My First win against a National Master! (and a Fide Women Master)

YuvalW

Updated: Nov 6, 2010, 9:14 AM | 1

*The second game is the one against the NM*

My rating is currently low, very low compared to my skill level, I had a really bad tournament - I got 1.5/11 against an average rating of 2100 half a year ago, lost 40 rating points in one tournament! This was 6 month ago and since then I didn't really have a lot of time to play..

But I did notice the following: In most games, about 7~8 out of those 11, I got into a comfortable to winning position, and was able to lose it from there, now I had a point to focus on, if I'll be able to keep outplaying them for the entire duration of the game I can probably win against 2100-2300 rated players.. All I had to work on is my endurance...

Completely unrelated to chess I decided to join a combat training group, it's a group that gets you ready for a combatant role in the army, bot physically and mentally.
After about 5 month training I started seeing results, I could run a lot longer and a lot faster, my endurance got a lot better, do you see the connection already? great!

Back to chess: I didn't play in any tournament recently, but in september the Youth Ilite (upper) League have started, and after working very hard to get our team in there over the past 2 years (from regional to national to upper) I was playing in it.
The strongest league in the country and we are the underdogs. But I started surprising very fast:

Game 1 (round 3): Ramat-Gan A vs Rishon-Leziyon A
Board 1 of this team is last year's Europe U16 championship, I was playing the second board.

This was a rather convincing victory, I could have finished it earlier and I screwed up a little bit, but nothing too major.

With this unexpected victory we lost 3-1 instead of 4-0, giving us a little better chance of not falling off the league (the three last placed teams go down).

our next game was against the strongest team in the country, Kfar-Sava A
Game 2 (round 5): Ramat-Gan A vs Kfar-Sava A
Kfar Sava is a very strong team, with the first three boards being 2300-2400, I was playing against last year's World's u14 girls champion on the 3rd board.

There is one factor that might have really had an impact on the game, being almost their entire team just returned from a very tiring Youth World championship (no winners for Israel this year). But the game itself really gave a feeling of her discounting me, and too much arrogance can't go unpunished:

Winning this game was great, it was ecstatic, it was the thing that will bring me full force in back to chess.

Notice how I played with the knights - first Nf1-e3-f1-g3, then Ng4-f6-g4-Nhf6, obviously there's something to work about here.

my friend on the second board (rated ~1900) drawed, playing against ~2300, the first and fourth boards lost giving us a score of 1.5-2.5, a minimal lose to the strongest team in the league!

I play only every other round, as it's 2 games a week and I can't attend on Thursdays, and as of now have a score of +2 -1 =0

for those still interested, here is the puzzle from the second game (39...Qxe5)

My First win against a National Master! (and a Fide Women Master)

underrated