TCCL 2014 round 1

We lost the first round to a strong team. I managed to squeak out the only win.

My opponent played an early Bg5 against my King's Indian Defense, and I forgot not only the line against it (Spassky-Fisher 1992) but the general approach to the Averbakh.

I ended up with an unfavorable Benoni setup, and had to defend against a strong kingside attack. Short on time, my opponent missed the killer move, and allowed me to give up a piece for 3 center pawns and transition into an endgame, where my central pawn mass proved to be too much trouble for him in the time he had left.

Recently I picked up an ideas I am going to try to apply now. The old idea was simply to study an opening after as part of analyzing the game just played. The new idea is to look at an opening 3 times in a day, with an hour or two break between first and second look, then more than four hours between second and third.

Flash Cards as Study Book

Dan Heisman has many excellent articles in his Novice Nook series on chesscafe.com. The one that is pertinent to this post is "Getting The Edge". In this article he gives 14 things we should do to improve.

Number 12 is to create your own personalized study book in which you document mistakes you have made and how you think you can keep from repeating them. I think the flash card format is excellent for this, and it is my major use of flash cards. They compose the deck I review as warm up before tournament games.

As Heisman points out, removing negatives from our play is as important as adding positives (e.g. tactical patterns), and it can be harder.

Noel Skelton Open 2013

The good news is that I played Wesley So in the first round. He spent a lot of time in the opening. I think he was deciding the variation that would be the safest way to win. He appeared tired and jet lagged. I hope he had a good time. He won the tournament, of course.

 The bad news is that I played terrible the whole tournament. Lots of visualization errors. I think I need to analyze my vote chess games without an analysis board or notes, then write down the variations, then use a set.

I found a few holes in the opening repertoire file I am using to filter games of interest, including the mainline of the early open Catalan that Wesley So played.