As many tournaments do, the Houston Open had the option of playing on a 2- or 3-day schedule. Going with the 3-day schedule would give me an extended break on Saturday, so I went with that, meaning game 1 was Friday night.

My opponent that night was one Mr. Wilson. He was an old white guy with glasses, a demographic not very well represented this tournament (Asian schoolkids were easily the most numerous.) Later, we found out he came all the way from Honolulu.

He was rated 1400, but had a great tournament, going 4.0/5.

In this game, he ended up dominating my Queenside with some mighty pawns and was clearly in control throughout the game. But still, at the class level of play, there are often ample opportunities to recover. However, I don’t find a way. Eventually ending up going down a Bishop, and resigned before fruitlessly trying to get a Pawn promoted.

If you don’t like chess much, sorry. This is probably going to be a boring week on LEP for you. Over the weekend, I played 5 games in the Houston Open, which works out very nicely for posting one game a day this week.

However, I’ll try to fit in some usual LEP inanities during the week.

A big motivator to play in the tournament was that Ivan of Getting to 2000 was going to be there. He’d be only the second person I’ve met from the chess blogosphere, so of course I had to go! He took a picture because I forgot my camera.

As far as the chess itself, there were two opposing forces at work:

Why I would stink: I haven’t been playing much chess the past year, certainly no games longer than G/20. There was no way I would play as strong as my rating. My last tournament was Nov 2007 and last rated games in June 2008 (which, strangely, were a win against an Expert and a near-upset of a 1934. And I was supposedly “out of practice”. Go figure.)

Why I would rock-n-roll: I was rated 1596, the highest rating in the U/1600 section. People look at you differently when you’re the “top dog”, so there would probably be a bit of a psychological edge. The average rating looked to be a shade below 1400, which at least should be good for a couple “easy” victories.

Now if I had some foresight, I’d have played in the U/1800, a section higher. This way, if I layed an egg, people would just chalk it down to having a hard time against tougher competition. But in the U/1600, no one would care that I hadn’t played tournament chess for almost two years. I’d look like a fool.

Games upcoming.