Round 1: Fight!
I've been active on chess.com for about a year or so now and while I've probably been studying far less than I should and playing random Bullet games far too much, I've learned a good bit. I'm not talking about major gains here, but joining the online chess community has definitely helped me approach the game differently than I did before and get more out of it. In particular, Daily chess has been a great chance to learn about different openings, work on analysis and visualization, and generally think about what I'm doing instead of just reacting move-by-move. Given how much I've enjoyed this format, I had to take a crack at the 2023 Daily Chess Championship. Returning to chess after a long hiatus has been exciting overall, and tournaments still feel filled with possibility to me. I don't kid myself about the eventual outcome (that Studying:Bullet ratio is real, folks) but I also can't help wondering who I'll get paired with, what they'll play, and what weird stuff might happen over the board. Unlike an OTB tournament, there's also the fact that all of your games in a round happen at once! I've been keeping 2-3 daily games going at one time over the course of the year, and I've been routinely amazed by how many games my opponents are working on at once by comparison. This is all to say that I approached Round 1 with a lot of excitement, a little trepidation, and an eagerness to see how my first year back at the board translated into some tournament games.
So what happened? A bunch of early timeout wins, for starters - something like 5 people in the group just bailed immediately. So it goes, I hear. The remaining players in my group are, well, let's say variable. What do I mean by that? As a group, they range in ability by quite a bit - I benefited from some early and large blunders from a few of my competitors, but others are clearly very good. There's variability to be found at the individual level too, though. Some of my opponents' stats had some oddities in them that I couldn't help but be curious about - a wicked low Daily rating, but a wicked high Bullet rating, for example. I know people play better or worse at different time controls, but I did feel like I was being hustled a bit in one case. Anyways, my point is not to dig in too deep with regard to the rest of the field, but to try and say a bit about my own play. After a year of playing online to try and refresh and rebuild my chess-playing skills, how am I doing? Am I seeing stuff I didn't tend to see before? Am I building any kind of opening repertoire?
I'm going to reflect on this by showing off one game from Round 1 that I think does a nice job of highlighting some of the things I've gotten better at, but also some of the things I definitely need to work on. With regard to the latter, there are holes in my game on display here that I know I should address: I need better opening knowledge (any of you played the Black side of the Frankenstein-Dracula variation in he Vienna Game? I hadn't!), I need to remind myself to not play "Hope Chess", I shouldn't just trade pieces because it's a quick decision. The list goes on, and I know these things in the same way that I know I should stop slouching in my desk chair and should do more cardio. Are these true facts? They are. Am I likely to address them? Only sluggishly and with a great deal of grumpiness. The grumpiness is offset however by the glimmers of improvement amidst the inaccuracies, the mistakes, and the blunders. I have a better sense of the key ideas in some of my favorite openings now, for one. I also think I'm getting better at taking calculated risks - calculated both in the explicit sense of trying to analyze candidate moves but also in the sense of weighing imbalances in the resulting position. I've also been feeling fairly proud of my Puzzle stats on the site: I crossed 2700 at one point and have been hanging out in the 2500-2600 area for a while. That's helped my tactical play a lot and this is one of the things that's on display here.
Alright, that's enough preamble - on to the game!
We start with a Sicilian, which I’m never especially thrilled about. I’m more of an e4-e5 player and I’ve spent a fair bit of time getting acquainted with the Scotch and the Italian Game. I’ve been seeing a lot of Scandinavians in the weeks before the tournament as well, which have been fun to play as both White and Black. The Sicilian on the other hand isn’t one I enjoy playing much as Black, which means I haven’t been learning it through my usual routine of trying both sides to learn where to look for key missteps in the opening and strategic ideas. Instead, I decided a few months ago that I should just decide on an approach to dealing with it as White and after trying out the Alapin Sicilian for a while, I settled on the Smith-Morra Gambit. I get that it’s probably not the most cutting-edge opening, but I’m not exactly the most cutting-edge chess mind, either. The strategic ideas (rapid development, pressure on f7, rooks on the queenside files) are pretty clear and I like the way it can quickly lead to a lot of momentum for White that can make Black feel uneasy early on. So, 1. e4 c5, 2. d4 cxd4, 3. c3 dxc3 4. Nxc3 …and away we go!
OK, Reality Check #1 arrives pretty quickly – my opponent does not panic at all and seems to know his way around this well enough relative to my own knowledge. Totally fine, but after a few moves it’s evident to me that I’m not likely to turn this into the kind of rapid march forward that can lead to Black getting tangled up without any development while the first few pieces I’ve played start to work their way closer and closer. That’s alright, but it does mean that as the opening progresses I’m settling into the real strategy of the Smith-Morra. In particular, I want to keep my development moving, I want to see if I can safely play e5 and I would also like to get my rook on the d-file, my queen on the e-file and generally give myself a lot of access to potential threats. After 16 moves I don't get everything I want, but I do end up at the position below.
And here, dear reader is where my troubles began. What have I done so far? I've got my rooks positioned on the c- and d-files in a manner I feel good about, I've got one knight on what seems like a decent outpost on d5 and another ready to move from f3 into a kingside that's starting to look a little exposed to me. My queen and bishop are also sort of aimed in that direction, which I also feel pretty solid about. All told, I've actually managed to get to a nice position for myself! The thing is, I didn't feel like it. Y'know what bugged me? I was pretty torqued that I hadn't pushed e5 sooner. I had it in my head that this advance was often a good paralyzing move in previous Smith-Morra games I'd played and so I really wanted to try and use it here, but just didn't get the chance. I was bummed. Bummed enough that I didn't see just how good this position is - it turns out that it's like +5 or something! "Why?" you may ask if you're only as good as me at this game. Because: 17. Ba6 leads to some real nastiness for Black. After 17. Ba6 f418. Qd2 Bxd5 19. exd5 Nd4 20. Rxc8 Nxf3+ 21. gxf3 Qxc8 22. Bxc8 Rxc8, Black straight up loses the Queen and has few prospects. Do I see this? No, no, I don't. Instead, I try to remember why I wanted to get this knight in before just capturing the bishop on e7 and killing all of my advantage.
Alright - time to reflect a bit on what happened and why I think this is an important game for me to keep thinking about. The problem here wasn't really a matter of not knowing the opening well enough - I did make a mistake in the opening and forget to push that pawn to e5 (I was right to be a little bummed!) but I more than made up for it in a few moves. The problem was forgetting to really look at the position and think about what I was building towards. I assembled my pieces pretty well and then just sort of forgot what the point was of them all being there. It's like if Captain America was all "Avengers, Assemble!" and then just kind of stared off into space and started picking dirt off his shield.
So then what? Believe it or now, even though I missed all this good stuff and threw away a good position I managed to get myself back to a good position by clumsily persisting in my idea that the opening was supposed to lead to me getting some pressure on the kingside for an attack. After just a few more moves, I'm back up to about +4 or so.
Ugh. Here we are, definitely in an endgame and it is not looking good at all for me. I've unknowingly squandered a couple very nice positions and my attacking ideas are gone. I'm just trying to hold Black off now, not actually jump into their neighborhood and cause trouble. Total bummer. Those pawns on the queenside are poised to just run down the board and my knight doesn’t have as much scope or speed as his bishop. As the French would never actually say, Le Sigh. It’s tough to imagine anything I can really do now though, especially after my knight gets rousted from its post closer to the corner.
But: Do you see it? What I have is perhaps not an amazing move, but it is just the thing to at least save this from being a totally losing position. For whatever reason I saw this one right away and was happy enough to have seen it that I decided I didn’t really care what happened afterwards. White to move and salvage a little bit of pride.
It's 31. Qg7+! I want to give myself two exclamation points if I’m being honest, but I know I probably don’t deserve them. The Game Review calls this a Great Move rather than a Brilliant Move as well, so I better stick with that and check my ego. Still, I think this was my puzzle practice paying off and it’s definitely the kind of thing I wasn’t ever going to see prior to rebooting my chess career this year. This little tactic is simple and turns the material deficit I had into a tiny material advantage: Now we’re in an endgame where my opponent is trying to push a pawn majority down the queenside, but I have a minor piece that he doesn’t to try and interfere with that plan and/or win.
The rest, dear reader, was not all that exciting. I briefly hoped that there was a path where I could steal a victory by flummoxing my opponent with some crafty knight moves, but he was too solid for that or I had inadequate ideas for making it happen. In the end, his pawns didn’t make it, but neither did mine, so the result was a draw based on insufficient material.
So why go into this much detail over a draw? Because I’m proud of this game, both for the Queen sacrifice that let me hold onto a draw but also for what came before. I made mistakes, but I’m at least happy to be making more active mistakes where I managed to achieve something good in a position through decent play but failed to see what the right next steps should be. I feel like that's a lot better than were I was at the beginning of 2022 where I'd often be just sort of moving stuff without much of an idea at all. While I'm also kicking myself over my "Hope Chess" mistake, I'm also kind of pleased with myself that the thing I was hoping for was actually a mate in 5 instead of just something like "I will take their pony if they forget it's there." I'm clearly not calculating enough stuff over the board, but I'm also calculating some things with more depth than I used to. So yeah, I need to study my Smith-Morra more closely and make sure I establish the set-up I want more reliably, I need to be more careful about examining my opponent's candidate moves, and I need to make sure I have concrete combinations in mind instead of vague attacking goals. All that said, this was a fun game. I was up, I was down, and in the end I was even. More than the other games I played in this round, this one has lots of good stuff for me to think about and analyze further and at least one or two things I’m proud of. So, Round 1 ends with a bit of a whimper rather than a bang, but 2023 begins with some good games and new plans to keep learning.
Now that you've heard my own take on this game, feel free to explore below if you're so inclined:
