Reviewing my Last Fifty Games

Finally, it’s there. The answer I was looking for. It’s not yet the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything, but it’s good enough for the time being.

My plan was to not publish a third article on my monthly mistakes, like I had done in March and April. It was a good experiment to find and share my biggest mistakes each month. It helped me focus and made me think about my weaknesses in a new way. By this time I had come up with something better, so there wouldn’t be a similar article for May.

However, it just so happened that I blundered a mate in 1 last month. Twice! It would be cowardly not to share them. So, I’ll start with a condensed version of monthly mistakes for the absolute lowlights of May. 

After that I’ll share my preliminary findings for the last three months.

In this article

• Part 1: Monthly Mistakes for May (short version)
• Part 2: Review of my last 50 games
  • the opening
  • the middle game
  • the endgame

Part 1 Mistakes in May

As mentioned before, this will not be a full overview of my mistakes made in May. This time I will only share the games where I blundered a mate in 1.  This is not a good representation of the way I play, blundering mate in 1 is not a common part of my play. Furthermore, blundering mate twice doesn't reflect my overall performance. I actually did pretty well last month.

Game #1 allohaaa vs Duckfest

This blunder was the result of me getting in time trouble, even though the position was very much winning.  I had just played Kh7 is get out of check on the 8th rank. What did white play to punish me for my mistake?

In this Rapid game my opponent played the Hillbilly Attack, so I started in a slightly better position. During the middle game my advantage went up to -4. For 15 moves I kept my advantage somewhere between -4 and -5.  The full annotated game can be found in my Duckfest Digest library.

Game #2 Duckfest vs f040

White (me) has just played Rxc8, hoping to create some counterplay. What did I miss?

This was a Daily game, playing the Slav Defense. This one is not as bad as the other one, because I was already in a losing position.  On the other hand, is there ever an excuse to blunder mate in one in a Daily game? Full game is available in tournament library.

Part 2 My Final Fifty Review

In previous articles I have written about my efforts to create a new plan for my future development, based on extensive analysis of my own games. After analyzing 300 games and creating a database of over 800 relevant positions, the results were useful but not as insightful as I’d hoped. 

This quarter I chose to try the opposite strategy. Instead of looking for everything I did wrong, this time I only focused on the mistakes that mattered most. That’s why my article about the mistakes I made in March only featured the mistakes that had a significant impact. There were still too many. Not only because I made too many but also because I wanted to include too many of them. For the month of April I was even more selective. I wasn’t there yet, but I was on the right track. 

Then I had a better idea. I started evaluating my play with that of my opponent, instead of only looking at my own mistakes. In the past I had always dismissed this approach because I thought it was misleading. Winning a game because my opponent doesn’t spot my mistakes, doesn’t change the fact that I made a mistake that could be punished in future games. This time I decided to abandon that conception and try the other approach. 

As soon as I started using this new system of reviewing my games, based on relative performance rather than absolute performance, it became clear to me that this might be a better approach. At least, to get a better idea of my strengths and weaknesses. Patterns were evident from early on but I kept looking at games until I had a sample size of 50 games.

This analysis contains Daily games, 10 min Rapid games, 45 minute rapid games and some Blitz games. It’s a mixed bag. Comparing these formats is harder than comparing apples to oranges, especially when some of the apples and oranges are significantly higher or lower rated than I am. The methodology needs some adjustments here and there, but for now it seems to be working.

This image is the easiest way to show what I did. For each game I evaluated and scored my play in the opening phase, during the middle game and in the endgame. I’ll explain my findings for each phase below.

Opening Phase

The preliminary findings clearly show that opening play is one of my stronger suits. In most games it hardly matters, but when it does it’s in my favor.
In 40% of my games the opening phase has no impact at all. In the other 60% of games the opening phase does matter a little. In half of these (30% of total), there isn’t much of an impact, but most of it in my favor (75-80%). In 20-25%, I'm slightly behind.
The other half, the remaining 30%, does have an impactful opening phase. In these games it’s also 75% in my favor. 

Clearly, my opening phase is going very well. Occasionally, I can get a winning advantage as early as the opening but mostly I can get just a small advantage going into the middle game. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter. Only rarely, I end up significantly behind in the opening

Middle Game

This is where most games are decided, because the middle game practically always has an impact. 

It appears the outcomes are well distributed, even a little bit in my favor. On average I'm doing well, but in absolute results this is where I can make a lot of progress. Even the middle game where I'm crushing my opponent, often contain multiple mistakes for me as well. This should be a priority for me.

Endgame

Most games don't get to an endgame or are decided before the endgame. But when they matter, they have a massive impact.

My initial take-away was that endgames aren’t that important to me, because I hardly ever play them. Around 75% of games don’t get to an endgame or are more or less decided before the endgame. Of the 25% of games that do get to an endgame, I lose about half. That is good enough for me to avoid studying endgames.
Or it was. In several games I suddenly lost everything without even realizing it. My hope was that as I dug deeper, this would turn out to be a statistical anomaly, but most likely it won’t be.  On the plus side, if I can convert 3 games that I lose in the endgame into a win for the next 40 games, that would mean a huge boost to my overall winrate!

Wrap-up

The results are not entirely unexpected, but still help to paint a clearer picture:

• My opening play is more than good enough.
• My middle game is okay. Should be a priority anyway, because it's so important.
• My endgame is average. Could be better. I lose too many games for no reason.

This is still a work in progress. This is good first step to knowing my strengths and weaknesses with some interesting insights to investigate further. Normally, I'd wait a bit longer before I publish, in order to have more time to complete my story.  But. I'm also looking forward to get feedback from other players.  

Thank you all for reading and feel free to comment and give feedback.