Disclaimer: I'm not very good at chess, leaving some personal notes here to try and get better.
Today I tried warming up with puzzles, I did a round of Mountain Climber on chesspuzzles.net. It did help me warm up a bit, I think I'll keep doing that before practice sessions. Here's notes on a few games I want to keep in mind.
Game 1
Against bot (level 1600). Opened with the main line Vienna game. Game outcome: win. Accuracy: 79.9%, ELO for game: 1500. Not a great game, I had the upper hand but kept making less than suboptimal moves. Luckily the bot played even worse lol. I'm noting this game for a move I'm trying to think through from the start of the middlegame:
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| Move 11 |
I worked up almost a pawn's worth of advantage on my position strength alone which I was pretty happy about, but then I squandered it back to even with Bd2 instead of Bd3. I'm trying to understand why. My initial thought process was to protect the vulnerable c-pawn, but the engine strongly thinks this was a bad move. After looking at the lines following Bd2 vs. Bd3, I can see why--in this position, the e4 square is hugely vulnerable to a Queen incursion via ... Qg4 and then eventually ... Qe4 or ... Qxg2. Bd2 sort of cuts that off immediately since the Queen can be easily repelled with ...Qg4 h3. I like to play into this position a lot, so I feel its important to understand the nuances of the position, and the e4 vulnerability is an important one it seems. So I think the lesson here is: prevent incursion into weak spots of your pawn structure--treat these vulnerabilities as seriously as a hanging (but not immediately under attack) piece.
Game 2
Against human (level 1386, TC: 10 min). Opened with the usual Sicilian, which was countered with the Alapin Sicilian defense. Accuracy: 64%, ELO for game: 1150. Game outcome: win (by time). This was my first game on time control against another person in a very long time, boy did it show. I forgot how playing on the clock gets to me. In particular, I played absolutely horrifically in the endgame. I made one or two pretty terrible moves throughout but kept things pretty even until the last phase of the game where I just really fell apart. I think my big takeaway is that I needed to more actively put pressure on the king threat I was trying to put together. Multiple times throughout the game I tried to set up a good tactic but I failed because I wasn't aggressive enough:
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| Move 19 |
I was trying to get the bishop protected so I could launch an attack on the King but in hindsight a bishop sacrifice here would have let me put huge pressure on the king. 19. Bxh7+ Kxh7 20. Ng5+ looks really strong. I've got my Queen, black Bishop and Knight all there to launch the attack, while Black doesn't have much to defend with. In fact, this is the point of this pawn structure and minor piece configuration, but I failed to exploit it. Later in the game, I made the same mistake:
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| Move 31 |
Here I once again tried too hard to be defensive after a blundered pawn and tried to limit the damage instead of taking advantage of the tempo to go after the King, hard. That should have been the play before the rooks ever got behind me. I think the lesson to be learned here is: aggressively go after the King, and look for forcing moves that both setup and launch your attacks simultaneously.
Lessons learned:
- Prevent incursion into weak spots of your pawn structure--treat these vulnerabilities as seriously as a hanging (but not immediately under attack) piece.
- Aggressively go after the King, and look for forcing moves that both setup and launch your attacks simultaneously
Previously on this blog:
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