Finally lost on chess.com

I played the Dilworth, then I lost a pawn, so instead of having two pawns and a rook for two minor pieces (a decent deal), I had one pawn and a rook (not a good deal). And I traded some more stuff off so my opponent had the two bishops and a rook against two rooks. This is bad mojo. Anyway, it was a good game, it was against a buddy who used to be rather strong and is just now getting back into chess. Good times.

I'm in Texas right now, so I don't have my tactics training software to practice with. I hope I don't get rusty this week, as I'm planning on playing in the "double class" tournament this weekend. I'll be in the C+D class, since playing up into the A+B class would not really be a recipe for success by either metric I care about - winning or learning. I can give a good game to the 1600s, I think, and 1700s are a good stretch, maybe, but above that... I'm considering playing in the Chicago Class tournament two weeks later. I'm not sure whether to try to play up and get experience or shoot for the money in my current (for the moment) class.

chess.com winning streak might be ending soon.

I played a little carelessly in one of my chess.com games, so now I'm going for wild counterplay to keep it interesting. Right now the material is even, but we're about to get into some vicious and unclear waters. I'll just have to keep this in mind: they can only take one piece at a time. I may end up down a piece when the dust clears, but that was what I was avoiding by going into the complications, I think. I also dropped a pawn in my Dilworth game, so now I don't have much compensation.

I'm on chapter 20 of the Yusupov book now and am still going over tactics problems. I haven't taken a good look at my games yet.

Don't tell my chess set, but I played a different 4 hour strategy game last night. It was fairly fun, but I'm definitely not a "gamer". I like my games to have perfect information and my work to have stochastic processes, not vice versa. And, yes, I know that's not a dichotomy...

EDIT: I wonder about the psychological effects of conditional moves. I just used a conditional move in my dangerous crazy freewheeling game. I hope that makes him think I have something forced up my sleeve, but it was more so that I wouldn't chicken out after his response! Still, if you know every other move loses and this one is unclear, choose the unclear move. And, in the end, it's chess.com, not nuclear warfare.

EDIT EDIT: Okay, that was boring, my opponent basically accepted being down two pawns after a few minutes of thinking instead of going into this slugfest. I expected to barely get out of this alive! One variation I looked at had me with a knight, bishop, and couple extra pawns against a rook and pawns (not forced and probably not the best moves). I might post a position once the game is over. I expect Houdini will give me a stern talking-to about this.

more winning.

I won my game last night in the CICL tournament. It was against my teammate, the top rated player in our section. He played the Danish, and it's a good thing I went over those games a while back. We got to the Schlechter, but I think I was somewhat inaccurate in that I played ...d5 before ...cxb2. I later won a pawn and then it was a long, slow grind until he resigned. In the final position, it was suggested that my opponent had drawing resources, but the computer says no (I haven't looked at the analysis yet and would prefer to work it out on my own, I just saw the numerical evaluation). It was a long, tough game. He said I should really consider entering one of those big money tournaments for class players since I seem to be rather underrated at the moment - and only for the moment - and might just be able to pull something off. I am, however, rather busy these days. Anyway, I'm still undefeated in CICL play.

I also won that correspondence game against the rather strong player, which was rather surprising. To be fair, I put quite a bit more effort into the game than my opponent, so it's somewhat like winning during a simul (not to say anything about the amount of effort he put in, but I spent pretty much an entire weekend on it at one point - a very good learning experience). This means I'm still undefeated at chess.com. I'll be interested to see what Houdini has to say about some of the moves and variations I had thought up, as the game was rather tactical in nature.

Anyway, I now have plenty of material to look at critically.

EDIT: PS I discovered the true cause of scid's borking up the annotations. It was the "mark tactical exercises" feature. So I can go back to labeling things with a "??". Also, one feature I don't like about annotation algorithms is that I don't care about the difference between +7 and +9, and maybe not between +3 and +5 unless it really is a minor piece vs a rook or keeping a couple pawns, but it makes a bigger deal out of those than the difference between 0.00 and +1. I remember once when I was playing against Chessmaster(TM) and had it annotate the game that it marked as the "worst move of the game" a point in the ending where my theoretical advantage went from "+86.5" to "+44.2" or something like that. And making derisive comments when I took 15 moves to mate with king and rook instead of 8.

Quick Tournament Update.

I played in a tournament yesterday afternoon and had a pretty good day. I went 3/4 with a performance rating around 1700. I lost my first game against a 1700, but later analysis showed that I could have won a piece at a certain point. Houdini confirms. I thought I had something there, but couldn't find it. Later, I dropped a pawn in a miscalculated exchange in the endgame and lost. I faced an unrated player in the second game and won a piece early and the game much later. I played a 1500 in the third game and crushed him slowly after tricking him into giving me a pawn, a space advantage, and a lead in development. The last game was against a 1660. I won a pawn early, but at the expense of very awkward development and a cramped position. She attacked me and I pretty much held her off, then, in time trouble, I made a slight misstep. However, she missed a zwischenzug and lost a piece. Unfortunately, I don't have the details of the position as I was in time trouble. After that, I simplified to a trivial ending which she played out pretty far. It looks like I'll gain 130 rating points. I might have won the "biggest upset" prize, I'll let you know later. I might post some positions later, too...

EDIT: I didn't get biggest upset, a 1350 beat a 1900.

Tricky position!

So I was playing a game and got to this position from the 5.Nc3 line of the Petroff. I considered Ne5!?, but it seemed rather unclear, so I went with Bxf7+!?. It seemed reasonable and it worked out decently for me. I won a piece a little bit later - not a result of that move. It seems that Ne5!! works, though. I'll have to keep that in mind in case it comes up again (on ne sait jamais).

The Dilworth

So I'm thinking about playing the Dilworth as Black against the Ruy Lopez if White will let me (9.Nbd2 avoids it, of course). I think something is wrong with how I filtered things out of my database, since I know Yusupov played the Dilworth occasionally (that's what brought it to my attention, as I'm reading Yusupov's series), but I don't have any Yusupov games showing up. Yes, I looked for Jussupow, too. So I'll have to go through and find some game collection of Jussupow/Yusupov to add in to my database (and then remove the duplicates).

The motivation for doing the Open Spanish is that the Closed has a ton of theory and the Open seems logical for both sides, though White is less likely to have prepared for it. I'm not going to overthink this, as, at my current level, this is hardly the most significant thing to worry about. The Dilworth is almost certainly far too complex, really, but it's worth trotting out in a correspondence game...

That was a pretty bad game!

I went over that last game. It was pretty bad! That previous post is indicative of how the game went. The guy who made the second-to-last mistake certainly won in that one.

scid's auto-annotate feature sometimes borks up on me, and I think I noticed in this game where that happens: on moves it ranks with a "??". I suppose the way to fix this problem is to stop making stupid mistakes in my games. And change the criteria so that it only awards "??" for mistakes of magnitude +9 or more. If I make a mistake that bad, it deserves to break my computer...

I won tonight, but it was a close game.

I screwed up more than once, but it wasn't noticed. He also screwed up a couple times, but I missed it. In the end, I found a tactical line that he couldn't quite find his way through - the best continuation would just get some pieces off the board so the position was less volatile - and he ended up getting creamed. But here's a position where I screwed up majorly. I just played Nb1??, thinking it would save my a-pawn. I should not have castled queenside in the first place, it was a bad idea.

Black to move and win.

Whoops! Fortunately, he did not notice and played O-O-O instead.

How my chess.com games are going.

So I've won two of my games so far. That gives me a rating of 1644 so far (ha!). In the first, I played quickly because I was in theory (the Tarrasch Trap - he accepted being a pawn down rather than falling deeper into the trap), then I played quickly because my choices were fairly easy. I made some less-than-precise moves. In the second game, I was playing slow until I saw I could win a pawn and then things got easy, so I played faster. I think I kept things fairly precise there. I'm in the middle of a few more games, mostly against weaker players than the ones I just beat. The one game against a strong player is still going on. It's still very sharp and it's probably a matter of time before I make a small slip that leads to an explosion - unless I already have.

I'm going to try to keep five games or so going at once. I'll probably have to start editing the lower end of the default strength option on my open seeks, since I want to play people stronger than me and there are so many players around 1300 that they will likely suck up any open seek that includes them (which wouldn't be so very bad if it didn't seem, at the moment, that the 1300 level is not going to be satisfying opposition). It will take a bit of experimenting to find that sweet spot where the opposition is challenging, but not completely insurmountable with the level of effort I'm willing to expend on these games (namely, treating it like a 40/2 game, or maybe like a G90).

Speaking of G90 time controls, I really should play slower in my CICL games. I have a tendency to speed up and get sloppy once I get an advantage (ugh, see above!).

It's a trap!

Alas, there is no Admiral Ackbar in our heads during the game. An opponent in one of my current games fell into the Tarrasch Trap. This is why I always make it a point to look up the famous traps in an opening before trying it out even casually. Sometimes they are rather subtle. It stinks to fall into one and sometimes you get a free point. Even if it never comes up, the tactical idea is often valuable.

This isn't such a bad trap, though, so the game isn't over yet.

I finished the first volume of Alekhine's game collection.

As mentioned in the title, I finished the first volume of Alekhine's game collection. Suddenly, I feel like I am a much better attacker. I am going to start on the second volume on the train ride home tonight.

I also started a couple more correspondence games on chess.com. I just put out a couple open seeks. I have no idea how good of an indicator chess.com ratings are for playing strength. The first person who accepted is rated 1300 and the second is 1500. I'll try my best, they'll try their best, and then we'll see how it looks. The motivation for this is that most tournaments require you to have had at least 5 rated games, so I want to get 5 rated games in. Then I can think about what openings I'm interested in getting into and play in thematic tournaments. That seems like a good way to learn an opening. I can also then figure out what rating level at chess.com would constitute a challenge to me at my level of involvement and then try to play people at that level (as mentioned in previous entries).

EDIT: I've added a couple more games. Right now I have five rated games going.

So I won my game today.

But it's like that anecdote about the two hikers who see a bear and one of them starts running - he doesn't have to outrun the bear, he just has to outrun the other guy. It was somewhat of a struggle. My opponent played the Schliemann and I didn't play it right (I took on f5). Anyway, I have a couple endgame positions, I'll show them to you later once I analyze them myself and remember them.

My correspondence game with the strong player is nerve-racking. I'm probably going to get blown off the board rather soon. That's what I get for getting in over my head in a sharp variation of the Sicilian. I spent much of the weekend analyzing the position because I spent a lot of time waiting in the airport and sitting on a plane. What else can you do when you've finished your novel and don't feel like playing over yet another Alekhine game? I'm finding it very educational.

Done with first four levels of CT Art again.

Level 10: 98%
Level 20: 92%
Level 30: 79%
Level 40: 73%

I was coasting at around 75% on level 40 until the last 50 problems. I perhaps went through them too quickly. I'm not sure whether I will continue to go all the way through CT Art again or whether I'm going to start another pass through the first four levels. The combinations at level 40 are probably too difficult to expect myself to be able to see them instantly, but level 10-30 might be that easy, and it's good to get faster at level 40. Not too sure about using level 50+ this way. Some of the problems are rather tough.

Those results are still fairly weak.