Phases in learning chess, Phase Thirteen
In the last blog were my wins versus the three strongest opponents. Recently I achieved a draw against a 2100(ish) player, and I admit friend of mine, but the accuracies were similar enough that it was justified. Maybe I am just a strange fellow, but I like being outrated, at least I don't mind losing then. The play of strong players also just seems to suit me better, I don't seem to be able to exploit the worse moves lower rated players make. As kind of a perfectionist it actually annoys me that I can't see what goes wrong in those games. What my mistake is.
In the past I simply was too impatient, I like playing aggressively, to sacrifice a piece for a pawn and a weakness in the opponent's defence. To make a hole in the wall which protects the king. I lose a lot of games because I do that too early though, not patient enough to bring sufficient threats in before it. Now that I get rid of that habit, I notice in a lot of chess lessons that those sacrifices are regularly made by chess masters, so now I figure my problem is that I don't see the right moment to act. Not playing aggressively can also lose one a game!
Last time I 'predicted' I would write about something else, but till now the 'pen' got away with me... on chess sites, especially here on chess.com, I coincedentally discovered I could combine several of my hobbies in one activity. I like taking pictures and some years back I started manipulating images, mostly simply combining parts of one picture with another. Started out with presenting the Unofficial World Championship I organised on the other site before taking all activities here, I had to create a set of tournaments and come up with a way to make a draw who is in which one, organising tournaments was already a hobby as a kid when I organised a billiards tournament for sixteen people in the Marina, we had a billiards table in the Clubhouse, on tuesday evenings we each played a round to our moyen, the average amount of points one scores in 20 turns, this way it was a fair fight no matter the skill difference. Dabbling with graphic manipulation software is as much a game for me as chess, discovering how it works on my own is just fun. Yeah, just like with chess, a kind of puzzle to me... Funny thing is, the most part of my life I thought I wasn't creative at all, but after creating about a 1000 impossible picture or memes or avatars and club logos, I know better now. You've probably all seen some of my work without knowing it, I created several logos for clubs here on the site but I have no need to claim them. So playing chess, creating images, organising tournaments, solving technical issues for others, solving issues with the site itself are all things that come in handy when maintaining and/or creating a club. And they are all things I like doing, so now you know why I am online so often and maybe not playing in my daily games...
As an encore, for me one of my nicest games I played, it's years ago but I remember it so very well for two reasons: I had to play an 1800+ player and didn't expect to win even one of the two games in the team match and I offered the guy a draw earlier, which he declined!
I don't think I had that checkmate before or after, always thought it had a certain beauty to it...
This game was one of the more surprising results to me, looking back at it over 5 years later I see I was winning better than back then, glad to see I have learned something. Ironic I could play it without understanding all of it though.
Next time: some more games and maybe a bit of promoting for our clubs, my friends,
thanks for reading!
