Category: Chess

It’s around 11 months since I started playing chess again so I thought I’d do a bit of a review and some goals for 2009.

I’ve found I enjoy playing quite a bit both at the club, tournaments and online as well as doing study both by myself and with others. So I’m definitely going to keep going this year.

In the last rating list my rapid rating went from 1276 to 1314 but my normal rating only went from 1261 to 1274. The main reason for this is that I am still losing the odd game to very low ranked players though carelessness. My actual rating is probably closer to 1400 in both rapid and normal going against my results against players in the 1400-1500 level.

Goals for 2009

1. Get my Rating to over 1700
2. Play in NZ champs in early 2010 and do well in under-2000 grade.

Programme to accomplish this

1. Keep playing at the Club
2. Enter as many tournaments as possible.
3. Play in over-1400 grades when able
4. Train 10-20 hours per week
5. Keep going to fortnightly coaching

Weekly training

1. 10-20 hours
2. 500 problems on tactics server ( 4 hours )
3. 20 Blitz games on FICS each week ( 4 hours )
4. 10 Standard games on FICS each week ( 4 hours )
5. Study Openings repertoire and practice it ( 4 hours )
6. Play though annotated games ( 4 hours )

Well that is the plan anyway. Certainly if I keep to it I’ve got a chance at reaching the goals. However keeping myself on track will be the hard bit.

I’m using a little area in the spare room going as a study space. For a computer I’m just going to use my Eee ( with external keyboard, screen and mouse ) but keep it off the network most of the time to cut the urge to browse. But for now just a board and a few books but thats enough for a start.

After my dumb loss in round 1 I was being extra careful the on Saturday in rounds 2 and 3.

In round 2 I was white against William Zhang. I was playing a little passively but got a bit ahead before my opponent my an error on move 22 I I won the exchange (  I won a rook for a bishop ) and then a few moves later lost a Knight. After that it was just a case of cleaning up.

Round 3 was against a Monish Santhosh who is a young guy ( 7 I think ) playing in his first tournament ( he had a bye in one round for a point which is why he got matched with me ). Easy win although I did look at a position for a whole two minutes before I noticed my Queen was en prise.

Round 4 and 5 were on the Sunday.

First up I had white against Stefan Kolev. Stephan was on a provision 1200 rating but is probably a little above that. I was a little disappointed with this game, I lost a pawn early on and gradually got a worse position by making inaccurate moves. Eventually my opponent had a passed pawn on a2 which completely tied me up and allowed him to capture a bunch of my King side pawns until he had a won endgame and I resigned.

Round 5 was against George Trundle and was short but fairly interesting. White played a sort of Stonewall Attack although he didn’t really get a chance to develop it correctly. He brought out his queen a little early and I ended up winning a Knight when the queens were swapped off. I was then in quite a cramped position while he pushed up some pawns and made a queenside attack. However after he made an error and allowed me to swap off some of his attacking pieces he decided that his attack had run out of steam and resigned.

So after 5 rounds I was now 3 wins and 2 losses out of 5 games. Unfortuneately all my games had been against players rated lower than my current rating ( let alone what I hoped to be on) so it didn’t look like I was going to lose ratings from the tournament.

Over Labour Weekend I was in the Merv Morrison Chess Tournament at my local club, The Auckland Chess Centre. I was in the under 1700 rating division. I thought I’d post a little about it. It also gives me the excuse to test the Chess by Blog plugin for wordpress.

The Tournament was 6 rounds over 4 days ( 1 game Friday evening at 18:30, then 2 games at 09:30 and 16:00 on Saturday and Sunday plus one game at 09:30 on Monday) with 90 minutes for each player plus an additional 1 minute added for each move.

There were two divisions, a over-1700 ( NZCF rating points ) with 11 players and an under-1700 with 21 players.

The New Zealand ratings are due our at the start of November so I was hoping for a good result to push up my rating a little. I’m currently at 1261 by I’m probably playing closer to 1400.

My first game was against Bella Qian, who has a 650 rating against my 1260 rating, which means I should beat her 90-something percent of the time. However I wasn’t being careful ( silly really considering the fairly long time control ) and completely blew the game. You can follow the game below and my comments below.