Lunch chess!

I brought my chess set to work and I am now going to make it a point to try to be there for chess at lunch on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Probably 2/3 of those each week. They're typically 10 minute games, so nothing too serious, but something good to keep the blood flowing. I have been too busy, personally, to devote much time to chess over the past couple months and my quality of play has definitely suffered.

Anyway, I lost horribly. It was a Dragon and I forgot to play f3. D'oh! If I had, apparently he was going to play the 'Dragdorf'. Later, he got some cheap tricks in. It was rough. Next time!

Slowly recovering

I played my third game of the season and drew it. My second game was very uneventful and very bad. I played against an 1800-ish player and lost terribly. Nothing to remark on. The game last night went poorly, but I eked out a draw as there was no way to penetrate the closed position. I feel like I made some positional errors in the middlegame that left me needlessly cramped, but my opponent was not quite strong enough to take advantage of my weaknesses. It was the sort of position I've seen Alekhine rip apart. I am most proud of my time-management skills, as I used up all my time in the first time control. That's the only real victory. I haven't run it through Rybka yet, one or the other of us probably missed some tactical blow at some point. My opponent definitely had some resources somewhere he could have used.

EDIT: I had initially not planned on playing since I have a test tomorrow in that data mining class and wanted to review the finer points of a couple of the algorithms. As an aside: the kernel trick for support vector machines is cool.