Round 4

I hadn’t played much this week, missing the Denver Open, City Championship, and Wednesday’s tournament this week, so I was more in the mood of playing it safe.

After the game, I told Alex that my …b5 move was a “horrible blunder”, and this is part of why I shied toward the draw, this and the clock issue which G/90 is famous for. I had at least 26 minutes remaining, but this is sort of the spot to request a draw, before the play gets fast and furious.

Fruit likes continuing the game by trading rooks on d3, but I would most likely have played ..h6, BxNf6 (he said he would have played this) ..BxB followed by …Rd4 which Fruit says is -.1 in Black’s favor, but of course this can turn depending who plays the position better from there.

Here’s a blitz game with admittedly a lot more “awesome sauce” in it than in the one I played OTB. This one is for my friend Alex who likes to say “Nezhmetdinov – no reverse-gear, baby!”

I didn’t play on Wednesday because my car was in the shop. Our TD doesn’t carry a phone, you have to email him. So I had to wait until the car shop owner drove me home to email. Sent it 10 minutes before the round, but sent it to “@comcast.com” instead of .net. Got the Failure Daemon and resent it two minutes before the round starts. The TD said he didn’t get it until 6 minutes after and in any case I got a forfeit, zero point bye. So I pulled out of the Wednesday tournament for this month

Round 3, Thursday

On Thursday I played Rhett, and it aptly demonstrated the weakness of this G/90 time-control. Here the game is in all it’s glory, and you can really see how the G/90 5 second delay format really lowers the quality of chess. This game would have ended sooner had we had more time. He had 55 minutes to my 1 minute and 45 seconds. I actually took him down to 3 seconds left where I had 7 seconds. Unfortunately, I was paying more attention to his clock, thinking he might flag, but his sudden blitzing took away “my” time to think on his clock and I couldn’t mentally cope with it.

First, you can see I gave him a queen, where he breathed a sigh of relief and I couldn’t believe I had done that. Then I queened and said “queen” without yet putting my queen there, whereupon he took it with his knight but I thought he had promoted my pawn to a knight of the wrong color for a couple seconds, then realized he had taken it, then was in disbelief that I couldn’t win. So I tapped his knight twice with the tip of my finger, then pulled my hand back because I saw the skewer but just couldn’t “believe” what was transpiring on the board whereupon he said “you touched it” and I knew that meant I lose by the famous skewer, but played the two moves just because of the why-not factor, then resigned. I saw the skewer before I tapped his knight, but like I say I was just in such disbelief that I could not accept it.

Round 1
Round 2
Round 3
Round 4

For now, I’ll post what happened this week before posting my games from the Tri-Lakes Open (Tri-Lakes Meltdown post coming soon).

So on Wednesday I had skipped Round 1, but luckily got paired with Ken, who had a win over Anthea in Round I believe.

Here is our game – Round 2 Wednesday. Ken is unfortunately an example of what happens to your chess game if you stay away from it too long. Once he was sporting a 1490 rating and was on the rise, but then he took a few months off and it was a disasterous thing for his rating.

Ken has always played the Sicilian Defense against me before, so while there is a lot to talk about of what happened in this game, and it’s not a perfect game, he basically “played his rating”. I think I maybe had 38 minutes at the end of the game, but at least 35.

Round 2 on Thursday was a different story. I was playing Alexa as Black in this game, and she really shows her class. Both of us were down to 1 second on our clocks! It’s easy to see why it got so crazy. It should have been a draw because of the time pressure, and she could have claimed a three-fold repetition at one point (I didn’t include those moves, but her rook kept going from f8 to c8, attacking either undefended pawn before I finally decided to sac my c-pawn).

I need to correct the game-score, as I recall now that she played 57.Rg8 h1(Q), 58.Rd8+ Ke7, 59.Rd2??. Time-pressure is such a nutty thing, so I could probably end the game-score right there.

If any game was crying out to be annotated it was this one. I’m on Linux, and I’d like to start including some annotation with the moves, could be from a chess “publishing” program just as much as from a “Fritz or Shredder”. Even a chess “video” of it would be great. I have the week off, so if anyone reading this has any ideas…feel free to let me know. 😉

So I finally decided to skip Wednesdays for this month. I was tired and it’s really too much to keep up that back to back schedule, particularly with a four round tournament coming up this weekend – the Tri-Lakes Open.

In Round 1 on Thursday’s game, I was paired against Gene, who hadn’t been playing much in the last few months – once he was even rated 1700.

I missed a lot tactically in this game. For example, I should have played the simpler 13.Bxh7+ winning a pawn, since I will then pick up his knight on e7. I completely missed that Black can nearly equalize with 14…Qxg2+,15. KxQ Nf4+, 16.Kh1 NxQh5. This is where simple tactics, pattern-recognitions, are crucial.