The Chess Tactician: November 2023

Sunday 26 November 2023

Reaching a grade of 2000 on lichess.org

I am not a very talented chess player, and I want to prove to myself (and everyone else) that hard work and dedication, might actually beat talent!

I've spent hours and hours over the years playing blitz chess, but alas, my online grade only slightly improved. So, I thought I'd slow it down a bit and play 10 minute games rather than 5 minute games and this has really helped. Given that I am not a fast thinker, I am also generally a few minutes slower than my opponents even during these 10 minute games, so if I have a 'won game' I have learnt to speed up in the last 2 minutes of the game.

Back in the summer of 2023 I set myself a challenge to reach 2000 on lichess.org. (It should be noted that this server is not as strong as chess.com where my 10 minute grade still sits at 1801). I found that it was simple enough to reach about 1800 without too much effort, but breaking the 1900 barrier was more of a challenge. Then one day I got past 1950 and realised that it might actually be possible!

So, in the last few weeks I have been playing between five and ten, 10 minute games. I've been doing some very basic analysis of the games I lose, and use chessgames.com to play through the games of the masters where the same type of opening is used. I find that this is very helpful, because you can get a very good sense of how to deal with the positions that arise from the particular openings.

I've played three, 10 minute games today and my grade started off at '1995'. I won my first game and my grade went up to '1999'. Bearing in mind that this had happened twice before, I realised I'd have to play another game to get over the 2000 mark, so I played another - but sadly lost !!! :( So, my grade now sat at '1994'. I then played a person rated '2019' and to my astonishment, got into a 'won endgame' with less than 1 minute to spare ... I managed to promote a pawn to a Queen - and given that my opponent had no chance whatsoever of doing the same I had a completely 'won game' and they resigned!!! So I gained 6 grading points and reached 2000!! :) Job done at last. I've now set myself the same target for chess.com . 'Never giving up' applies here.

Saturday 25 November 2023

The enemy Knight became a beast!

I made a major strategic blunder in my last club game against Reading A Team. In this game I really should not have allowed my opponent to place his remaining Knight on e5. During the middle/endgame phase having a Knight on such is a square is a blessing. The Knight surveys eight squares of the board and in this case, the Knight controlled the entire game from e5.

My Knight on the other hand was placed poorly on a2 ("Knight on the rim is dim") and ended up getting trapped ... ! Rubbish ... !! Never mind - learnt from this and won't let it happen again...

Note: when I showed some colleagues the position after 16. ..e5, I gave them three choices ... They can either play 17.dxe6(ep), 17.fxe5 (which I wrongly elected to do) or 17.f5 which looked to be the strongest move. Unsurprisingly, out of those colleagues asked, the ones with the best chess ratings elected to play f5! This looks to be the correct move as the enemy Knight is certainly deprived of the e5 square, and White gets an attack against the enemy King, with effectively a Kingside pawn-storm.