NOTE: SUBMITTED TOO EARLY BY MISTAKE. GAME ANALYSIS YET TO COME. I am way behind in my tournament blogging, but it doesn't matter: I don't make news, I make mistakes. The point of amateurs blogging their games is to expose their mistakes to their...
It's been a long time since this tournament, held at the Rockville Hilton over the MLK Day weekend, but I've been busy with other stuff and it took me a while to analyze my games. Chesapeake Open was expanded to seven rounds this year, which is ni...
Fall is a busy time for me, so I played no tournaments between the Potomac Open in August (which didn't go well for me) and Eastern Open in late December. Eastern Open has sections 300 rating points apart and, although my rating fell below 1900 af...
Sometimes you are the windshield, sometimes you're the bug... and I definitely wasn't the windshield in this tournament. After the ridicuously quick loss in round 2, I went home, rested, posted the first two games here, gave myself a pep talk - a ...
Ouch! First two games, two painful losses! The first game was simple, almost boring, heading for a draw until I made a series of wrong decisions: And the second game was worse! I missed a tactic and suffered one of my fastest tournament losses e...
Tournament play takes a lot of time and energy, so it is good to play toward a goal, like winning a prize or achieving a title (or, for us mere mortals, category) norm. In the World Open, prizes are huge, but with so many players, it is very diffi...
I took a bye in round 4, not because of a need to recover from two losses, but because I had planned it that way. Last year I was completely exhausted after playing 9 games in 5 days, so this year I decided I would play 7 games in 6 days. In roun...
My second loss in a row. There isn't much I can say about this game yet, I don't know exactly where I went wrong, I guess I don't understand the middlegame positions in this game... I am taking a bye in round 4, and I doubt I'll have time to pos...
Another round, another teenage girl opponent. This one was from Kyrgizstan, with no USCF rating. She was assigned a rating of 1750 for pairing purposes based on her FIDE rating in the low 1600s, but it is pretty clear that her post-tournament rati...
As I am playing a 6-day World Open schedule, I will have several days with one game per day, so I will try to post my games as I go. This inevitably means posts with a bare minimum of commentary and analysis. I will update the posts later with mor...
There are two reasons I love playing in MD Chess Association tournaments held at the Rockville Hilton: one, it is a very comfortable playing environment, and two, I've played there three times in the last year and have never left without a prize. ...
A year ago I returned to tournament chess after a 14-year hiatus. My first tournament was the under-1800 section of the UMBC Open, and I won it with 4.5/5. One year later and 160 rating points up, I was happy to play in the Open section of the sam...
Part 1 is here. So my undefeated streak stopped at 7, but I got through 3 rounds with an even score against opponents with an average rating of 2020. Can I keep up with that? Sunday started with a bummer: my opponent failed to show up. It's never...
Four weeks after my best tournament performance ever, I played another tournament and again decided to play up a section, which this time meant under 2100. New challenge! I had not faced a 2000+ rated opponent in a tournament since 1999, and have ...
(For the first two rounds, see Part 1.) My third-round game was full of errors on both sides. I keep getting bad positions out of the Torre Attack; if I am to continue playing it, I need to understand it better. It started well: 7.h4!?, with whic...
After a disappointing Eastern Open just two weaks earlier, I had my best tournament since 1992. Despite playing a section up (under 2000), I tied for second place with 4/5, won prize money, improved my rating by more than 100 points and, most impo...
In the fourth round, I played as black against a teenager whom I had already met in March at UMBC. Back then, he hung a piece early in the game. His rating has improved a lot since then, and he had a good tournament, finishing well ahead of me, bu...
My least successful tournament since I started playing again, but it was fun and I finally (in the last two rounds) got to play some players higher rated than me. Half a year since the last tournament (World Open) is a long time, so it took me a c...
