Monday, March 14, 2011

As soon as I find out how to post chess positions...

...I'm going to post a couple from my games showing missed opportunities from my tournament games. In the first, I went from being far ahead to merely being ahead (instead of "far ahead" to "much farther ahead") in a game I won, in the other I failed to exploit an inaccuracy in move order which would have boosted me from a pawn down to slightly ahead in a game I lost. Tactical rather than strategic missed opportunities.

I played today at lunch. It was a terrible, terrible game. I completely messed up the opening and was a pawn down with awkward piece placement, a king stuck in the center, and little prospect for equalizing. The opponent had a bad bishop, but a central pawn majority that could move along and make the bishop good. However, the opponent made the decision to play on the queenside (attacking a weak pawn), which gave me time to consolidate a little and after a few inaccuracies I won a pawn back and got a dominating attack on the queenside which led to a quick back rank mate. The crucial strategic mistakes were not exploiting a lead in development + king stuck in the center, allowing me to catch up on development, and playing on the wing instead of in the center. Then there were the tactical mistakes. My crucial mistakes were utterly flubbing the opening and getting into such a shitty position in the first place. There were a couple tactical finesses I missed, some of them were taken advantage of, some weren't.

Almost done with level 60 on CT Art. Some of the problems are incomprehensible, some aren't so bad at all. I'm running around 66%. A few of the ones I just couldn't get at all were from "R. Fischer, 1963, US". I presume there were from his 11-0 US Championship victory. They boggle the mind.

In other news, I'm at 1541 on the Chess Tactics Server right now. This is okay, but not awesome. My highest is 1605 from 3 years ago.

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