Chess in a Time Warp
Submitted by
on Wed, 06/18/2008 at 9:36am.
In Catch 22 when Joseph Heller wrote, “Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them,” he might have been looking at the way I play chess.
The other day I drew a low-rated opponent in a tournament and had a fairly easy time reaching the diagram position, a queen to the good.
I had just played 21.Rf7, stalemating the king and threatening 22.Qxa6+ Bxa6 23.Rd7#. At that point black blundered and placed his unprotected bishop on b7 allowing me to play 22.Rd7#.
And is that what I played? Not a chance! My mind was still locked into the queen sac on a6 to divert the bishop, which no longer needed to be diverted.
I'm not sure how wide-spread this problem is but other people have spoken about doing the same thing: you see a move or a combination then, when your opponent moves a day or two later, you go ahead and execute it—only to discover that the board no longer looks the way you remembered it. (It's analogous to a writer trying to proof read his own work: his subconscious tells his eyes what they should expect and they miss the errors.)
It's like playing chess in a time warp.
The obvious solution is make it a practice to play through the last few moves of each game to refresh the view of the board but, alas, like New Year resolutions that tends to get forgotten after a while.