My chess of February 2024
This post has been in the works for a long time, and is the first in what I hope will become a series of reviews of what I've been studying and playing over any given month. Please do peruse my briliancies and blunders for your own amusement if you wish. I expect these posts will do a lot of good for reflection.
What I've been studying
This month I completed a chessable course Winning Chess Stratagies, which served as my main middlegame course for multiple months beforehand. I wanted something new to study (that wasn't just playing out analasies of modern GM games) so I impulsively bought How to Reassess Your Chess, as it's recently been turned into a Chessable course. So far I've only managed to take a crack at the first chapter, but it seems much more my style so I think I will dig into it quite quickly.
In the way of openings there's not been much. I took a day with a lot of free time from my university studies to learn a lot of Benko Gambit lines, but with my lack of time to review them some have slipped from me for now. I have also not studied any endgames, but those remain a strongpoint for me so I don't feel as guilty about it.
For those unaware, I've been following a training method created by Polish IM Mat Bobula (that I learnt about through these chesscom forums) that splits up your focus for each day of the week. The original plan I've found to be somewhat flawed and inflexiable, but my modified version (still based almost entierly on their method) works nicely for me. I expect I'll talk about this much more in a future post.
My games in February
In February I attended the Guildford Chess Club to play ECF rated Rapid (15|10) games twice. I wrote the moves for each of the 5 games I played with a completely even score of +2-2=1. A summary of each game is:
- A loss against fellow University of Surrey player Beau Darrer - I blundered my Queen in a worse French exchange middlegame to a pin and resigned. The game can be found here.
- A win against Alfie Collins - I played against an IQP for the entire game and won it with a tactic. They resigned after their blunder. The play was easy, but you can see the game here.
- A tragic draw against Kieth Lo - Winning, then losing, then winning, then losing. I forced a draw. Due to the amusement of this variation it is below.
- 14 move resignation. Every continuation I bothered to calculate lost.
- A miniature against my GCC friend Atanas Georgiev with a knight sacrifice. I am proud of this game, so it is below.
Let us have a look at the interesing these games
Game 3
The first game of the night for the 26th I had expected to be a smooth win for me. Paired against Kieth Lo (a roughly 1100 rated GCC player) we played an opening I had studied a lot (and hinted at in a previous post) so felt confident. I sacrificed a pawn in the middlegame and felt like I had an amazing attack. The attack failed and I was suddenly on the defensive. Due to time trouble I stopped notating at move 30, but the whole game lasted likely until move 60 in a complex rook endgame.
Game 4
This game was going to be a French exchange from the second I sat down. We had discussed our opening repetoir before we started the whole event, but we did not know we would be paired. I tried going for a line given in a course I've recently completed (but dislike) here, which backfired quite badly. There was a lot of emotion going into (and coming out of) this game.
Game 5
My opponent (with no wins in this match yet) and I are both very tired. We both
have an aggressive tactical style of chess, which led to this being an important
game to notate. Funnily enough I did not need the paper to write this up as the
game was so memorable. It is correct and is as follows:
Ratings in chess
My ECF rating over these 5 games has gone down 0.2 points from 1521K to 1521K. Not bad. This is prone to updating as I played against some provisionally rated players. If it changes I will comment below.
Online the ratings vary a little. I played quite a lot more than I usually do, and managed to get into the Legends club this month! My blitz rating has gone down 16 point from 1463 to 1447 over 92 games, with my Bullet rating going from down 24 points from 1435 to 1409 over 31 games.
In the future of these posts I plan on including some tactics from my recent games, but I think I will leave this here for now. I hope you've enjoyed looking at my progress though this silly game, and hope to do another of these in a month! As you might have noticed from my March planner, I've already started the month off in an interesting way!
