'Improve Your Chess' Group Competition

Hello, and welcome to the 'Improve Your Chess' group competition!

Rules:

• This is a correspondence format (Online turn-based) with a time control of 3 days (originally two).
• The competition is a single round robin format, with 2 groups of 7 competitors with each player playing 3 games as White and 3 games as Black (originally a 'swiss-system' format, with 12 players and 5 rounds).
• The groups will be posted by myself in this thread, in a cross-table format.
• Each round will start as soon as the final game in the previous round has finished.
• The games will be sent through challenges sent by either player; just make sure that each person has the correct colour pieces. Please make the title of your challenge "'Improve Your Chess' Group Competition", so that you know what that game is for.
• When your game has finished, please post it here so that myself and others know the result.
• No cheating (but that's obvious)
• HAVE FUN!!!

If I have missed anything out, then please do let me know.

Groups and current standings:

Please make sure that the colour you are playing with is the one on your row (e.g. Oraoradeki will play as white against t_taylor, as black against CardSure etc.)

Good luck to all!

Round 1 (vadsamoht vs LesuhAn): http://www.chess.com/echess/game?id=92194300

First result of the competition:

Second result of the competition:

All games are now underway! Please remember to put the title of your challenge as "'Improve Your Chess' Group Competition" or something similar and message me the link to your game as soon as possible; I had to do a bit of searching to find the games. Also, when your game is complete, please post the game in this thread like the two games above.

Here my first game analysis of the IYC group competition:

Here the second game:

 Hope, this helped you . Cheers, Till :)

Thank you very much for the analysis. I'm sorry you had to witness such terrible chess, but I guess that's why I'm here. For anyone who's interested, I'll try to justify some of my play;

8. Rb1 - to guard against ... cxd4, cxd4, ... Bb4+, exchanging off the bishops. Clearly black had signalled his intention not to do this with ... Be7, but I didn't want to risk it, and I thought the b-file might be useful later.

15. Kf1 - I anticipated the e-file opening up, so I wanted the king out of the way, but I still wanted to play h4 and bring the rook in via h3. This is where I really started to lose track of what I was trying to accomplish.

16. c4 - intending to play Qe4 without ... Qd5, and expecting to take the d-pawn later. If you were being generous you might call this plan "optimistic".

17. Qe4 - failing to notice that ... Bf5 was now possible because ... e5 was played. Simple, no? Well apparently not.

28. gxf3 - I had intended to take with the rook when I played Rh3, but I changed my mind and tried to hold the h-pawn instead.

29. Kg2 - Avoiding a potential ... Re1+, and perhaps allowing my own rook to cover the back rank if necessary.

32. f5 - Happy to give up the f-pawn for the d-pawn.

And I'm all out of excuses! Thanks again for your time.

Till I really appreiciate the analysis. Like CardSure said I am sorry you had to see this bad gameplay but I really was just tryingto practice my tactics. Thank You!

Here's our game:

The last move for white was supposed to be RxN, after which I can simplify into a winning K+P endgame where I have advantages on both sides. I thought I was messing around with lines on the analysis board at the end there, but was actually using the conditional moves interface, and Black moved before I had realised that :/

Anyway, ggs to LesuhAn.

Thanks, Vadsomoht, good game. I saw things, differently. Even if he took with the rook, I felt I'd either be able to get a back rank mate or I'd have an extra rook. Correct me if I'm wrong. :)

Yes, looks like you're right. I've put the line I calculated in the game above, but I missed the fact that QxR still works for you.

OK, thanks for checking that. Should be an interesting analysis since the power was shifting at different points in the game.

I am curious about how this tournament is done with the swiss pairing system. I understand ratings tend to fluctuate but Looking at the pairings, I find it strange that the stronger player (in rating) is always White. In Swiss, the color the higher seeded player plays should alternate i.e. Board 1- higher rated player plays White, Board 2- higher rated player plays Black e.t.c. the spyv - Squareshot game is an exception, though their ratings are inaccurate as the number of games completed are 5 and 19 respectively. It will be harder to pair players in future rounds, assuming that all the stronger players win their games and are due to play Black the next round. Of course I am talking as if I want to minimize the number of times a player would have to play the same color twice in a row.

Would be interested to see how this problem will be addressed.

Here is the list of correspondence rating as of 26th June.

1. Oraoradeki (1886)
2. Learning2mate (1837)
3. Squareshot (1704)
4. Danomulligan96 (1619)
5. Pimpslap (1604)
6. Spyv007 (1593)
7. t_taylor (1558)
8. Cardsure (1529)
9. vadsamoht (1502)
10. LesuhAn (1476)
11. Moles123 (1357)
12. ThomasJEvans (1356)

Tbh I thought we were playing games to understand each other much better, rather than it being a competition...

I think the swiss pairing is just to accelerate people with similar ratings getting to play each other. Also my rating has changed about 30 points since the pairings were announced, so it could be that the same has happened for others, too.

Ratings were not taken into account when making the pairings. And also, it is impossible to avoid the problem of having the same person playing the same colour twice; so there is a good chance that the same colour will come up for you twice.

Also, I am tracking the colours for each person to avoid the problem as much as possible.

Hi, Thomas, I think the pairings will end up working out fine since who wins isn't always predictable. Hey, do you know when the 3rd game will be analyzed? I'm looking forward to learning from my mistakes.Thanks for all the work you're putting into organizing this for everyone. :)

Oops, accidentally, posted twice!

I do not know when the third game will be analysed; it is Till that is analysing. And for the organising part, it's not that difficult when you have organised many competitions before.

here the analysis of the 3. game:

Cheers and give me your feedback, Till :)