all, and was fortunate that the Qb5 resource was there, and that it worked. But without annotation you might almost believe that white knew what he was doing!

I think the main thing to learn from these recent games is that I need to rely less on blinkered generalisations, look at more candidate moves, and make myself calculate a bit more! To only let a calculated sequence refute a candidate move... especially when the alternatives (e.g. the passive position vs Mr 177, when I declined to play e6-e5) involve simply losing without any active play.

The annotation continues...

The following game was played against University A. For whatever reason I don't think UWE has a chess team active in the district league. University A are pretty strong, but I'm happy with my play in this one... up to a certain point at least! I had black.

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So, that game was a little unfortunate. I think I became a bit frustrated after infiltrating my queen and then not making the immediate progress I had hoped for.

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This game is probably one of the nicest games I have played, complete with some flashy tactics thrown in at the end. The sequence from Qc5+ onwards is certainly quite aesthetically pleasing (for black!), but I'm happy with how I played the opening as well. It's rare for black to win this quickly in a caro-kann, move 25 would be checkmate.

End of the first half - 157

It's quite a long time since my last entry. Since then I've played 7 games, and now have a gap of almost a month until the club games resume in January. The first half of the season has gone pretty well in terms of performance rating - approx. 157 (i.e. about 1850 FIDE), and I've met some pretty strong opponents.

During this time I've continued lessons with WIM Vita Chulivska on ICC, on average one hour per week. I was pretty ambivilent for the first few, but ever since we've started analysing games (my own, and some GM games) it has been interesting, funny, enjoyable, and very informative. I would definitely recommend her as a coach and look forward to increasing that schedule at some point in the future. In the mean time however I think I need to set chess aside for some weeks.

With it being 7 full games I can't really annotate them all in one go, and may start getting a bit more selective (maybe I should start only including the ones I don't lose!?). Here are the next couple.

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Well that game certainly supported the 'secret to club chess' entry about simply avoiding blunders. At the same time, it was quite an interesting game. White also believed too much in blacks ideas on the queenside, and fell too much into passive defence. He had some strong ideas (e.g. Bh3, Bh6 etc.), but didn't follow them through. The move f2-f4 also arrived rather late.

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A pretty odd game. I didn't quite know how to respond to his rather off-beat opening choice, and got carried away. Still, it's quite impressive how my centre crumbles. It reminds me a little of the french defense.

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.

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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!