Chess: Why am I so stupid?

I’ve already established what I have been doing consistently in my previous blog post, so it would be pointless to go over those things (unless, of course, there is something of importance that happens, which in the case of Friday, there wasn’t). However, we did do something exciting (for me at least…)!

After doing some chess puzzles like Math problems (read blog post 1 for reference), I was able to actually analyze a couple of my games with my mentor! We took some games that I played recently at the 2011 Ohio Grade Level Championship and looked at them. Since it’s been six months since I’ve played those games, I don’t remember every move that I played that tournament. Luckily, I dug up pieces of paper where I annotated the games on. Without getting too specific, we definitely found some errors in which I could have improved my play. For example, we looked at my first game where I was in a losing position where my pieces were basically doing nothing and I was about to drop a pawn because I didn’t have enough defenders. However, when we looked at the game again, there were two moves in the opening that set my position behind my opponents (one was taking a pawn, which opened a line up for my opponent’s bishop; the other was pushing a pawn that blocked a developing square for my knight). Even though I was behind, my opponent gave me an opportunity to actually have a great position, but at the time, I did not see it. It involved a tactic called skewering (where one piece attacks two pieces in a line, but the more important one is in front), which would had let me either win a piece or have a really nicely positioned pawn-bishop pair. When we found that move, I was like, “Duh…”, but that was probably because I was just starting the section on skewers in the book so the pattern was easily recognizable to me. Anyways, we did that for some of the games before moving back to the chess puzzles.

GLHF,

Anthony