Bad to middling chess
Three games over the weekend before last. One to be semi-satisfied with, with two stinkbombs.
Game 1: The best of the lot. I managed to extract a disadvantageous position from a winning one, but my opponent then managed to give away his advantage (which I don’t think either of us realized that he had). Even on time, we eventually agreed on a draw in a Rook endgame.
Game 2: My hair-brained novelty on move 4 is a fraud, and my opponent sacrifices material for a crushing attack. To give you an idea how badly I played the opening, from moves 5 to 14, Fritz gave me ?’s or ??’s on 5 moves. Now, if that was the end of the story, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But I had multiple opportunities to halt his attack and convert on my material plus, which I failed to notice. That’s what made this loss so irritating.
Game 3: Got paired up with someone rated 600 points lower. Don’t know how most of you feel when that happens, but these games make me really nervous. Mainly because I know I should win, and even a draw would be devastating. Plus, there’s no benefit ratings-wise for a victory, so it’s a lose-lose situation. I have no problem with playing an occasional game like this; it reinforces that I need keep my head in the game regardless of the situation. (Being nervous about playing lower-rated players seems to have done wonders; I only have two losses to anyone below 1500: a 1400 and 1497.)
In this game, I run around headless for the first 2/3rds of the game, but I wasn’t too worried, expecting my inexperienced opponent to start making blatant mistakes. Which he does, eventually. (In reality, I had no clue how to play the position.) But he was pretty solid for a good chunk of the game.
Despite it all, I (unofficially) earned +8 rating points.
Haven’t looked through the games yet, will do it when I have some time to enjoy, but how did you change the chess diagrams so the comments scroll? That is frickin’ awesome!!!
Comment by Blue Devil Knight | 26 November 2007
Y’know in game 2 I think your 4. .Na6 isn’t bad at all; I have suspended opening study for now so I come over here to get all my theoretical novelties!
Comment by Wahrheit | 26 November 2007
@BDK: You’re not the first person to query about Chess Publisher! I’ll create a post explaining the “magic” behind it.
@Wahrheit: That’s wonderful. As long as these moves remain in the realm of theory and not practice, you should be OK.
Comment by Donnie | 27 November 2007