So... Radjabov lost today to lose the match 2-0, he is the highest seed (3) to get knocked out so far and although I did not expect that much out of him in this tournament, I was really surprised to see him get crushed like this by someone over 100 points lower than him. Ponomariov lost yesterday and today had Black. The game looked very drawish but he was able to win, so looks like he will go through (he will win the playoff).

Other than that my IT guy was going through the programs on my computer at work and he's like "What's Dasher?" and I was like "I use it." hoping he would leave it at that, but he figured out it was for chess and deleted it... So no more ICC at work I guess... That sucks.

So... I think I ended the slump. I played three games today, all pretty quick, and scored 2.5. The first game was a draw, if you saw my earlier post where I said I have only scored 16 draws in over 270 rated USCF games then you know this is a rarity. And I made this sucker work hard for this draw. I had a nice position, my knight was much better than his bishop, but he got me to trade. Then we were in a queen ending, then a pawn ending, then another queen ending, and I thought I would be able to pull something off the whole time but no, he earned his draw. Then the next game I was going to lose! But I found my game...

1.e4 c5 2.Nc3 Nc6 3.g3 g6 4.Bg2 Bg7 5.Nge2 e5 6.d3 Nge7 7.Be3 d6 8.Qd2 0-0 9.Bh6 f5 10.h4 Nd4 11.Nxd4 cxd4 12.Nd5 Nxd5 13.exd5 Qe7 14.h5 Bd7 15.hxg6 hxg6 16.0-0-0 Rac8 17.Bxg7 Qxg7 18.Rh6 Rc5 19.Rdh1

This position is so bad... I had originally thought that I could get away with Qxh8 and getting two rooks for the queen. But now that I am faced with the prospect of Rh8 I see the following... 19...Rfc8 20 Rh8+ Qh8 21 Rh8 Kh8 22 Qh6 and I am cooked. If only I could get Be8 and Rfc8 in I would be ok... or....

19...f4!! These kinds of moves end my slumps. This is a beautiful move, since the only problem in my position is the Queen coming to the h-file, I simply prevent it, and now I can carry on my attack and we end up in a good bishop vs. bad bishop endgame which white gets thoroughly lost in.

20.Rh8+ Qxh8 21.Rxh8+ Kxh8 22.gxf4 Rfc8 23.fxe5 Rxc2+ 24.Qxc2 Rxc2+ 25.Kxc2 dxe5 26.Be4 g5 27.Kb3 b6 28.Kb4 Kg7 29.Kc4 Kf6 30.b4 Ke7 31.Bg6 a6 32.f3 Kd6 33.Bf7 Bb5+ 34.Kb3 Bxd3 35.a4 Be2 36.Bh5 Kxd5 37.Bf7+ Kd6 38.Bc4 Bxf3 39.Bxa6 Bd1+ 40.Ka3 g4 41.Bd3 g3 42.Bf1 Bf3 43.a5 bxa5 44.bxa5 g2 0-1

After this game I felt pretty good and I took a break to look at a couple Kasparov pawn sacrifices from Chess Strategy in Action. Then I made an exchange sacrifice in my last game of the day...

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 e6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Be3 Qc7 7.Bd3 Nf6 8.0-0 Bd6 9.f4 Nxd4 10.Bxd4 Bxf4 11.Bxf6 Bxh2+ 12.Kh1 gxf6 13.Rxf6 Be5 14.Qf3!? I figured that Black losing the right to castle and the weak Bishop were adequate compensation.

14... Bxf6 15.Qxf6 Rg8 16.Rf1 d6 17.e5 Qe7

Black figures he can simplify and be OK, that I was relying on my attack to be compensation. But no! I was ready to exchange Queens, my activity is compensation (a theme of positional sacrifices, my work is paying dividends).

18.Qxe7+ Kxe7 19.exd6+ Kxd6 20.Rxf7 Bd7 21.Ne4+ Kc7? This is an ugly move, now White is just winning

22.Nc5 Rad8 23.Nxe6+ Kc8 24.Nxd8 Kxd8 25.Rxh7 Bc6 26.Rh2 Re8 27.Kg1 Re1+ 28.Kf2 Ra1 29.a3 Ra2 30.Rh8+ Ke7 31.Rh7+ Kf6 32.Rf7+ Kg5 33.Rf5+ Kh6 34.g4 Rxb2 35.g5+ Kg7 36.Re5 Ra2 37.g6 Rxa3 38.Re7+ Kf8 39.g7+ Kxe7 40.g8Q Kd6 41.Qg6+ Kc5 42.Qf5+ Kb6 43.Qe6 Ra5 44.Ke3 Rc5 45.c4 a5 46.Kd4 a4 47.Qd6 Ra5 48.Qb4+ Ka7 49.Be4 Kb8 50.Bxc6 Kc8 51.Qxb7+ Kd8 52.Qd7# 1-0 Mate with 0.4 seconds to spare... close call but a smooth win.

Beginning with 19...f4 I was ready to bring some creative solutions to the table and to think in more abstract terms. And it produced results. I need to study more...

I woke up at 3:45 this morning half-hungover with really bad cottonmouth. I stumbled downstairs to grab two bottles of water, turned on some music (the silence was deafening), drank one of the bottles and figured I had just prevented a worse hangover when I woke up. But then the album ended and my mouth felt drier than the reading material for a statistics class. I got up and started browsing the internet while I drank the second bottle, then my eyes wandered to the board I have next to my computer. At the board was the end of a game, but last night when I was looking at it (very briefly) I thought Black was a little premature in resigning and I wasn't sure that I would even be able to enter into such a risky variation with White. But surely enough, at 5:00 AM, in the dark, with an annoying headache and slight nausea the variations poured out and Black is mated in all lines. Chess is weird like that.

So, this happened on Wednesday and I'm already over it but I still think it's funny. The other day when I said that I was going to get on ICC and murder some people I won my first two games and then there wasn't a good standard seek so I hit that stupid green button and waited for a five minute game. ICC has separate ratings for the five-minute pool and blitz, I'm like 1800 blitz and 1550-1600 five-minute, and I get paired against a 1700 and I'm like cool no problem right. So then after a few moves I look at his name and it has IM in front of it and I'm like damn... this isn't going to be as easy as I thought. So I find out after the game that he is 2780 in regular blitz, that's only 1000 points on me, no big deal... His name is Olivier Simon, he's from France, he's a douchebag.

Here's how it went down. He played the Rossolimo variation against my Sicilian. This is a pretty popular Anti-Sicilian so I have looked at the lines in some detail. One of the themes is that the knight goes from g8 to f6 to d7 to f8 to e6 before you castle because awkwardly enough you have time and this is the fastest way to get it in. So for the first 12 or so moves my play was book. Then he says "it's easy?" which I don't know what that means, he's French so maybe he thinks it means something. Then later he says that it's easy to learn an opening but that my play after that was horrible and that I need to learn to play not learn openings. I spend very little time studying openings, I just look up lines that I'm in and continuously develop around them. That's how I found that idea in the first place. But anyways, coming from a normal player I would just shrug that off and laugh but I really don't think IMs should act like that. Then he just leaves. So I was like wtf??? And I went to Fritz to see how "badly" I played. I hold a slight advantage for the first 30 moves, and my theory definitely doesn't go that deep... Then I made a mistake and lost 10 moves later. But wtf?? He wasn't even winning. And this is five-minute, what does real play have to do with five-minute. I hope I meet this guy OTB sometime. I have made beating him OTB one of my chess goals. Then I can be like we played online and you told me to learn to play so I did! :)

So, I got bored by going out this weekend and aside from work I've basically been cooped up in my room since Friday looking at chess (watching movies and playing some xbox too). Yesterday I didn't do any work after I got home (while I was at work I was looking at a game played by Samurai Pawn for a while) and I just went and hung out with a friend. It was a nice break; but definitely a short one. I can't get away from a board at this point. I was so eager to get back I wanted to look at some positions before work but I never have enough time. So needless to say I'm looking forward to some quality time with a board this long weekend. I should also start keeping track of what I'm doing, so I don't end up reading 7 different books at once. Maybe I'll murder some people on ICC to get my standard rating back over 2000. It's under 1900, which is unacceptable.

Thanksgiving Bonus: Crazy Japanese Video

So since I have started this blog I have had a renewed flame for chess. I had gotten to a point where the material seemed pointless but now that I have found a place to put my frustrations and insights I want to keep going. I was really considering slowing down with chess. I haven't really revealed much of my normal life. But I finished my BBA in Finance in less than four years and right now I'm working but I will be returning to school shortly for an MBA/JD. I have never really focused as much energy as I should have on school or on chess, kind of bouncing back and forth between the two and then following random paths as they crossed mine. But I have a 167 LSAT, 95th percentile, which pretty much guarantees me entry into a top tier law school, so eventually I should probably follow that path. The problem is that I don't really want to go to law school and start a career and a life that is that intense without at least earning a title (or convincing myself that I will not be able to keep improving). I have exceptional chess vision and I have always maintained that learning chess at a young age and teaching myself to study chess has allowed me to learn other concepts more quickly and to have a greater appreciation for logic and reason. I have always wanted to have at least a six month or one year period of just pure chess work, but I don't know if I'll every be able to get it. I think the best place for it is Europe, although New York also seems to have a pretty significant chess culture. I had almost given up on a "chess career", more likely chess sabbatical :), but now that I have somewhere to actually post my work and talk about what I am doing I am actually excited about the work because I have found other people that are doing the same thing.

A lot of books came off my shelf this last week. A lot of games from different time periods and different authors. That's how I like it, an abundance of positions from an abundance of sources. At least to start. From now on I really need a more focused plan. I'm jumping from book to book trying to figure out what I actually want to read. Chess Strategy in Action is priority number one. It will ground me for a little bit and start me off on the right track. Really I am facing no problems in the great majority of positions I have been in in the last few months. I've been playing some pretty good chess. I'm 19-4 in rated games since I moved back to Reno. That's including the win against Garingo and the loss to Parreira on Thursday. I have been having problems committing to complicated positions, I think that this reflects the quality of opponent I have faced in recent months. There's no reason for me to take a complicated position against a player that is truly weaker. For instance of my five wins at the WSO (I lost one game in 11 moves!!!) I would say that 3 of them were completely drawn endgames, and I just outplayed my opponent from that point. Now those were A players, and two of them were undefeated in the later rounds. So I am not afraid to go into an endgame as long as I see that I will still be able to find some play. The problem with this strategy is that as I face higher rated players in the coming months (I will have to move up to expert eventually) I will not be able to win against more stubborn opposition and I am going to have to bring back the creativity that I have been suppressing to win games on pure technique. I get into bad slumps sometimes, especially on ICC (my handle is macdre by the way if anyone wants to play sometime), where I am playing really well but I just can't win a game. It's almost as if I put on some autopilot that is a result of having seen a similar position or theme a few times but not really enough to understand it and I just play natural moves and ignore my opponent completely. I just stop working on the game, a lot of times if it is online I start switching windows. I would say that I lose more games because of a shotty effort than from actually getting outplayed. These games are also a product of my suppressed creativity. I think I will dig up a game and give an example in a post this week. When I was seeing Shulman he wanted me to do 10-15 studies a week, (he used to go over studies with me after my hour was up for an extra hour, we would just put the position on the board and take 10 minutes each, it was interesting). I think that the purpose of this is to stimulate creative solutions, as precision and use of many conflicting and overlapping chess concepts is required to solve these types of problems. Maybe I should bring out the Nunn book Solving in Style, that has a lot of good studies in it. Also a lot of my best work has been creating databases (25-100 games) in a specific opening and running through it to get an idea of typical tactical and strategic themes, piece placement, standard exchanges, pawn structures, endgames, etc. I just haven't committed to any openings lately and I don't know what I want to do with my repertoire on both sides. I don't even know what to work on. The match with Garingo will force me to do some intense homework in a few good lines, but I need a broader approach.

I think I will read Secrets of Chess Transformations, by Marovic. Part of a superb four part series on middlegame play. I highly recommend Dynamic Pawn Play in Chess also, but the other two books deal with topics that are discussed in several sources so I don't think that I will get them. This book talks a little bit about converting a space advantage, and then devotes a heavy majority of the discussion to "Real Sacrifices" which the author defines as sacrifices without immediate compensation. Positional sacrifices in essence. I feel that against stronger opposition these types of sacrifices are essential to understand. I cannot tell you how many times I have gotten into a position where I do not feel like there is a way to improve without some kind of material sacrifice, only to shy away because I do not feel comfortable and find that it was indeed sound after the game. On one hand it is good to know that my instincts are good. But I am so cautious sometimes, especially considering my aggressive style. I need to add some flair into my game and one reason that I hadn't read this book is that I didn't feel it was necessary, I felt that there were more pressing things to learn. But now I have gotten to a point where in almost every game I feel that a more revolutionary change in the position is necessary to find what i want. I'm tired of playing boring positions just because neither player is willing to take any risk and I'm tired of playing dead drawn endings when at least I could be playing unbalanced endings. These are the positions that really test an opponent.

Anyways this was a long rant that started as appreciation for the blog community but then got severely sidetracked. Kind of like me trying to stay on one book...

I haven't posted for a week for a reason, I've been looking at more games and I was in Vegas for work Tuesday through Thursday with limited access to the internet (I didn't feel like paying $12/day when I know things to do in Vegas...). So yesterday was game day at the club and it was an interesting one, although I failed to bring actual effort into the building (perhaps a result of the fact that my flight to Reno landed at 6:50; I was 25 minutes late; I caught up on move 12 or 13). I had been looking at the games of Botvinnik on Saturday (Sometimes I just decide to look at a random book that I have, in this case Botvinnik's 100 Selected Games; definitely a great read as it is written by Botvinnik himself; his reign is almost as impressive as Kasparov's). Anyways, this led to me reading Botvinnik-Tal 1961 while I was in Vegas. There is a very interesting history during Botvinnik's reign of the chess realm. There was a rule in effect that said that he was entitled to a rematch one year later if he lost the championship. This rule helped him regain the championship twice, he lost in 1957 to Smyslov, and then lost in 1960 to Tal (he had almost lost in 1954 to Bronstein and there is some speculation that Bronstein threw the match, although Bronstein denies this in several sources); regaining the title the following year in the return match. I haven't actually read Botvinnik-Tal until this point and I was looking at the games and much like the first time these two met, nearly every game that Tal played white was a Caro-Kann.

So when I arrive I am due to play David Parreira who I murdered the last time we met in a Caro-Kann:



I decided to play e4 and go into the Caro-Kann again, but then I decided to play a more exciting line from the Advance Variation:



There is some explanation necessary here. Filipas-Garingo had just ended in a draw and so I was going over some lines because I could not believe that there was a draw there. I was spending very little time at the board because I had a crushing position and he was spending a long time at the board. Then I went to play Bc5 and had already grabbed the Knight when I realized that the f3 square was covered by that pawn and I was mated. Another advantage of the earlier Bb5 tells as the f1 square would have prevented the embarassing mate.

After this Nathaniel and I decided to play a 10 game match with G/40 time controls. I won the first game with a mate however he had a very large advantage when this happened. I'll post this game later as these two games took some work. At least something came out of my poor performance.

I've been playing chess as long as I can remember, my dad taught me on a plane when I was very young. However there have been several lapses in my career. I would say that I really became serious as a student of the game in fall of 2005 when at school. I had just broken through 1700 (now I have just broken through 1900) with a superb performance throughout the summer and I was basically buying two or three books a month from Amazon and just tearing through them.

I am, as Eric Shoemaker pointed out, primarily an attacking player, although I have won many games with positional finesse. I think that the reason that I am drawn to attack is that I have a good feel for the initiative. I am also extremely good at finding concrete lines and evaluating them. I have often been criticized for playing too quickly or pursuing plans (usually sacrifices or other significant changes in the position) when I could have simply improved my position or when it is speculative. I generally like positions that are very unbalanced, it gives me a good chance to be creative and it usually guarantees winning chances. The positions that I dread, not because I will lose them but because it is hard to win them, are positions that have the same pawn structure on both sides.

Anyways that's just a brief summary of my experience. I think that I will post a lot of games on here, study habits, results, rants, etc. It seems like fun.