Random Musings

Well, the end of the month is almost here, and while I could go crazy and do a few hundred CTS puzzles a day to get to 1000 tries, I don't think that's likely or productive. As is, I've done about 200 in the last two weeks since my tactics post. My success rate has held steady at a hair over 80%, and my rating has gone up about 100 points to ~1340 there. Unfortunately, I think that's the rating wall for the time being...the puzzles I'm starting to see, especially the ones with ratings over 1500 frequently mystify me. Perhaps someone who has done many more CTS puzzles can enlighten me, but some of the puzzles I find hardest are the ones where the right answer is a simple recapture with no obvious tactic. Are those thrown in just to 'keep us honest' or am I totally missing the point there? In many cases I wish the solutions went a few ply deeper so I could understand what's going on....little makes me feel like I got less out of a problem than to solve it correctly with a move that appears to accomplish nothing. Tomorrow is the last round of the September Thursday Night Swiss tournament at the Boylston Chess Club. I don't know who I'm playing, but I imagine that my opponent will be rated 1200+. I know I can beat people in the low end of that range if I play carefully and get a position I feel comfortable with, but we'll see what happens. Though I don't like thinking this way, getting 1 point out of the 1250, 1550 and 1900 I already played (given that I'm an 870) means that I've already had a "successful" tournament, I suppose. This brings me to an important question though. Given that these tournaments are small and tend to be full of people rated at least 400 points higher than I am, is it worth playing in more? I love that it forces me to play at least one slow game per week, but in most of these games I'll be fairly over my head. I know you improve by playing stronger players, but how much do you gain from a game against someone rated 1000 points higher than you? As for the World Championship Match, I have little to say aside from I enjoy reading others' commentary, would love to see a real championship cycle return, and that one of my primary goals in chess is to get strong enough to be able to understand these games and their commentary. At least a little bit.... Oh. One last thing. For some reason I no longer seem to get emailed when you folks comment, so I'm sorry if you feel ignored. I'm going to check my settings, and failing finding a fix there, visit more frequently.

Ugh

Well, that could have gone better. Worst OTB game I've played. Period. There's no excuse for dropping a piece on move 8 in a 40/90 G/25 time control game. Sure, the guy was a 1900 and likely would have beaten me anyway, but I didn't have to hand him the game. A 1100 or 500 would have found Qa5+ with my piece hanging on b5. It's stuff like this, things that are so simple but I overlook anyway, that make me wonder how I'll ever improve. When I don't drop pieces I'm a lot better than my rating, and when I do, I'm as bad or worse. More tactics, I guess, but I don't know about that either. I'm seeing pretty good tactics for myself, but I still have a hard time seeing even simple tactics for the opponent. I guess the problem is not that I can't find them, but I don't make looking for them part of my normal routine. Another problem I have is that when I feel like I'm in 'the opening' my mind doesn't look for tactics as much, so I am much more vulnerable in the first 10 moves than the next 10, especially in positions that I'm not familiar with. Perhaps I need to play more blitz just to get comfortable in the openings I play? Sigh. -1 now on the tournament, final round a week from today. At -1 I should get someone I have some sort of shot of playing a reasonable game against, I hope. Between now and then, hopefully I can find some time to play.

In under the wire

Round 3 of the September Night Swiss at the Boylston Chess Club tonight. I finally got the mychess viewer installed on my webserver, so you can look at my first and second round games here. The first game wasn't that interesting, to me, but the second game had a lot going on. I'd appreciate comments on either game from anyone who has time to give them. I'm glad I got these posted now, as if I start falling behind I'll never catch up, and I feel like a good way to motivate myself to look at my games is planning to annotate them and put them online. I didn't annotate the 1st round game, but may go back to it later. In other news, haven't spent much time on chess this week. I did go to IM Husari's Monday night chess class/shindig at the Medford library. The attendees were mostly small children, their parents, and a few older folks. I strongly suspect that my 15 USCF games were more than anyone in the room aside from the IM himself, and I had to explain to the woman playing to my right that castling involves the king and rook, rather than the king and knight. To be fair, she was a bit flustered because the child she was playing had brought his Harry Potter novelty set, and it was both 1) difficult to tell the pieces apart and 2) difficult to keep them from falling over in domino style chain reactions. I did have a reasonably interesting game against and older fellow that I got paired against. He asked me my rating, and when I told him he started to tell me all about how e4 c5 is the Sicilian defense...eventually IM Husari came around and said he didn't want discussion during the game, for which I'm thankful since it was going to get a little annoying. Anyway, I played my standard closed Sicilian and got some helpful hints on the general plan from the IM as he visted each board in turn giving pointers to whomever was on the move. My opponent eventually played an exchange sacrifice that didn't work out so well for him, and although I had to offer it back on several occasions, he didn't take me up on it. 8:30 came and his position was evaluated as losing, but he was a little cranky about it. If I go back I'll probably play him again. But is it worth going back? The two or three nuggets of information I got from the instructor probably made the trip worth it, but the crowd was overwhelmingly sub 10 years old... Oh well. Chess is chess, and I suppose I shouldn't pass up free hints from an IM twice a month.

Victory!

Last night was round 2 of the September Thursday Night Swiss tourney at the Boylston Chess Club. I was paired against Jon Turcotte, a 1259 player who had also lost in round 1. I managed to pull out a win in a game that I probably should have lost. It was also a game that really helped me see the truth in that old chess saying about castling on opposite sides of the board with the queens still on. My opponent and I both developed fairly strong attacks, and both of us wasted a lot of tempos (is that even a little grammatical?) in the process. His attack should probably have prevailed, but in the end I got there first. I'm not sure how to feel about this game, and it makes me wonder about the psychological effect of post-game computer analysis. I think I played, what for me, was a good game, but crafty is pretty sure that I spent most of it in a losing position and should have lost. How good can I feel about a game that I won only because my opponent missed his best move (the same move) on numerous turns? I made some rash decisions because I was impatient and wanted to press my attack, and he could have punished me for it, and didn't. So, should I take my win over a player rated ~375 points higher than me and run with it, or should I fret over all the things I did in this game that will come back to haunt me in the future? Hopefully this weekend I'll have time to annotate it some and stick it up on one of these crazy chess viewer applets. In other news, I managed to stick to my plan of doing at least some chess work every day. I did about 50 CTS problems on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday I really had no time, so I did 3. 3 is better than zero, I think. My rating there is up to 1310 or so. But the rating isn't as important to me as the success rate and the number of tries, which are both on their way up. Happy Friday, everyone.

Well, this is unfortunate

Severine Wamala, who organizes a series of local (Boston area) chess tournaments is in a little bit of trouble with the law. http://www.boston.com/news/local/Massachusetts/articles/2006/09/14/teacher_accused_of_sex_assaults/ I've never met the man, so I know nothing about him, but I kind of hope that someone steps in to take over for him and that the fall NorthEast Chess getaway still happens...I was planning to attend. In other news, I have my second game of the Boylston Chess Club's September Thursday Night Swiss tournament tonight. Hopefully it will be more interesting than the last game, in which I played the black side of an anti-Marshall against a guy rated 700 points higher than I am. Note that I wasn't attempting to play the Marshall, it's just where I ended up by playing moves that seemed ok. Anyway, I played reasonably for 20 moves or so, and then got my self twisted up in some tactical badness and lost a piece. I'd play on down a piece against anyone rated under, oh, 1100 or so, but against a 1570? I didn't feel like it....

Tactics I have known

After observing some of the efforts of other folks in the chess blogosphere, I've realized that I really haven't done that many tactical problems in my life. I'm working to change this, but let's take a moment to do a rough accounting. Tactics books I have: 303 Tactical Chess Puzzles Bain's Chess Tactics for Students Seirawan's Winning Chess Tactics Papa Polgar's Brick I've done at most 200 puzzles from the Polgar book. I've done about 200 from the 303 book. I've done pretty much all from Seirawan and Bain's books, but that's not more than 300 between them, if that. I don't feel like counting. Let's throw in another 100 to be safe to cover puzzles I've printed from various sources. All told that's somewhere less than 800 printed chess puzzles in my life. Moving online, at current count I have done 331 puzzles at the CTS (80% success, 1280 rating), and about 150 from Chess Tactics for Beginners. I've done very few of these problems more than once, so that means that in my entire life I've solved fewer than 1200 to 1300 chess puzzles. Given the numbers some of you other people are putting up I'm not surprised that I'm missing tactics, especially ones that my opponent is about to play. Speaking of the CTS, I find the time limits there somewhat infuriating. As you can tell from my rating and success rate, I work sort of slowly. It's never fun to lose points on a puzzle you get right just because you didn't do it fast enough, but I guess that's what pattern recognition is all about. At any rate, I'm setting a goal for the next week or so. I'm tempted to say something like "100 puzzles a day" but I know, given the constraints of my life that that would be difficult. I'm going to set a goal that I have a chance of meeting. My goal for now is simply this: do some tactical puzzles every day. That's it. Lame, I know, but you have to start somewhere. I think that if I keep a slow and steady pace I can get to 1000 at CTS by the end of the month, but I don't want to set my expectations too high.

Mark your calendars!

During an unexpected phone conversation with IM Satei Husari (in which he was trying to convince me that I should take some chess lessons with him, but more on chess coaching in another post) he mentioned that he has open class/play sessions at the Medford Public Library rougly twice a month. (http://www.medfordlibrary.org/) The next such session is a week from today at 7PM. Those of you out there who are in the Boston area should join me for the joint purposes of 1) meeting one another and 2) playing some chess. IM Husari said in these sessions he tries to pair people with others of similar strength and will comment on the games and give you ideas about what you might be doing differently. I don't know how useful it'll be, but I'm not going to pass up a free opportunity to get some ideas and find out if I like this guy's teaching style...

Diving In

Greetings! Welcome to yet another chess improvement blog. After trolling the chess blogs of the Knights Errant, I've decided to dive in....not necessarily to the circles themselves, but at least to the world of chess blogging. I think that it'll be good for me, though I'm not sure yet that I have enough time for chess improvement, yet alone writing about it. No offence, but this is probably more "for me" than "for you." I figure if I write about what's going on, especially the games that I'm playing and my study progress, that it'll help keep me on track. Having the occasional reader (and hopefully commenter) along for the ride is just a bonus. So, for starters, let's make this post about where I currently am, and where I hope to go. I've known how to play chess since I was quite young, but just played occasionally with my friends. I never tried to make chess a serious hobby until about 5 years ago. At that point I got tired of playing my old chess computer and decided to check out online chess. I started at Yahoo! and quickly grew tired of the lack of seriousness there, and moved on to FICS, where I have played on and off since. More off than I'd like. Time for a quick aside: I find that my chess interest waxes and wanes, and I'll be bitten by the chess bug for a few months here and there, and then tire of it. I'm not sure what drives this, but I do know that so far this hasn't been a recipe for success. I've learned some things over the past few years, but I feel ready to get more serious. I joined the USCF a little over a year ago, and have played in only 3 OTB events in that time. A one day rapid tournament at my local club back in July of '05 (The Boylston Chess Club in Davis Square, Somerville, MA), the BU open in November of '05 (where I apparently split the U1200 prize with three other folks but didn't know that until very recently) and the Eastern Class Championship in Sturbridge earlier this year. My record in that time is +4 =0 -9 for a shiny USCF rating of 871. Bleh. Now, I'm sure many sub 1000 players say this, but I think I'm a little better than that. Of course, it's now up to me to prove it. My plan isn't as fancy as some who are out here, but I'm keeping it simple for now: I'm going to do lots of tactics puzzles and play in more events. I made progress towards the latter of those goals this past week. I entered the BCC Thursday Night Swiss tournament for the month of September. This'll get me one 40/90 G/25 game per week for the month. I led off with a loss this week to drop my all time tournament record to -6 overall, but given that the guy was rated about 700 points higher than I was I guess I couldn't have expected to win. I don't think I acquitted myself too poorly, and that game will be the subject of an upcoming post. Oh, right, the title. So all of you other chess bloggers have these nifty titles. I couldn't think of a good one, so I stole one from an acquaintance of mine. "Strong Among the Weak" is a phrase that Chad Ellis once used to describe his Magic: The Gathering skills, and in particular he was discussing trying to break into a higher class of play. Now, you may rightly say to yourself that an 871 isn't strong among anyone. Fair and not fair. Sure, I'm rated below the vast majority of rated chess players (I know I can find the percentiles on USCF's website somewhere, but I'm too lazy right now), but I tend to beat anyone who doesn't actually consider himself a 'chess player.' So, I find myself straddling that line between someone who plays chess, and chess players, and I'd like to move from the former group to the latter. We'll see how it goes. I'll keep you up to date. The next couple of posts will discuss my tactics situation in more detail and look at last week's game.