August 2017 Untitled Tuesday

    Hi everyone,

    It's been five days since the WPP finale, and I still feel gassed. After coming off of a series which was not only some of my best work since starting this blog in late April, but also meant a lot to me personally, I'm less than thrilled to be writing about a monthly event - something which repeats itself time after time until eventually you run out of new things to say.

    But this is only my second UT post. Maybe there's hope for me yet to get good at blitz before I run completely out of material 

    There's a reason why I play most of my blitz games on Untitled Tuesday. It lies somewhere at the intersection of the friendly community there, my need for a good mental state when playing blitz and the garbage openings I see in about 80% of games in the open pool. Even if I still hang stuff all the time, I like UT and UT likes me, to the tune of a ~1500 performance in the two events I've played in.

    But not in the first three rounds of this event. I lost my first three games, and all three losses had a lot in common. In my first-round game, I grabbed the two bishops early on and missed that White was better anyway after my somewhat artificial ... Bb4-a5-b6 maneuver. Later on I became tied to a weakness on c6 and saw a tactical trick that solved my problems... except that it didn't. In my second game I won a pawn in a Giuoco Piano with opposite-side castling but allowed my opponent loads of compensation, and so it goes...

    Here's my third-round game against the founder @MGleason, in which I got a large advantage out of the opening and then blew it all over the next several moves.

    But we in the 1300s in blitz have another predicament: we have plenty of interesting losses but no interesting wins. In my three wins in the later rounds, my opponents all hung something for no compensation at all. I'll take this opportunity to introduce my own quote about blitz:

    "In 1929 if you played badly in blitz there was something wrong with blitz. In 2017 if you play badly in blitz there's something wrong with you." - chesster3145

     Here's my draw against the 1600-rated @laciiuhasz, where I blundered an Exchange in the opening but garnered some compensation for it and later forced a perpetual check in serious time trouble:

    Thank you for reading this post, and I'll be sure to be back with another one next week, in the form of either a training journal or a post on the Endgame Lovers tournament I'm almost finished or the September Untitled Tuesday. Bye for now