Speed Chess Challenge

llama the alekhine destroyer :eyes:

as a lifelong alekhine adherent myself I'm not sure how to view this, heh.

This one 2100 OTB player told me once that in his OTB games, a certain opening made him uncomfortable, and he always got a bad position... but also he usually won in the end, so there was no reason to stop playing it.

Sure 9...e5 isn't your favorite. And maybe something like 5...exd isn't your favorite either... but for a specific opponent if you score better that way, why not

Draw with black, win with white. GM strategy haha.

everybody gangsta until you get matched with an underrated opponent and you're black

perhaps you've considered switching to exd over cxd? :T

Oh yeah, 4.Nf3. Not a terrible position, I considered it, but I felt like you'd be comfortable. The positions are similar to something I like to play as black, and that was just my feeling, that you'd like it. 4.c4 transposed into my main prep, so I stuck with that.

I actually score better with cxd overall, but I'm not liking the lines where I play e5 and they respond with d5 (I've lost all games)

I'll stick with my mediocre exd lol

That's a benefit of arranged games like this... makes us study stuff.

When I was playing at a club, every week I'd prepare something or study something I did badly last time.

If you only ever play random people you never get that motivation.

no wonder my opening repertoire is almost exactly the same depth as it was when I was 1500...

Haha

Steven... my tactics haven't improved at all. The only thing I think I got better at is pawn structures, but there's a limit to how much you can autopilot your way through classical games. 

When I start calculating a position for more than two minutes I get frustrated and impatient and then I just make a move "so the game can continue"

Meaning I finish all my games with wayy too much time left on the clock :L

Nah, your tactics are good.

We both made mistakes, but I think you were more often the one punishing me tactically.

I think I have a trick for this (I played tons of online and took long breaks between OTB so I know the feeling of not being able to manage a clock).

Do something like untimed puzzle rush, or buy a puzzle book... the point is you're going to get hard puzzles.

And then set a clock for yourself... your target time (and time limit) is whatever you want your normal pace of OTB games to be. That way you'll get used to how you should fill up that time (how long to look for candidates, how long to calculate a single line, when to wrap things up, when to make a final decision).

That's nuts lol.

hmmm maybe it's time to buy Yusurpov then

And if the puzzles are too hard, that's good, because you wont have a solution yet. Just pretend it's a normal game, you tried to find a tactic, didn't, and now you're going to make a normal move.

I got my PR highscore of 47 when i was around 1600-1800 blitz range (can't remember)

I broke it recently with... 48. This was like two weeks ago.

I was 1800 blitz... at least 10 years ago lol. Puzzle Rush didn't exist, so I guess I have no way of knowing whether that's normal or something.

Hmm

Then maybe an anti Steven match strat is freestyling the openings to get odd positions.