A Blunderful New Year

The mistakes are there, waiting to be made -- Savielly Tartakower

Welcome to 2017!

I have been neglecting the blog for a couple of years, so I figured it was well past time to post something new.

A quick update and then on to the subject of the post. Chess study hasn't been very fruitful and games have mostly been at the Joplin Chess Club. I managed to play in one regular tourney and as a house player in another, for a grand total of six rated games in 2016 and six tourneys with seventeen games in 2015. Results haven't been spectacular but I had one of my better events in March 2015, with 3.5 points, winning the Class C prize and a peak rating of 1648.

A Start to 2017

First Joplin Chess club meeting was on the 1st so I got to play a few games there. Had a really good game with Blake Splitter that I hope to get analyzed this week. I also had a day off work for New Years, so I was able to play in one of the weekly US Chess club's Monday 10|0 events on January 2nd, my first US Chess club event since April of last year.

I still need to go over all the games but thought I would present a couple of related puzzles from the second round during the event. Finished 3/5 but in the game I managed to blunder two immediate wins away. I had some additional blunders but these were ones where I should have been able to calculate and/or recognize the patterns.

The worst part was that I had plenty of time on the clock to find the winning lines. In the first puzzle, I had looked at some similar ideas previously, when they didn't work, and neglected to see if they worked in the position.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the positions. These are certainly going into my tactics collection, though they probably aren't really that hard in reality. Takeaways here are for me to use a little more time in more critical positions and don't blitz out recaptures before analyzing the position.

Position 1: I had 7 minutes on the clock here and blitzed out the recapture. Black's last move was to capture the bishop on d2; Nxd2.

Position 2: In this position, black had just moved the pawn to h6 to protect the bishop. I had 5:20 on the clock and only spent about 8 seconds analyzing.

Thanks for taking a look. I hope everyone has a great year and a lot of great games in 2017.