Patzer to Grandmaster: The Western Class Tournament

On March 5 & 6 I played in my second over the board tournament. It was held at the Hilton in Irvine right across the street from Orange County Airport. The attendance was good. 

If you have been thinking about playing in an over the board tournament, I encourage you to go for it.  It is such a different experience than playing online. Very rewarding. Even when you are a patzer like me.

In my first tournament I got two points out of five games. I won one and got two draws. I considered it a success. I just wanted to come away with something. That was in November. 

My second tournament I judge also to be a success. Well, let's be honest I am of the optimistic sort.  Every learning experience is a success. But I did do better than in my first tournament. I played four games and won two, so that is a definite improvement. But even more in this tournament I discovered that I still had lots of opportunities for improvement! How glorious is that. There was no reason for me to stop studying, no reason to stop studying just about everything in chess, but particularly my opening theory. 

I will attach the annotations to my games below. Feel free to look at them. Or not. They are not particularly well-played games. I doubt you will get much benefit from studying them.

Of more importance was my post tournament analysis of what was wrong with my thinking. The fundamental error was a belief that my hours and hours of opening theory had made me superior to my opponents. Particularly in the opening moves I was playing on automatic. Consequently, I found myself in worse positions, where if I had stopped to honestly evaluate instead of just thinking, "O, I think, the line goes something like this."  What a catastrophic thinking error that was.

But I did win more games this tournament than last tournament, so... all is good. 

Here are the annotated games for completeness. 

Round # 1 . My big blunder was 15....Bxh6. I knew this at the time and yet I played it anyway.