I'll be leaving tomorrow morning for my yearly week vacation at the chess tourney of Imperia. Last year I prepared a lot for the tourney and (with some luck) won my division; it was also the first time I won a tourney. This year I did basically nothing... so it's gonna to be a quite terrible performance :-D
I actually don't care much... it's more just sleeping a bit more, going around in a nice place near the sea and getting very good even is somewhat excessive food for a week. I also decided I won't go running every morning this year; I'll just chill out a bit more.
I finally finished Chopin waltz op 64/2 and I just started looking at nocturne op 9/1. It actually looks much harder than I thought by hearing the piece: the dreamy out of time part for the right hand is accompanied by left hand broken chords I can barely take; I've no idea if with exercise I'll be able to get them easy enough to forget about them and have them playing themselves... we'll see.
Also I didn't notice hearing the piece the acciaccatura with a two octave and half interval. I actually wonder what that really means; for what I know I'd say that such a thing is impossible to play for a human being...
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6 comments:
Luck? I thought there was no luck element in chess =)
Luck is important in chess. In can help you with the pairing, or you can start a combination without seeing all thru the end and still having it correct by coincidence. Also you may do bad moves your opponent don't notice, or your opponent may blunder. Your opponent may decide to enter the only and one opening variation you played all your life or may enter the only ending type you know perfectly.
A win for those reasons has IMO a good part of luck in it.
Hhhmm to me 'luck' is when something happens to you that is completely outside your control. But it seems to me that chess is the one case where you have the most amount of control over how the game proceeds. So if your opponent doesnt notice your bad move or starts a variation that you know well it can also be viewed as him being weaker or you being better prepared. But then I don't really play enough chess to substantiate my claim here.
My parents came to visit me this summer and as a present my father bought me a nice big chess set and a clock. My father and I play 5 mins each blitz. But since they left I havent played with anybody.
5 min is a nice time; during this turney there were also two blitz tournaments in the evening and I partecipated in both. The last one was last night and I got an amazing fourth place behind three masters (and ahead of a few other masters).
Against a master I happened to make a move and only later realizing it was going to forcedly win a piece. Sure the tactical elements were present and i saw them (pins, undefended pieces, double attacks) but all of them suddenly combined in the position without an explicit precise plan. May be it's not pure luck, but luck is a part of it.
I find that when playing 5 mins blitz the winning strategy for me vs my father is to avoid making obvious mistakes and try to catch him with 'cheap tricks' like forked attacks or positioning my bishops and rooks to have his piece in the same line as his king or queen, is that called 'pinning'? Also trying to limit the amount of free squares that are available to him by blocking his pieces with pawns or having a square under double or tripple attack so that he cant move there. This last tactic of restricting movement seems to work best on my father, since it makes him think longer and I end up winning on time.
Ok, the tournament is over and it was bad. Not as terrible as I was expeting but not good at all either. I ended up 14th of 42 with 4.5/8, two full points less than last year. In at least three games I made a very weak move because of boredom, and in one game I had a plan was total nonsense: I was trying to trap a knight without noticing that with the final pawn push that should have captured it I was freeing up an escape square, more than that a true outpost for it.
I was lucky in a few games this year too, but it wasn't enough :-). Next time better preparing instead of just repeating myself "The tournament is coming, you should prepare...".
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