I lose a lot.
I've been playing online again, for a while I was just studying, now I'm doing both. I've been losing badly. And not even losing badly, usually winning and then allowing my opponent to mate me or otherwise hanging pieces. There have been some interesting games though. And a lot of the time I can recover from positions that are so ridiculously bad. I have also been letting myself sacrifice for little or nothing on pure intuition and it has been going rather well. Some very pretty stuff. I'll have to find a couple good positions.
I came across MSA Data (click the link) on Liquid Egg Product's blog. It's pretty cool. I found out that out of 271 rated USCF I have 159 wins, 96 losses, and 16 (!!) draws. Yeah I'm a risk taker... I think it's probably a bad thing. I also used to resign very early because I used to attach a lot of emotion to the game when I was young. Now I am seasoned. I show nothing. I feel nothing. I couldn't even remember what my last draw was!! But I looked it up and it was over a year ago, I was so mad when I offered a draw that I couldn't win the ending but then he refused and I couldn't believe it. Someone watching was telling me to calm down and I was like "fuck that I'm the only one with winning chances here..." and then I calmly walked away. While I'm writing this it occurs to me that this may be the last time I sacked an exchange and tried to win with the bishop. I think it contributed to my aversion to piece sacrifices even when I know they are good.
On that note I was going through a Maroczy database I have and there is a game in the line I'm preparing where Kramnik and Anand had drawn and Kramnik was trying the line with White again. (The line is 1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 d4 cd 4 Nd4 g6 5 c4 Nf6 6 Nc3 d6 7 Be2 Nd4 8 Qd4 Bg7, they played a different move order though) Anand defends for a while and then matter of factly sacrifices the exchange and says (it was his annotations in Chessbase) now black is completely out of danger because the pawns are on one side. OK... really?? That's all it takes for you to decide to snap off a bishop for a rook...?? So a couple moves later Kramnik starts to really press and Anand says this is a mistake and the next move Kramnik offered a draw and Anand decides to keep playing and wins the game down the exchange with black. Now I should justify this by saying that this was back in 1996 when Kramnik was just a lowly 2775...
Anyways, work's over now so I'm going to just post this and go home, but the exchange sacrifice and the positional pawn sacrifice are definitely my two biggest areas of study right now. Let me know if there's anything I should look at...
I came across MSA Data (click the link) on Liquid Egg Product's blog. It's pretty cool. I found out that out of 271 rated USCF I have 159 wins, 96 losses, and 16 (!!) draws. Yeah I'm a risk taker... I think it's probably a bad thing. I also used to resign very early because I used to attach a lot of emotion to the game when I was young. Now I am seasoned. I show nothing. I feel nothing. I couldn't even remember what my last draw was!! But I looked it up and it was over a year ago, I was so mad when I offered a draw that I couldn't win the ending but then he refused and I couldn't believe it. Someone watching was telling me to calm down and I was like "fuck that I'm the only one with winning chances here..." and then I calmly walked away. While I'm writing this it occurs to me that this may be the last time I sacked an exchange and tried to win with the bishop. I think it contributed to my aversion to piece sacrifices even when I know they are good.
On that note I was going through a Maroczy database I have and there is a game in the line I'm preparing where Kramnik and Anand had drawn and Kramnik was trying the line with White again. (The line is 1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 d4 cd 4 Nd4 g6 5 c4 Nf6 6 Nc3 d6 7 Be2 Nd4 8 Qd4 Bg7, they played a different move order though) Anand defends for a while and then matter of factly sacrifices the exchange and says (it was his annotations in Chessbase) now black is completely out of danger because the pawns are on one side. OK... really?? That's all it takes for you to decide to snap off a bishop for a rook...?? So a couple moves later Kramnik starts to really press and Anand says this is a mistake and the next move Kramnik offered a draw and Anand decides to keep playing and wins the game down the exchange with black. Now I should justify this by saying that this was back in 1996 when Kramnik was just a lowly 2775...
Anyways, work's over now so I'm going to just post this and go home, but the exchange sacrifice and the positional pawn sacrifice are definitely my two biggest areas of study right now. Let me know if there's anything I should look at...
Re: recovery in bad positions. When I finished the tactical training program (Circles) there were some games where I would just pull wins out of my ass, even though down lots of material and just come up with completely undeserved wins, undeserved except that I found them and worked for them so dammit I deserved them.
That happened a few times in a row, so then I started to get a little cocky. I can play any way I want in the opening and then if I lose some material I'll do some tactical ninja and win it back and take home the cake.
And that made me sloppy with move selection and analysis. And then I started losing. Now I'm back to working on visualization and basic tactics review.
I get like that a lot. There was a period of time when I won like 15+ games straight and a lot of them started out badly and then I just wanted to win and turned it on. That will to win is an interesting topic, I think it's in that Heisman article everyone is posting... Like when I get down in a complicated position and I still think that I have some chances and I just want it I get mad good. But then like the last week or so I just haven't wanted to win. It's annoying I don't know how to fix it it just goes away after a while and I get back the 150-200 points I've dropped.