Blunderfest Blitz Game

It’s 7:32am as I start to type this.  I’ve been awake a bit over three hours for some unknown reason, and the two Red Bulls aren’t working.

So what should I do?  Play blitz of course!

So I played a game on lichess which was a festival of blunders by both sides.  Here are the highlights.

Here my opponent has just played 21.Qh5.  Clearly he’s hoping to mate me, but the e pawn is also hanging.  However, I decide to defend the mate threat first with 21…h6 when 21…Qe7 saves the e pawn and I can still  stop any mate threats my opponent tries to make.

However, instead of taking the e pawn they play 22.Rg3.  Uh oh…my h pawn is hanging to a tactic.

So I play 22…Kh8 instead of 22…Qd6 which saves the e pawn and the h pawn.

A few moves later this position is reached.

My opponent misses the simple 26.Nxd4, which wins a pawn.

As you can see by the complete game here, those weren’t the only blunders.

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott

If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.  Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.

If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter.  Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.

Tactics Update

Here’s an update on the tactics program with 90 days to go.

Date Day Correct/Missed
7/1/2018 Day 1 16/5
7/2/2018 Day 2 16/6
7/3/2018 Day 3 22/4
7/4/2018 Day 4 20/3
7/5/2018 Day 5 11/3
7/6/2018 Day 6 18/3
7/7/2018 Day 7 11/5
7/8/2018 Day 8 12/7
7/9/2018 Day 9 14/5
7/10/2018 Day 10 18/4

Something interesting happened today.  I wound up starting 3/3 but finishing 18/4.  Which is good since perhaps I’m internally disassociating from worry about the score itself and just focusing on the puzzles.

A lot of time I wind up with a gambler mentality and if I miss one or two I suddenly feel myself starting to want to play fast and loose and almost move like I’m playing a blitz game instead of looking at a position which I know has a concrete solution.

This is why I have days like the 11/5 and 12/7 days.  I started off bad and then felt like I was forcing it.

So perhaps this is a breakthrough of sorts.  That would be good!

In the meantime, while I intend to carry on with this task since it’s 15 minutes of random positions, I also intend to start making physical flashcards so I can use the woodpecker method on about 500 or so problems.

All in all I feel like my tactics continue to slowly improve, so that’s a start.

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott

If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.  Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.

If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter.  Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.

Look Deeper!

Sometimes when you first look at a position you have a candidate move that you would like to play, but it doesn’t appear that it works, so you simply dismiss it.

Here’s a great example of such a position from a game of mine five years ago.

It’s black to move, and I really wanted to play 12…a4 here.  But it looks like it just hangs to the knight, right?

I looked at 12…a4 13.Nxa4

Here of course I can sack the exchange, but I didn’t see a follow up.  Yes, I can win the c pawn with something like 13…Bxc4 14.Bxc4 Nxc4

Without a doubt I’m a bit better here, but the attack is gone.  It didn’t seem like enough so I just tossed 12…a4 aside.

What I should have done was look deeper.  After all, there are other ways of undermining White’s pawn structure which don’t require me to sack the exchange at all.

Had I looked deeper, perhaps I’d have found the following:

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott

If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.  Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.

If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter.  Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.

How Many Hours Per Day Should One Study?

Of course this is a question that many of us ask ourselves, but the true answer always boils down to one thing…

WHAT you do, and HOW EFFICIENTLY you do it is much more important that HOW LONG you do it for.

While it’s for sure a true statement to say that the more study time one puts in the better the odds for good results, it’s also true that how that time is used it much more important than how much time is used.

Here is an excellent article by GM Sergey Shipov on this subject. https://thechessworld.com/articles/training-techniques/how-many-hours-per-day-to-work-on-chess-according-to-gm-shipov/

I myself have been spending anywhere from 30-90 minutes per day on chess for a long time, but only recently have I started really trying to focus those efforts and make them count for something.

I’m hoping to see a payoff from that in the not too distant future.

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott

If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.  Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.

If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter.  Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.

Missed Opportunity (Pokorski-Wainscott 1/2-1/2)

One area in which I have long struggled in chess is strategy.  Specifically as relates to planning.

I do feel like I have made some slight improvements in this area, but it’s not nearly enough.

This was evident in the following game.  I was never in any danger, but the one real missed opportunity in this game was by me.  I could have played 20…c4

So, at the end of the day I can see the next area I’ll need to focus a lot on.

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott

If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.  Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.

If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter.  Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.

 

How Early is Too Early?

One thing I’ve read time and again by people working to improve is that often times they give themselves more time to improve by working on chess first thing in the morning while getting up earlier in order to do so.

I often work on chess early in the morning, especially on weekends, but normally I sort of get into the groove with some playing through games, etc.  This reminds me of an older gentleman who lives in Chicago named Vladimir who, prior to a tournament game, likes to find someone who’ll just make 10-15 moves on the board with him.

The idea is just to get used to moving the pieces and staying in theory.  Once the position gets to a point where either side would have to think he’ll reset the pieces so it can be done again.

He calls this “priming the pump” and it’s an interesting approach.  His philosophy is that shuffling a little bit of wood will get the brain up to speed on piece coordination prior to the game.

So this morning I decided to do my 15 minutes of tactics first thing.  Like immediately.  I woke up, went downstairs to my chess lab, and set the timer and off I went.

Here are the results…

Date Day Correct/Missed
7/1/2018 Day 1 16/5
7/2/2018 Day 2 16/6
7/3/2018 Day 3 22/4
7/4/2018 Day 4 20/3
7/5/2018 Day 5 11/3

As you can see, the results were slightly out of whack.  The percentage doesn’t seem too out of line with prior results, but the number solved is far off the mark.

Granted, a sample size of one may be statistically insignificant, but I can tell you that I felt slow when I was solving.

So there seems to be something said for priming the pump.

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott

If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.  Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.

If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter.  Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.

 

Tactics Update

So one nice thing about finding myself with some extra time on my hands is that I have been able to fairly easily keep to a training schedule.

What I’m mostly hoping for with the tactics work I’m doing (15 minutes a day of simple tactics – i.e. not logging in and using chesstempo) is to get faster.

Much faster.

Here are the three days I’ve done so far…

Date Day Correct/Missed
7/1/2018 Day 1 16/5
7/2/2018 Day 2 16/6
7/3/2018 Day 3 22/4

As you can see, not logging in means that the tactics I’m getting fed are quite simple.  However, this is very useful for increasing my speed at simple tactics.

Here is an example of one of the problems that I’ve gotten when not logged in.  I’ll give the solution at the end of this post.

Everything in this puzzle is a forcing move.  There are no quiet moves or intermezzo’s to worry about.  For those types of moves endgames studies are the way to go!

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott

If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.  Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.

If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter.  Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.

The solution to the puzzle above is 1.Nxg6+ hxg6 2.Rf5+ gxf5 3.Rxf5#

Tactics Redux (Again!)

If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time you know that I’ve had a constant battle with tactical acumen.

I’ve spent years trying to figure out the correct approach to solving.  I know that it’s important, but I’ve struggled at times to figure out how much/how long/how difficult.

What I’m doing now is combining two things, one which I learned from IM John Bartholomew, and the other which I recently learned from soon to be FM Andrzej Krzywda.

John told me years back at a camp that “15 minutes a day” should be sufficient for tactics at my level.

Andrzej said in his Perpetual Chess appearance that he solves simple tactics by using www.chesstempo.com but without logging in.  This means that instead of getting fed tactics at your rating you just get fed some simpler tactics.

The hard solving in Andrzej’s studying comes from endgame studies rather than difficult tactics.  But of course the idea remains that constant solving is the key to improvement.

So what I did was relaunch my 100 days of tactics idea, but in this logged off mode.

Now what I am tracking is number of problems solved vs missed.

So for instance on day one I solved 16 and missed 5.

Since my last “100 days” attempt I have still continued to solve tactics on a daily basis.  Primarily through apps on my phone.  This will just require me to be a bit more disciplined as I’ll need to track the time used.

I won’t have to track the correct/incorrect though as ChessTempo is kind enough to do that for me 🙂 – I’ll just need to reset it each day.

As I was recently laid off at work I now have a lot more free time during my day, and I am trying to make use of some of it for chess.

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott

If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.  Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.

If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter.  Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.

Move Order Matters

Since I started working on solving studies on a more regular basis I have noticed that I often pick up on the themes, but that I have a tendency to not get the move order correct in a meaningful way.

Take this study by Kubbel for example.

It’s White to move and win.  Feel free to set a clock for ten minutes as I did and try to work through the solution.

Quite often in these drills I find the same thing repeating itself.  I will start at the position for some time trying to figure out the nuances, then just as I start to make sense of the position I’ll only have a few minutes left and so I rush through working on a solution and I’m not getting it quite correct.

My assumption is that if I just stick with it eventually I’ll see the ideas quicker and be left with more time to calculate without getting into such “time pressure” and missing stuff like this.

Here is the solution, including the failed move order I selected:

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott

If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.  Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.

If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter.  Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.

Finally Got a Study 100% Correct!

The subject says it all!  After several attempts over several days I finally got a study completely correct!

Here it is…

You will find the solution at the bottom of this post, but I encourage you to spend ten minutes on it first, just like I did!

Since I heard Andrzej Krzywda on Perpetual Chess recently I have been following his advice and solving studies.  Really the idea is just to immerse yourself into a position for a length of time (in this case ten minutes) and work on calculation.

I wrote about it a few days ago with this: https://ontheroadtochessmaster.com/solving-studies/

At that time, and until now, I hadn’t solved any completely correct, including any side variations, but finally that’s a thing of the past!

Let’s hope that this continues.

Til Next Time,

Chris Wainscott

If you like this blog, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.  Any money I raise will go towards lessons and stronger tournaments.

If you can spare it, please click here and become a supporter.  Even $1 a month can help me achieve my dream.

Solution…

1.Nf7 Ba1 2.Kb1 Bc3 (or d4, f6, g7) 3.Nd6+ Kxc7 4.Nb5+ (or whatever square will fork the king and bishop depending on the alternate moves listed above…)

1.Nf7 Bd4 2.Nd6+ Kxc7 3.Nb5+