Targeting 1500 - Training Game #1

Hello, everyone. Evan Lutz here. Allow me to give a bit of an introduction: 

I am currently a freshman in college and began playing chess seriously about two years ago. In two weeks, I will be playing in my first rated tournament in almost a year. I am a relatively low rated player, around 1380 in online rapid and around 1150 USCF (I think - I haven't checked or played in a tournament recently). Over the next two weeks, I'll be playing 1-2 online training games per day for my upcoming tournament and posting the games with my analysis here in the chess.com forums. Another goal of mine is to reach an online rapid rating of 1500. Any tips and help with analysis would be very much appreciated. 

… Ultimately, there were two problems I had with this game: time management and planning. Towards the end of the game, with little time and lack of a clear plan, I lost focus. Any tips for these problems? When I'm playing 30 min rapid, I feel like I have too little time to craft a detailed middlegame plan, so I resort to playing random moves, which is a problem.

Impressive that you post a loss when asking for help. A lot of people wimp out and post a win.

I don't have a lot to say, just a tip. In queen pawn games usually the c and d files open up, so it's common to put the rooks there. Combined with cxd (you can play it before or after) will give you something to work with. In the game Qb6 and e5 was a bit awkward.

Not being sure what to do isn't always a flaw of the player, sometimes it's the position's fault  In that case, even though it seems to make sense that you'd analyze a position where you were unsure, it makes more sense to analyze how you got there in the first place. I know it's asking too much that you choose your opening development moves to coordinate with a good middlegame plan. It's not like your a master  But I hope my tip about queen pawn openings helps you coordinate around a good middlegame plan a little better in the future, at least in positions that look like this.

More than anything though, you're playing long games and analyzing them to find mistakes. That alone is a strong sign you're on a good path to improvement.

I would have thought that 19. … Qc7 was a more consistent way to meet White's idea of opening the b-file. It would allow you to maintain your Pawn on c5 (answering 20. b4 with 20. … b6, and answering a doubling of Rooks on the b-file with Bc6 covering all potential invasion squares).

There is a defensive principle called "economy of weakness", which dictates that you shouldn't make positional concessions unnecessarily... in this case, there is no need to concede White the excellent d4 square for his Knight.

Good job for going through the games, although the analysis was much more like just a commentary, often the moves that were mistakes didn't have alternatives offered or concrete variations - it was very much just 'playing by general ideas' that were sometimes good, sometimes questionable, and sometimes just overlooking basic tactics, and not much anticipation of the opponent's possible resources. For example as the earlier poster said, ...Qb6 was quite clumsy, he could probably just ignore it with Nc3 anyway (I will leave you to work out why you can't take on b2 there).

With that having been said, the first game was a reasonably decent effort (despite the later mistakes), ...