Day 9: Some Lessons from Blitz

Back to the work week, which means much shorter chess sessions. I did some coursework, moved through a couple of positions in the Roots of Positional Understanding module and played 2 games of blitz.

I managed to win both games, hitting a new peak rating of 863, but both games featured some serious learning opportunities.

In the first game, things started fairly passively. This led to my first missed opportunity.

I could have taken way more space. It is something that I need to be aware of, but when my opponent is all bottled up, there is likely an opportunity to grab space on the flanks. In this case, I missed a nice opportunity to push the h pawn and really cramp my opponent's position.

After that, I managed to give up all of my advantage with some dubious attempt to create play on the Queen side. I will admit that when it got to this portion of the game, I really was as a loss for how to move forward. This is the one of the weakest areas of my game and something that I am trying to work on. It seems that what I needed to do was slow down and just focus on improving individual pieces.

Fortunately for me, my opponent got a little careless attempting to create their own pressure and fell into a pawn fork. For some reason they decided to give up their Queen over their Rook, but either way, it swung the game in my favor and I was able to convert.