MCC Groundhog Day Swiss: Halftime report

I've been lazy about posting updates here. My life has been a little too busy to analyze the games I've been playing, and posting about a game without having some annotated pgn to link to seems not worth it.

I'm two weeks into the four week Groundhog Day Swiss tournament at the MetroWest Chess Club. I'm playing in the U1700 section and am currently +2!

In round 1 I again played Timothy Lung, and again beat him. I had black in a Scandinavian defense. It was an odd little game that saw his light squared bishop get locked into a corner of the board. I made some bad moves towards the end, and gave him a nice chance to win the game with an unsound sacrifice, but he played a terrible move that gave the game right back to me. I'm now +2 against him and have won our last 3 encounters. I'm hoping for a psychological edge the next time we face one another....

In round 2 I played Calvin Hori, 1653. I had white and we played a closed Sicilian. I'm really starting to like this opening. I feel like I understand it pretty well, and it lends itself to positions that are comfortable to me. I got a fairly good position before I started to play some poor moves. I walked into a fork that I'd been aware of and carefully avoiding for a few moves, but managed to turn it into losing the Exchange rather than losing a full piece. My attack was still fairly strong and my opponent was in extreme time trouble. He had about 10 minutes left on his clock at move 25 and needed to make it to move 40. He made a few too many mistakes under the pressure from the clock and the win was mine.

After the game he wanted to discuss it a little, but didn't have much time. He spent what time he had telling be about how bad some of my moves were (and they were) but (while I didn't say this) I don't feel too bad about it since, as bad as they were, they weren't bad enough to let him win.

I'm planning to post these games later tonight, after I learn a little more about Fritz's html export options. I'm pretty excited about beating Tim Lung (again) and transferring the yoke of "highest rated player I've beaten" from him to Mr. Hori.

I'm one of 5 players in the U1700 with 2 points, so I'll be paired down in the coming week. If the provisional pairings hold, I'll get a 1300 with 1.5 points. The two wins that are already in the bank seem certain to push me over 1400, and I think that if I can manage to grab another point from a 1300+ player that I might even reach 1500 by the end of this.

All very exciting, but I'm still waiting for that time when my rating reaches its plateau for my current level of chess knowledge. I don't want to say I'm not learning much from the weekly games: I am...but I'm not doing much aside from that to improve right now. At some point I'll hit a wall and more improvement will take real work. I'm still not sure where that's going to be. I don't see myself as a 1600 level player yet, but I think I'm every bit as good as Mr. Hori, and his rating has been at 1650 for quite a while.