Tournament Report: Patzer plays FM!

Hi all,

So, the Best in the West 2018 is over, and I am whipped! It was a good tournament; reasonably strong, well-run, and all around a nice environment. The time control was 60 minutes plus 30 seconds increment from move one. There were 5 people tied for first place at the end on 4.5/5 points, including a very strong performer in Ray Yang, who, while only(!) rated 2109, defeated FM Greg Canfell (2258) and held the tournament favorite, Kanan Izzat (2560), to a draw. 

The closest yours truly comes to all this is that I played one of the tied leaders in the first round. Let's take a look at that savage scene...

Well, this was a bit embarrassing but I don't think I played as poorly as much as my opponent played well; the only mistake I needed to make was misjudging the value of the pawn, which I did. Lessons were learned, some of which I'll recap on.

The anomalous 18...Rc8?? could have cost me half a point. You're never winning til you've won!

After this exhausting non-event, I went home and slept solidly. (I only got 8 hours of sleep, but they were 8 solid hours.)

I panicked in the time scramble and turned a win into a loss.

I played pretty toothlessly in this game, and it was only by virtue of my opponent recapturing errantly that I was able to win.

Recap: What have we learned?

Well, I think there are some very valuable lessons learned, though losing to an 8 year old 900 was a bit of tough love. Some insights I had:

1) I'm playing and evaluating too emotionally

In almost all of my games, I had some sort of emotional reaction that impacted how I played.

In my first game, I evaluated my own position as "not too bad" until the end, even though most of the people I showed the game to valued the a6 bishop to be completely dominating. (Including Stockfish.)

In my fourth game also, I overvalued my queenside expansion and forgot to develop. (The Pirc can be rather forgiving that way, though; your bishop and knight can stay at home for a while without too much punishment.)

And in my fifth, I was in a depressive sort of stupor and gave my opponent chances he wouldn't have otherwise gotten.

I need to learn to take "I want" out of the equation and look at the position in a balanced manner. Easier said than done!

2) Tournament play is like a muscle

I found, especially by round 3, I was getting pretty exhausted, while the majority of the other players seemed to be, for the most part, fine. Then I realized that most of these people do this more than twice a year, and they are used to concentrating on chess for this long at a time. I guess that's something to work on; building the chess muscle so that it takes longer for my brain to fry.

3) Have a plan in your openings

This tournament really illustrated to me, when watching the top boards, (and playing on one of them) how gimmicky my openings are. I figured I was being clever, avoiding mainlines, surprising my opponent. Okay, in blitz, go for it, but in classical, I'm not learning very much about chess patterns by playing the Grivas Sicilian, or the Prins Variation against 2...d6. The whole shtick of these openings are that they throw the opponent off guard.

I think, for me to improve, I need to learn the basic openings, and the many plans in themes therein, before I try to go all tricky. I've done a forum post that entails a possible plan of action, and have gotten helpful feedback, especially from ThrillerFan. My forum post.     

4) I am very impatient! 

I find that I most often fail when the position asks me to quietly develop and control good squares. Develop? Be patient? I want to kill the person opposite me, and that's that! (This ties into the "I want" problem.) I've been aware of this for a while, but putting it into blog form will hopefully cement in my brain the error of this way of thinking.

Well, that summarises my tournament experience. What am I going to do based on this experience?

For one thing, I'm going to commit to going over a few master games daily. I think it's probably a bit much to ask me to annotate them in detail on the blog, but I'll try to report on the key moments and themes. This exposes me to proper chess playing every day, as well as identification of critical moments and patterns.

For another, I'm going to try expanding my daily tactics from 10, to maybe 15, and from there, beyond... This tournament has shown me that endurance is very important.

And, finally, I'm going to be rejigging my repertoire. Starting today, I'm intending to put into motion my posited plan in the link above, changing the opening of focus every month (the tail ends of September will be lumped into October .) More on that in another post; this one's already long enough!

So, that was my tournament experience... I am most certainly looking forward to the coming Victorian Country Championship, held in Geelong in just under 3 weeks, where I intend to put my learned lessons into practice!

Thank you all for reading (if you made it all the way to the end, you're a legend), and I will talk to you soon.

Cheers,

~Willy