Round 1 – April 2012

I played on Wednesday and also on Thursday this week.

On Wednesday I was exhausted, and after battling traffic just to make it there on time (it wasn’t much of a battle, just stuck in that parking-lot-speed commute), I was ready to turn around and go home.

Unfortunately for me, I ran into Rhett in Round 1 and was pretty upset about it. Rhett has won the last two Wednesdays tournaments and has looked fresh, but Wednesday is my tired day it seems.

There was a new “Accelerated Pairing” baloney that they were doing for this tournament, as I shouldn’t have otherwise gotten Black against Rhett in Round 1. I was chessed-out and mentally toast by the time I had blundered. I had seen that Qd7 was a blunder, and that …BxN followed by ..Nf6-d7 was correct, but I had forgotten the blunder and suddenly had some vain hope-chess thought that I need to make a quick move and might have time for ..g6. I was quite disgusted not by the loss but that I had been caught thinking I would get paired with an easier opponent and wouldn’t need to be “fired-up” for the game or anything like that.

On Thursdays my energy level is much better, but made another quick, weak move for the sake of the clock, as I had had the …Bb4 winning move even a move earlier. I didn’t see it until Fruit showed it to me. Oddly enough, however, I saw that White could give up the Rh1 after ..Nf2 because White ignores it and plays Ne2-d4, and even the engine keeps re-evaluating a couple moves later like it didn’t understand that Black’s one-piece attack was not real.

I praised Daniel after the game for his defensive, positional resources, but he did still miss that blatant tactic.

I stayed up til 2:30 am last night at McDonald’s, going over chess stuff with Alex. I focused on defusing his marvelous combos with Black and won some blitz positions against him, and had a completely winning position against Katie (she’s 1900) in our blitz game, but blundered and lost. I prefer that, though, because it means in a slow game I would keep eating up her Taimanov Sicilian Defense.

Rhett moved quickly in that game against me, didn’t move his queen much and played quietly against my quiet play. He has changed his manner of play now, I see.

There were a lot of factors for why I was sort of too tired to play on Wednesday, but one thing I did was to drink coke and play scrabble and dumb-ass board games the night before, and win all of the games. I should have been drinking a beer playing that stuff, not trying to win at everything all the time.

Anyway, in the Wednesday game, I was fearing eventualities where my opponent gets in both g5 and e5 against my g6/Bg7 plan. I blundered because I was fearing eventualities more than I was playing the position at hand (eventualities don’t happen right away or even necessarily, depending on what the opponent actually plays). I didn’t play ..Nh5 or ..Nf6-d7, I had seen both moves, because I was more worried about eventualities than I was for the need to simply play chess move-by-move.