Another Rating Peak Achieved!

After this year's Southwest Chess Club's championship I managed to achieve another all time peak rating of 1771. 

Things still seem to be going rather well for me.  I feel that my approach at the board has changed a great deal over the past few weeks since I started to seriously analyze my games.  I now make a point to analyze every game after I play it.

I still plan on working on my repertoire until I get it up to par, and I know my endgames need some work, but at this point I feel like things are really continuing to improve and that slowly but surely I am climbing up to where I feel I should be.

Time will tell.

Look for some more games to be posted here soon!

Never Lose Focus

This game is a great illustration of why you should never lose focus.

I played this game against Scott Haubrich last night in the final round of the club championship.  Scott is in the midst of an incredible run having gone 7-2 in the US Open winning the Expert prize outright.

I am crushed out of the opening because I foolishly fail to play ...Qc7 which allows him tactics that get my pieces totally uncoordinated. 

Yet I then fight back to take the initiative and missed a few fighting chances.

The message?  Stay focused!

Cultivating the Will to Win

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the will to win.  What separates the best from the rest?  I think that it's the will to prevail rather than to make any assumptions.

For example, look at Gata Kamsky.  He gets into drawish endings where he has the slightest of advantages and then he just keeps pressing until his opponent cracks.  Sometimes that gets him into trouble, such as yesterday against Tomashevsky in the World Cup, but more often than not he doesn't crack under the pressure and he converts an awful lot of those positions.

Now it's easy to say that Gata is a veteran and that's why he has developed the ability to press on in those positions.

Then yesterday I'm looking at a game from when Magnus Carlsen was a twelve year old IM.  He has the White side of a Berlin and he heads right into the endgame line with the annotators noting that even at that young age Magnus was well content to get into an ending with a slight edge and just grind away.

Sometimes I like to think that I am developing that ability myself.  But then you only need look back a few weeks to this to see that I haven't fully developed this ability.

I think that this will be a rather important next step in my improvement.  It's not enough to say you want to win, you actually need to go fight to make it happen.

What a Difference a Year Makes

What a difference a year can make when it comes to chess.  Last year on August 16th my rating had fallen to 1560 after having been at 1711 only eight months before.

It seemed like I couldn't so much as sit down at the board without dropping game after game to players rated 1200-1400.  Every time I played I felt like I was going to lose.  It was a terrible outlook to have but I just couldn't help it.  I was wondering if I would make it all the way down to my floor of 1500.

Then, something happened.  I remembered that in the first year of my return to competitive play I had taken my rating from 1500 to 1720.  Yes, I then dropped 160 points, but so what.  I had gotten there, hadn't I?

I had gotten cocky and hubris had bitten me.  It was time to relax and remember how I had made it in the first place.

So that's exactly what I did.  I started working hard again when I would study.  I started to remember that rating differences exist for a reason.

Essentially I remembered that if I just played my game the results would follow.  I lost the fear.

In the past 12 months I have been over 1700 for about half that time, and am currently at my all time ratings peak and I feel like I am still trending up.

Here is the game that I credit for turning my attitude around:

Interesting Game

This is a game I played yesterday with an Expert, Troy Zimmerman.  This is the third time I've played Troy (second in a month or so) and was our third draw.

This represents only about two hours or so of analysis, so there are likely some things that I missed.  I would certainly be interested in hearing your comments if you see something I missed.

What I find fascinating about games like this is that it shows that Experts make plenty of mistakes, and it shows that it's possible to make mistakes when playing Experts and survive.

Overall Troy is a far better player than I am now, but for whatever reason I just seem to play him tough.

This was in the fourth (of six) rounds of the Southwest Club Championship.  After this game I have 2.5 points.

Analyzing Your Wins

One of the things that we are all taught is that you should analyze your own games, especially your losses and draws.  After all, the idea is that you will learn from your mistakes.

FM Alex Betaneli recently gave a lecture at the Southwest Chess Club where he said that it's just as important to analyze your wins to see what might have been missed there as well.

This is especially true at the class Thursday I played a game that I won without ever being in serious trouble.  Yet when I looked at it with my coach he showed me that it was a blunder fest which I was lucky to escape from.

Once again, I horribly misplay an opening and then I get lucky when my opponent misses a crushing follow up.

Chess World Cup!!!

I don't know about you, but I am glued to the monitor watching Susan Polgar and Lawrence Trent's commentary on http://new.livestream.com/cisha/wcc2013

Also, because sometimes I can be a total juvenile, I found this to be thrilling!